On Balance and the Average Champion

TL:DR Did some math and practice tool shenanigans and came to a conclusion: balance changes to base stats do not address the issues with damage in the game. Abilities and items which decrease the value of resistances are what should be revised.

To preface, I really like this game. I own ever champion, and have spent more than I am comfortable admitting on skins in spite of the fact that I'm just a scrub who gets to gold for the season rewards and mucks about with friends in norms. Coming on the boards for news and reactions, I've seen a lot of complaints about the amount of damage in the game; tanks being effectively useless, assassin's requiring no skill to play effectively etc. I'm one of those nerds who reads the latest patch-notes before playing, and I've seen most of the balance changes focused on champion base-stats and scaling. I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the statistically average stats for all the champions in the game (found here)) and see what we can glean balance-wise from them.

Average Champ Stats: Health: 554 Health lvl18: 2145 HP Regen: 6.6 HP Regen lvl18: 18.5 Mana: 306 Mana lvl18: 884 Mana Regen: 8.4 Mana Regen lvl18: 18.4 Attack Damage: 59 Attack Damage lvl18: 118 Attack Speed: 0.64 Attack Speed lvl18: 1.085 Armour: 30 Armour lvl18: 92.7 Magic Resist: 31.06 Magic Resist lvl18: 47.1 Movement Speed: 336 Range: 317.7

From this data, there are a number of interesting points (all of these assume no modifiers from runes, items or abilities):

1. At level 1, the average champion takes between 12.2 autos to die, which will take roughly 19 seconds of uninterrupted autos. At level 18, this increases to 35 autos in 32 seconds.
2. This is due to armour levels equating to 167.2 effective health at level 1 and 1989.4 effective health at level 18, using the equation 1 + (armour/100) x health.
3. The average champion takes 76% damage from magic-based attacks at level 1, decreasing to 68% at level 18, using the equation 100 / (100+MR)

All of this seems pretty reasonable, to me at least, so my next thought was to test items and runes.

To test this, I took Kai'sa (2nd most-played ADC according to op.gg at the time of writing) into practice tool; the goal was to time how long it took to reach the lvl 18 health threshold with and without items, using the highest pick-rate runes and items from her aforementioned op.gg page. The practice dummy is actually good for this as it has base armour and magic-resist values of 100. Without items or abilities, it took the average 32 seconds to reach the lvl 18 health threshold. With items? Just under 4 seconds. Under 4 seconds using only auto attacks, using abilities it was just under 2 seconds.

While this is by no means an exhaustive series of tests, it does lead me to believe that items and abilities should be the primary focus for balance.

I'm neither a mathematician nor a game designer, if there are issues with my calculations or logic, please let me know... Just be polite about it, ok?