Balance Trends

With the advent of patch 6.9 and the mid-year mage update - I have to say I am rather unimpressed with the rather droll and markedly distasteful approach towards 'addressing' balance and I use that term loosely on the basis that the pre-season did just this:

• Failed to address previous states of unhealthy gameplay be it in specific champions, items, or masteries
• Introduce a variety of new balance issues with radical system changes
• Swept previous issues under the rug by forcing the sudden shift onto the playerbase.

Whilst change is in the spirit of making any evolving craft interesting - the timing of such decisions and repeated trends, say:

• Nerfing a champion directly
• Only to nerf their itemization options or masteries in subsequent patches

Leaves a rather bitter taste in one's mouth when it comes to playing the game expecting some measure of consistency.

A key example would be the hot-topic that's been buried in 6.9 - Sated Devourer.

Auto attack reliant champions have always been quite binary in terms of feast or famine - revolving around itemization to offset their weak base values and early game potency. This goes double for melee champions who do not have the safety or luxury of going pure offensive (with some exceptions).

However, the fact of the matter is - as strong as Sated Devourer was in the hands of champions who had synergies with it - Rageblade in tandem was the true culprit of its abuse.

At the time its gold efficiency was horrendous for the gold investment, such that a lot of ADCs (Ashe, Kog'Maw, Varus, Tristana) could feasibly obtain it and synergize it with Runaan's Hurricane to snowball the game in their favor off of a relatively meager budget.

Whereas Sated Devourer was gated by the presence of farmable jungle camps and takedown opportunities.

With the new Rageblade having a non-range inhibited stack requirement to achieve Phantom Hits, as well as its massive increase in price at 3600 from 2800 - it is inconceivable in the current fast-paced environment of the game that any DPS reliant melee champion could acquire the gold necessary to attain this item in a timely fashion AND still have an impact prior to that point with its sub-optimal build path.

Perhaps it may be just this patch - but with Bloodrazor having very limited multiplicative item value synergies, I am once again disappointed that favor has been paid towards the burst end of the spectrum, something that has significantly less windows or opportunities of counterplay to consistent DPS.