Havoc vs Sunder

Havoc vs Sunder

6 Armor Penetration is usually better, except:

1. The break-even point is 300 armor.

Once you start fighting a target with 300 armor, 1.5% bonus damage is better than 6 armor penetration (assuming you get the 10% mastery).

Once you have Last Whisper, this number is 230. If you have a Last Whisper (and the 10% mastery), if you attack a champion with 230 base armor, 1.5% bonus damage is better than 6 armor penetration.

2. If your champion deals magic damage as well, like MF/Corki/Trist/Kog'Maw and more, the magic damage components will benefit from Havoc and not the armor penetration, pushing your "equilibrium" point down.


Logically it makes sense.

A 100 armor target is taking 1/2 damage.

Reducing 100 armor from a 100 armor target is a 100% damage increase as you're now dealing double of half, or full damage.

Similarly, a 300 armor target is taking 1/4 damage.

Reducing 300 armor from a 300 armor target will cause you to deal 4x the damage, a 300% increase.


Normally Each 1 armor pen is granting you 1% more damage


However, this gets much fuzzier if you are not reducing someone to zero.

For example, reducing someone from 300 armor to 200 is not doubling your damage.

They are going from 1/4 to 1/3 damage.

This is going from 3/12 to 4/12 (still equivalent to 1/4 and 1/3 respectively), or a 33% increase (3 -> 4). Each point of armor reduction is giving you a .33% damage increase.

Each "mastery point" here would be an improvement of .66% damage
(better than the .5% from Havoc).


As the values get smaller, this falls behind and Havoc takes over.

In the specific case above, I would be dealing 27.027% damage to a 300 armor target
(with 10% armor penetration).

If I reduce the target's armor by 6, I am dealing 27.427% damage.

If I instead take Havoc, I am dealing 27.474% as much damage
(this is a 1.5% increase over 27.027%)

For the specifics for the numbers above, the 6 armor penetration is granting 1.48% bonus damage, or .249% damage increase per armor pentration (much worse than our earlier 1% per armor penetration), or .493% bonus damage per mastery point, just below Havoc's .5%


Based on Phreak's post
http://na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?t=1866700