League-of-legends – When does building armor pen. become more cost-effective than building attack damage

league-of-legends

I'm looking for hard math, not educated guesses.

Some things I've been looking at:
At what enemy armor level is it more cost effective to build Last Whisper over Black Cleaver?
At what enemy armor level is it more cost effective to build Last Whisper over Blood Thirster?

This is assuming standard AD carry masteries in offense, so +10% armor pen, +6 armor pen. Also assuming 0 armor pen runes (not everyone chooses to run them on ad carries)

Best Answer

I think the other posts pretty much sums it up, it is really situational. I found this which is in an in depth comparison between last whipser and black cleaver.

Copying the tl;dr from the linked article: Everything in League of Legends is situational. Neither Last Whisper nor The Black Cleaver is superior to either in all situations; learn to think analytically and determine in what situations one will do more damage than the other.

Edit: Link contains hard math, result is still "it depends". The lower armor and longer engages the better black cleaver turns out and of course vice versa.