I've been thinking about items.

I've been thinking about items.

• is hated, and for good reason. It's overloaded and removes counterplay from a class that excels when the other side doesn't have time to counterplay you.
• were both reworked this year and sightstone was deleted because of pros. Then the starting support items had their costs increased.
• People are complaining about AP champs not having enough defensive items.
• ADC item nerfs were partly to blame for the weird bot meta, and them being changed again is one of the reasons ADCs came back into the meta.
• probably should be a component of simply because it's that good on most AD junglers.
• is good on paper but no one gets it; I think it needs a better passive.
• is something riot always seems to have troubles getting right.
• has been reworked this year because of all of the problems it caused.
• has a rough build path and it seems like most mids only get it about 21% of the time.
• is this year's midlaners have to rush it ubiquitously item
• is an item some midlaners have to rush because it takes forever to stack, but it's a terrible rush item because you give up so much early damage from it.
• should be renamed poke you more cannon because of some of the champs that abuse it. Right ?
• was given true damage because if there's one thing all ADCs and Yasuo mains need, it's more true damage.
• were changed to ignore total armor when IE was given true damage, because if there's one thing all ADCs need it is more damage. Edited: Thanks to Illabethe for reminding me this point was a buff and not a nerf.
• was removed from ARAM because it is problematic and then quickly returned to ARAM the second riot's balance team was force to play on an all melee team vs an all poke team.
• Trackers Knife was deleted because after years of encouraging players to ward, riot finally decided that lack of vision is fine for the game. And then skockingly they get upset when people call the balance team a bunch of boosted animals. Yes, if there was one thing holding league back, it was the fact that 70% of the players warded better than bronzies and watched the minimap regularly.
• got reworked again. IDK why riot is always reworking ER, but it seems like a new season comes upon us and once again riot decided that an item that once had lifelink needed crit instead. No wait, it didn't need crit, what it needed was mana. I'm half expecting it to build out of and will give the VGUed lethality that scales on how much max mana he has. Or maybe it'll be a support item for soraka that builds out of and . Who knows.

After thinking about all these things, something dawned on me. Maybe the itemization in this game is bad and needs a bit of a rework. I'm not saying start from scratch and throw everything out bad. I'm saying, maybe itemization in general is levels of can we please get these things reworked?

I'm also not talking about one class of items getting changed. I remember part of the problems we have today stemming from midyear updates that focused on a single class. Riot never had time to do them right and now we have Duskblade to suffer through as a result. I'm saying riot should turn off all items on their internal servers but the tier 1 stuff for a week, they should be relatively easy to do. Work on those, then go to the tier 2 items for a week. See if there are any holes you need to be filled or pieces you are fine with removing. They shouldn't be much trouble either. Once you are done with those, all your base components should be set. Then you can start working on all the final items. This is where the real work of the item GU begins. Anything that is underused should either be reworked or scrapped. Anything that is mostly fine in the new ecosystem can be tweaked. Maybe add a few items for more build diversity. Take all the problematic items and delete everything that's making them toxic to the gameplay.

This isn't going to be easy. It might actually take time and need polish. But I genuinely think that going through all of the completed items and asking yourselves if those items have been problematic and if so what can be done with those problems in context of all the other changes you know are happening would help the game out a lot.

So let's try VGUing items. All of them. Just to be safe.