Reinforced Armor seems ... lacking
This might just be due to what I'm use to from other MOBAs, but here's a small story:
So, late game I'm playing a game as tree and we wipe at Baron, and our tier 3 mid was already down. It's a pretty typical story, yeah, but unlike most all our lanes are completely shoved. Before they can even get to mid, all of our waves were knocking away at the enemy base, and they'll all pretty big waves. The enemy team completely disregard this, and go straight for our base. I'm sure this could be the final moment, where they demolish our inhibitor and deal heavy damage to our tier 4s to the point where the next fight will decide the game. But at least, if we do win the fight, they'll have taken significant damage to their base as we -
Our Nexus is made their bitch before our support can even leave fountain.
Now, granted, they did have a late game Trist, so structure damage was going to be absurd. But again, it wasn't that they had minions; their minions literally could not leave their base because our minions were beating them down. So I really had to stare at the result, wondering how the heck they melted our base like butter without so much breaking a sweat. Or having a minion within twenty miles of our towers.
As much as I like split pushing and taking structures, this doesn't really seem quite right. Perhaps I'm completely overestimating how much Reinforced Armor ( the in-game name of backdoor protection ) is actually supposed to do, that's entirely possible. Still, it feels like breaking the base with absolutely no minions should be more of a risk than it evidently is, given that they were making a pretty big mistake after getting Baron ( which really raises the question of why they took Baron anyway, considering they were barely getting any value out of it ) yet the Nexus might was well had exploded as soon as the wipe happened because the only thing that was going to prolong it was apparently Trist's mouse breaking.
That said, I'm not really sure if increasing the value of Reinforced Armor would really be that elegant. This situation seemed so surreal because it was an extreme case, after all; generally when such a game-deciding wipe happens, the minions waves aren't so in your favor. I definitely do feel like the Nexus should have Reinforced Armor, however, as I've just discovered that it doesn't and I'm completely mystified at that. Sure, inhibitors don't either, but those present a temporary advantage compared to towers, and they certain don't have as much of a permanent advantage as taking the Nexus does.
Increasing the armor and magic resist would be my first thought, but just moving it from 200 to 300 or something, like I said, seems inelegant. I'd think it'd be much more fitting if the amount scaled with the distance away from the nearest enemy minion, so that the option of charging straight for the enemy Nexus is still there but becomes more and more difficult the more you neglect your waves to do it.
Perhaps something more unique, though, would to make use of that fancy gray health Tahm has. As in, while Reinforced Armor is active, structures with it will store gray health and will constantly regenerate to 100% of that gray health, at a fast but beatable rate - albeit that could be mixed with the above suggestion, tying the regen rate into the distance from an enemy minion. Of course, as soon a minion deactivated Reinforced Armor, the regeneration stops and the gray health is removed, allowing the structure to be taken normally. This is partially inspired with how DOTA does backdoor protection, but without the bit of funniness where someone can actually heal an enemy tower by attacking it without any creeps around. Since with this suggestion the structure won't regenerate any more health than what it's lost since started taking this instance of damage, that's not a concern.
All that said, I don't think these suggestions should be applied to all Reinforced Armor, rather some sort of Enhanced Reinforced Armor limited to either the non-inhibitor structures in base or just those related to the Nexus. As I said before, I might just be completely underestimating what Reinforced Armor is meant to accomplish, yet I still feel like even with a sieging hyper carry neglecting your minion waves shouldn't be so riskless. Maybe if you have two, but then again that's risky from the start when you consider how much that can impact team fights.
