Late night post on idea of diversity

Writing this from my phone as I lay in bed so bear with me on the lack of proper formatting.

Hello, recently there's been an uprising discussion on the boards about diversity and that includes both item and champion diversity. The main discussion revolves around a general distaste for seeing the same champions or item builds repeated among multiple games. This point specifically look at item diversity as champion diversity will be looked at in a future post.

Looking at item diversity, the roles being the biggest offenders for lacking item diversity throughout league's history are mages, adcs, and supports. The reasons for the lack of diversity often stems from items giving too general a set of stats that are always desirable and simply better compared to other items (mages typically build what gives most AP + Pen, adcs it's crit + IE into pen). Another issue can come from niche's given too items being desirable in all cases and therefore seeing high purchase rates (typically seen with supports).

With the recent class updates especially tank and marksman, I think Riot has found a perfect method to increasing item diversity that has yet to be realized and refined to its full potential. And that is developing niche's for items while removing their general application for usefulness. Take a look at tank item.

1: Cinderhulk was reduced in its in combat damage while increasing farm speed/potential greatly.

2. Items in general focus far more heavily on the stats they're intended for (less health, more resistances).

3. Crit damage reduction from Randuin's increased to focus on lowering carry damage but with less armor (weaker against casters and duelists but stronger vs crit based carries).

I feel as though this same mindset were applied to the mage update items things would be far more interesting and probably healthier compared to the current Morello/Gunblade rush depending on if you're a ranged mage or mage assassin. Things such as lowering the AP from Morello's and focusing the niche more on in combat Mana sustain + high cdr for a good early item if confident but not for snowball. And rather than the hextech items we have now, the items that COULD have been may be far more interesting.

Granted, some niches are simply too powerful and will keep items desirable such as Locket active, AoE healing of Redemption, old Rylais, IE, Runaan's, PD, and many others that power needs to be forcibly or sometimes awkwardly removed to keep the item weak and undesirable except on the most extremely rare of cases. Just look at Ohmwrecker, the item is a laughing stock due to its numbers but imagine an item that disables turrets with decent stats or active duration that is useful, it would be a must buy for divers and siege comps!

In all honesty those niches need to simply be abandoned completely to make room for something new that could be far more interesting with options rather than a one-size-fits-all model of items.

When I wake up tomorrow I'll edit this a bit to make it cleaner and give a TL;DR.