Why the hate for defensive itemization Riot?

Marenjii·10/8/2014, 6:21:28 AM·5 votes·392 views

SV was nerfed for being too good, which caused BV to get nerfed because everyone flocked to it. Randuins loses a passive, and regardless of what anyone says, Wardens no longer being built out of 2 Cloth Armors made starting cloth 5 viable only for a few out of the 120+ champions. Unless you can itemize Seeker's, Thornmail, FH, Ninja Tabi or IBG you are screwed against AD casters top lane. Can't get FH or IBG unless you have mana, Ninja Tabi means no option for Tenacity unless you can itemize Zephyr, Thornmail gives no health, and Seeker's is an AP only item. Sunfire Cape nerfed just so that it does a miniscule amount of extra damage late game where it won't even matter. On top of all that all these items received no compensation in the form of price reduction at all. Were these items really that OP that they get no form of compensation?

7 Comments

Zanphyra10/8/2014, 10:06:35 AM2 votes

Because they are boring I guess to the balance team? I don't know, there isn't an actual reason.

If you say they promote passive play, they promote more tower dives that would otherwise be much less likely.

I like watching tanks/bruisers and I play them. They are fun. I think they feel too much like paper later now compared to in the past. Items like Atmas and Wit's End seem to be forgotten completely.

MR itemization is poor and hasn't been as interesting since the removal of FoN and Wits being changed. ADCs can shred through armor really well but if Riot doesn't want a bruiser/tank to do well vs. ADCs then MR itemization should be a bit better.

TecToNiiC10/8/2014, 12:39:26 PM2 votes

Offensive items are flashier for the e$ports plays.

In all seriousness I think they got completely carried away. They could have just nerfed the cdr on visage and called it a day. Early sunfire used to make you a threat in top lane or early team fights and now almost now one builds it.

Hopefully the small pbe buff back to randuins signals a trend of trying to help some melees/bruisers in the top lane again.

Elkington10/17/2014, 3:28:35 AM2 votes

Most of the reasons that they nerfed bruiser/tank itemization are very much present in AP/mage itemization, yet for some reason it remains untouched.

I believe it's just bias to be honest. Things are looking a bit up in season 5 and I look forward to the day when ranged champions, particularly casters, can't just do whatever they want anymore.

Marthian10/8/2014, 6:56:25 AM1 votes

SV was nerfed because it 20 cdr was just too good for already being a great defensive item. Sunfire was a great item to rush since it did so much early game.

As for others, a lot of items were generally already gold efficient. I think it may have to do with buffing ADCs since top lane was so stale that it didn't matter if you won bot lane since bot just farmed all day and is too tanky to kill.

at least in my experience.

Marenjii10/8/2014, 3:14:09 PM1 votes

Yeah, the nerfs were just overdone. Reducing the price of these items to reflect the loss in a passive, or stats would have been great. But all they did was make them less gold efficient.

SV was nerfed because it 20 cdr was just too good for already being a great defensive item. Sunfire was a great item to rush since it did so much early game.

As for others, a lot of items were generally already gold efficient. I think it may have to do with buffing ADCs since top lane was so stale that it didn't matter if you won bot lane since bot just farmed all day and is too tanky to kill.

at least in my experience.

That 20% CDR didn't make it broken to the point where it could not get a small price reduction. It wasn't broken at all. They just got tired of it being better than all other options besides BV, due to mr itemization being terrible. They should have did something to make Wit's End, and Locket better options. The SV nerf just caused BV to gain immense popularity, which should have told Riot that mr itemization needed work. But instead they take the easy and worst route. Sunfire was great at giving top laners that lacked waveclear the ability to not constantly have the wave pushing them into their tower if they went up against someone with better waveclear. Also helped them against ranged because the added waveclear means they don't get poked down under tower. You got all of that at the expense of your wave constantly pushing, fair trade off

junglerboy1610/8/2014, 3:34:31 PM1 votes

When these things all got nerfed, LoL was going through the phase early in the season where basically tanky bruiser tops hard carried and every other role was kind of useless. They mostly nerfed SV because the early masteries used to have that crazy 3% missing hp5 upgrade, which made Mundo broken as anything this season has seen (I remember watching a preseason game where the Mundo had over 350 hp5 at one point in the game) The change for Warden's mail just doesn't make sense, and really shouldn't have happened. The nerfs to Randuins were to help out the then struggling ADCs against the oppressively powerful tanks/bruisers. BV's spell shield was too strong anyway, it took way too much effort to pop the enemy spell shields before engaging, which forced the game heavily towards boring siege comps and games that ran for 60 minutes. At the time of each of these nerfs, they were 100% warranted (excepts Warden's mail recipe change, that just doesn't make sense in any context), Right now though, after nerving the mastery for missing health hp5, and for over buffing hyper carry ADCs, the really ought to buff SV and Randuins up a little. Sunfire is a different case though, it was nerfed because it was very toxic for if a top lane got ahead, they could pressure the enemy even harder with really high early damage and could reduce their opponent's impact to zero. Right now, they need to make it so the damage scales at 2 or 3 damage per level, so that it actually has a use outside of the one they nerfed it out of.