A while back, Riot was talking very seriously about nerfing all of the armor penetration runes in the game. The argument was pretty simple. They provide too good a benefit, mostly at the early stages of the game. So why have they gone unchanged?

It may seem strange to be asking this now, but I just had a game against a Miss Fortune where I got to feel the full brunt of her lane prowess. I was playing Kennen, and positioning myself well, but it just didn’t matter. She was getting lucky bounces, and I seemed to catch creep aggro if I looked at her wrong. With a champion like Miss Fortune, armor penetration runes are particularly effective because she’s given a mage-grade nuke that can be dealt as pure damage with proper runes.

In my particular case, I had no recourse against her as Kennen, because his magic damage doesn’t get through nearly as much resistance. As the game goes on, it becomes a bit less of an issue. Most champions have scaling armor, while their magic resist remains the same throughout. Armor penetration items tend to be significantly more useful than their magic pen counterparts. The 40 percent armor penetration item increases both the damage you deal and how frequently you deal it. The base armor penetration item grants you cooldown reduction and damage. The magic penetration equivalents only increase the magnitude of your damage (and in the case of Haunting Guise, give you a little health). Granted, part of that is a difference in playstyle, but there’s no denying the strength of physical damage as compared to magic. That’s why the physical damage dealers are considered “carries.”

The thing is, armor penetration runes wouldn’t be such an issue if there wasn’t such an abundance of skills that make use of them these days. When it was just auto attacks, it wasn’t as big a deal. With champions like Miss Fortune, Urgot, and even Pantheon in the game, the runes need a change.