AP Bruisers will always be a balance nightmare with the current set of items

When you look at champs like etc. you always see them dominating the game and warping the meta around them or they are just straight up irrelevant.

Right now Vlad is broken and is terrorizing the game. While any other one on that list is irrelevant.

I think the biggest reason why these champs are so hard to balance is that they have nothing to be balanced around.

Imagine the current AD Bruiser roster and what they build. You are thinking about stuff like Steraks / Titanic / GA / BC / Trinity and all that good stuff. Items that benefit their kits and synergize with it. Now Imagine if we just removed those items and these bruisers would be stuck with items like Ravenous / BotRK / Mallet / IBG / Maw / QSS You already know that this would be absolutely horrible for any bruiser out there that isn't named Mundo.

Now those AD Bruisers just build suboptimal stuff and just deal not enough damage to be relevant. So they start building ultra damage items like IE and ER so they deal enough damage but are not tanky enough and die in 3 seconds.

Then Riot comes in here and either buffs their damage or tankiness, the problem is, if that happens then they become unstoppable. When you give them enough tankiness that a Darius with IE and ER rush can survive then he will instagib anything that gets close. When you give him more damage then Darius will just go nigh full tank and still kill anything that gets too close.

It becomes super hard to balance these AD Bruiser because the items they build are not working with their kits. IE is not designed for bruisers but when there isn't a better damage item then there just isn't a better damage item and they are forced to build it.

When you look at what items the AP Bruisers I listed above build on OP.GG you quickly realize it's stuff like Ludens / Rabaddons / Spellbinder, stuff that a Bruiser wouldn't build if they aren't forced to do so.

In short, if an AD Bruiser would build the same as an AP one it would look like this:

It's this mish-mash of suboptimal items that you hope kind of works on your champ and if it doesn't then good luck staying relevant in the game until the day Riot decides to make it work, in which case you become unstoppable.

It is also very clear that these AP Bruisers have certain parts in their kit that just could be on an item they could build. Sylas and Diana passive for example, they are more or less tiamat effects... how about we make an AP Tiamat item and give these champs actual passives. Passives that aren't here to forcefully make them work with the current suboptimal buildpaths they have

Mordekaiser passive too, that could be an item, you could remove Sylas shield if that item was a thing. Then Sylas E wouldn't be so grossly overloaded and wouldn't need to be an a 18 second cooldown lvl 1. But he needs that shield right now, otherwise he will die in 3 seconds.

Same with Ryze shield, do you see a single shield in Darius kit? Or shields in other AD Bruisers? There just a few of them. they don't need it because the items they buy cover that aspect (Steraks).

When basic needs of a class are not represented in the items they buy then all of those things need to be forcefully included in their kits otherwise the champions wont ever work.

If you want to make actual AP Bruiser and not pseudo tanky burst assassins on their good days and walking wannabe AP tanks on their bad days, you need to rip off their innate champion mechanics that the whole class needs, put these on items and give them tools or strengthen them into wanting to buy those exact class defining items.

Only then you can actually make them into normal champions that aren't a balance nightmare 24/7.