I don't understand why we don't have more melee only or ranged only items.

Spicy Rice·4/4/2019, 12:44:36 PM·24 votes·10,745 views

Specifically melee only tank items, seeing as a large reason why (or at least a large reason to me) tank items can't be made more powerful, stat wise or effect wise, is due to how ranged champs start to abuse them.

The power of range is so overbearing, that to me, it'd make sense to restrict items for them.

And that isn't to say I want to change current items to ranged only or melee only, but rather we should look into make more items in such a fashion.

39 Comments

Death by Glamour4/4/2019, 5:49:17 PM16 votes

Surprised no one so far has mentioned Ezreal and item 3025 which has been a thing from almost 5 seasons.

As dusk has said though, the majority of champs abusing tank items are infact melee assassins.

DuskDaUmbreon4/4/2019, 12:51:32 PM16 votes

Because most tank item abusers haven't been ranged.

The most recent tank item abuse (Barring champion-specific abuse, which is a special case) I can think of was tank Ekko/Fizz/Yasuo, none of which are ranged.

The reason that there aren't more ranged/melee splits is because, for the most part, items can be balanced around both, simply because there's not many ADCs or mages that really want to delve into defenses more than necessary, because otherwise they lose too much damage. The only hard and fast ones have been those rare instances where an item was inherently broken on the unintended class - hydras on ranged, for instance - or where it gives an effect Riot does not want to let ranged (or melee) champions have because it'd just be a case of the former.

Jamaree4/4/2019, 12:51:15 PM7 votes

Probably because it’s a slippery slope and if tank items like that became good the backlash on the other end would be just as overbearing as the current one is.

The thigh guy4/4/2019, 2:51:40 PM5 votes

There’s lot of things in the game that are strictly better on melee due to mechanics. The only thing range locked is runnans and the only reason that is range locked is because riot couldn’t figure out how to code it (I wish I was memeing)

wolvius4/4/2019, 5:51:45 PM3 votes

Because champs like Thresh Urgot Rakan are technically ranged but their range is shit.

Tobykachu4/4/2019, 3:38:18 PM1 votes

Iceborn Gauntlet is the item that immediately comes to mind. It's basically only good on Ezreal, whilst the class since is was nerfed so hard and became pretty awful on most tanks.

JedenVojak4/5/2019, 12:34:22 AM1 votes

[{quoted}](name=Spicy Rice,realm=NA,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=GOAWlkZd,comment-id=,timestamp=2019-04-04T12:44:36.044+0000)

Specifically melee only tank items, seeing as a large reason why (or at least a large reason to me) tank items can't be made more powerful, stat wise or effect wise, is due to how ranged champs start to abuse them.

The power of range is so overbearing, that to me, it'd make sense to restrict items for them.

And that isn't to say I want to change current items to ranged only or melee only, but rather we should look into make more items in such a fashion.

Because Riot doesn't like to make items that can't be bought by champions.

They just change the champions to be completely non-functional with the items, see Regen Soraka, AD Fizz, AP Yi, etc.

HàrrowR4/5/2019, 2:08:27 AM1 votes

Most people answered your question already, but another one is just build diversity.

Its fun changing things up and finding new ways to play a champ, if we locked items into class specific categories then the whole reason for items to exist disappears, you can then just switch over to the hots system where there's no items and your champ just scales directly.