You know what league REALLY fking needs? DISPEL. EFFECTS.

Please forgive this long essay, as this is a topic I've put quite a lot of thought into on how to balance it.

TLDR at the bottom.

In games like Warcraft III and Dota / Dota 2, unit buff strategies have counterplay because certain types of units have an ability that dispels either as primary or secondary affect. This means that buff stacking would mean that that unit may be exceptionally powerful but it's also vulnerable to dispel effects so it makes the strategy a risk.

How does this affect league?

SHIELDS.

For the longest time, shields were balanced because they only scaled moderately with AP, and only their shield strength increased with AP. Supports felt like shit, though. So Riot added Utility Scaling (And the nightmare of Lulu and supports like her arose) in order to help mage supports feel better about building AP. That was alright, except that it caused balancing concerns when those same supports were brought into solo lanes.

Eventually Riot nerfed those scalings or outright removed them in extreme cases (Rip Lulu solo lane) and those champions that relied on massive shields left the spotlight. However, gradually Riot has been trying to fix healing champions. They gave Soraka a rework and a unique health drain mechanic to justify her massive healing. She still needed tuning, and that was alright and all but with the Grievous wounds finally being fixed, she's no longer outrageous.. as much.

Then come preseason and the changes to support items. Before this, Ivern was kind of shit. Janna was okay, but was nothing special as mage bot lanes were more common and she has minimum effectiveness verses mages in most scenarios as all she can really do is mitigate poke on a single target while most mages have aoe poke that's capable of hitting multiple targets.

The preseason changes to items, most notably the rework of Locket and introduction of Redemption, utterly has broken shield champions.

https://gyazo.com/729fd8f50261432510b227f6b72f2233.png gives a huge increase of 10% to all shields and healing. Nice mastery, and it's pretty worth to take on it's own. But, on it's own, it's not broken really. However, it also increases the value of every other shield item in the game.

shields up to 665 damage naturally. Even with the STANDARD build and Windspeakers, you gain +30% shields and healing. This means Locket can shield for up to 864.5 on five targets. This item can prevent 4,322 damage.

This doesn't even include natural shields from champions like Janna and Ivern.

Okay, so champions that have shields can stack them really high. What else is the problem?

Well you see, when Riot added utility scaling they also made sure that shield mechanics best benefited those mechanics. This means that shields that have secondary affects or longer durations are always destroyed last. **So champions whose bonus affects were balanced around the shield being destroyed basically had that lever removed. **Janna gives 40 + 10% of her AP bonus AD to her ADC, who uses flat ad EXTREMELY well. So the ADC gets this giant shield that also buffs the shit out of their offensive capabilities, THEN add the bonus from Ardent Censor which gives them additional DPS via attack speed and they drain health.

AD carries are balanced as a class around a poor early game, and huge sources of late game damage that are extremely fragile.

You CANNOT balance ADCs as a class when a single support can give an ADC over 1.5k effective health through shields and healing, AND this doesn't include the absurd efficiency of Warlord's bloodlust on Hurricane users. ADCs are simply too tanky because shields have no real counterplay.

Silence effects are essentially removed from the game, so silencing the support and then jumping on the ADC is not only inefficient on the few sources that remain, it also doesn't remove shields that stay on the target. With the prevalence of CDR on these support items that also enhance shields, these abilities also have extremely low cooldown and almost no down time. Janna is a huge offender here, because her shield cooldown gets to 5.5 seconds, and her shield lasts 5 seconds.

This makes assassins as a class useless to combat extremely powerful ADCs. AD carries as a class, I will say again, are balanced around being extremely fragile. They have to be, because their overall late game damage reaches absurd levels. Assassins CANNOT kill ADCs protected by these supports because the assassin rework made their abilities much more telegraphed and also delayed. This means that even a support played by a monkey can press E and 1 and negate the assassins entire burst combo.

SHIELDS NEED A FORM OF COUNTERPLAY.

How do we add counterplay to shield mechanics?

Simple! We add the dispel effect into the game.

For those who aren't familiar with it, Dispel removes positive buffs from enemies, and negative buffs from allies. There have been some iterations of dispel that have removed all spell affects (positive and negative from both enemies and allies, or in between) and some spell affects cannot be dispelled, usually those that are ultimate-related spells.

How do we implement Dispel effects into the game?

Well, we have a few ways.

Items

• This can be a new item

Needs a companion item. Meaning, other choices for mages that like CDR and Mana regeneration. They reworked the fuck out of so it's not even useful on most mid laners (except shield abusing dicks) so another mage item with AP, CDR, and mana regeneration with a passive (or an active, preferably) that Dispels spell affects on the target or an an Aoe.

Another LW type of item, preferably melee only with either an active (preferably) or a Grievous wounds type of passive that specifically mitigates or reduces shields. Another alternative would be to make also reduce shields on the target to make it more appealing because unless they have hyper healing champions (sometimes even then because champs like and are kind of shit atm) I will just get anyway.

• New Abilities

Plenty of champions are up for reworks. Why not give them this mechanic?

Forms of execution on abilities

Probably needs to be tied to ultimate or secondary utility spells. This means that they aren't able to be maxed immediately and allows you to poof their shields before you burst someone. Chances are, this would be best on assassin like characters.

Please note that the form of Dispel I am talking about would, for the most case, specifically target shields. Other forms of buffs like increased AD or attack speed and whatever likely wouldn't be affected.

TLDR

Shields are fucking busted. Nerf shield enhancements, provide a way to dispel or mitigate shield generation because they innately have no counterplay. Either through new items or reworked ability mechanics that allow for both counter picking and counter purchasing due to how binary and uninteractive the nature of shields are.