Thoughts on the Recent Reworks

At the beginning of this season, there was a lot of talk about strategic diversity. Champions that weren't normally seen were being played... Urgot wasn't a running joke for awhile, Eve saw some actual play, Lee Sin actually disappeared for awhile and we moved from the bruiser meta to a tank meta which made fights much more drawn out and interesting.

And then, the Devourer Enchantment came. After nerfs to literally every other enchantment in the jungle, we were all sure Devourer wouldn't see the light of day for very long. We were wrong, I guess, because it's still there, and it's still completely dominant. Yi, Shyvana and Xin are all put on rather ridiculous levels with this enchantment... And let's not even talk about Fiora with it.

Then the Juggernaut update hit... At the same time as a wide variety of new AD + HP items became available. Before, champions like Fiora and Yi were built as glass cannons and were easy to kill with proper CC and burst. Now, however, they have upwards of 3k health with the same damage and attack speed as before and are quite literally impossible to kill once they get going.

Fiora's update was the first to confuse a lot of people. I just don't understand how a champion who you're supposed to counter with CC can not only block that CC, but actually punish you for using it. She already has the dash on her Q... Did she really need the added effect on her W? And then came the others. Darius, has a heal on his Q that can heal for more than Gangplank's W. Garen, a mechanically easy-to-use champion, does more damage while building tank (with some added % health true damage, of course) than some carries. Let's not even talk about Mordekaiser, because the entire concept of trying to make a champ viable in a lane by literally forcing them into that lane doesn't make a lick of sense to me.

Every game I seem to play lately has the same champions banned (and if they're not, 95% of the time they carry the game). There's very clearly a problem right now and I'm not really confident that Riot's going to come up with a solution. But I feel like the easiest thing right now is to just get rid of these new items / item reworks. They are, in part, a core part of the problem. The last Bruiser meta had them doing a decent amount of damage with some sense of tankiness. This new bruiser meta is seeing assassin-level damage with Garen-level tankiness. I cry every time I play an AP champion that relies on skills, because they just cannot compete with the 10-or-so bruiser carries you've built with the last few patches.

TL;DR Too much in too short of a time frame. Reworks + armor nerfs + new items specifically suited to the bruiser class all worked together to make the last few patches (and this game) completely disastrous. Get rid of the items ( ) for the time being, see if it helps, and if not, the problem is even deeper.