AP Bruiser Items: A Suggestion

AP Bruisers are in a weird spot. Champions who like AP but also durability, they're forced to adapt to mage and tank items, as itemization that exists in the gap between the two is often too appealing to assassins, mages, or other champions who might cause issues if they had reliable access to ability power and durability. On the flip side, an AP Bruiser with ratios high enough to survive on items unappealing to traditional casters becomes problematic when build with traditional caster items and high AP values.

To me, the issue stems from a discrepancy in the available tuning levels for AD and AP champion scaling. AD champions have Base Attack Damage, Total Attack Damage, Bonus Attack Damage, Attack Speed, Cooldown Reduction, and Critical Strike Chance, all of which can be tuned or itemized for individually. This means that an AD champion has a number of ways to balance their damage output, and by adjusting one or more of these numbers you can heavily change their itemization preferences.

AP champions, meanwhile, have Ability Power and Cooldown Reduction, and I feel as long as this is the case it'll be challenging to design good AP Bruiser items that don't risk overlapping with tanks and/or mages and assassins to a problematic degree.

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#So what can we do?

One solution would be providing Base Ability Power to champions. This would let us tie items in to this base ability power value, such as an item that grants +50% base ability power. The advantage here is that it's fairly easy to understand and tunable on an individual basis, but we do lose the ability to really have the same concept of an item spike, as your AP ratios would have to consider this base value (so it couldn't start too high) and the base ability power value might grow over the game, which would make our characters automatically scale into the late-game, which is potentially undesirable in some cases.

Another solution might be a new stat -- say, Inner Reserve. This would start out at a set number based on the champion, such as 80 or 100. You could then create items with effects like "gain AP equal to 50% of your Inner Reserve (60)." This would let us specifically tailor item strengths on a per-champion basis and prevent abuse by tanks or mages by lowering their Inner Reserve values, but it lacks the clarity and immediate comprehensibility of the previous suggestion which limits us to a specific stat. It also messes with gold values slightly, because two champions might not get the same value of ability power out of the item. Of the two this is the solution I feel is stronger though, as it means we can still tune champions to have specific item spikes or high/low points in their power curves -- something that I think is sacrificed too much in the first option.

Both of these would, however, give us more levers to make AP bruiser itemization, and I feel that there is a definite need for more levers.

##Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions?