Shift Focus - Tanks and tank items, not damage

The things in this game that tend to break it tend not really to be related to damage or mobility, although there are outliers that become problematic like and , but they are not necessarily game breaking.

There is a consistent theme with the kinds of champions and builds who do, however, break the game. Those would be those related to tanks.

Tanks with dominated the meta for a bit, and it was often bought as the only damage item for 2-3 tanks per team to become one of the dominant builds in S3. Tank Ekko, a more recent example, speaks for itself and is probably fresher in the memory of readers (as it is still somewhat a problem).

Dr. Mundo, despite being quite literally the archetypical stat check champion, finds problems with tuning - in that he is either overpowered and overtuned, or useless. It is quite strange. It leads one to believe that the problem might simply be the focus of these changes .

Stop tuning damage, start tuning HP and resistances - and introduce more mechanics for damage reduction.

I would like to see the introduction of items that complement the role of a tank, that are completely unattractive and perhaps even detrimental to the builds of damage dealers. Items that, and I have brought this up a few times before, perhaps even give negative stats. Negative movement speed, negative bonus attack damage/Ability power, attack speed, what have you. Something like that may help. Then you have the possibility of adding more items that scale with bonus survivability stats. We have seen this brought in with and , and it is a great mechanic. There is nothing attractive about either of these items to players who primarily actively deal damage. I would like to see more of these, and for them to be implemented in a way that really bring tanks to 'another level' of survivability that is differentiated from, say, a bruiser building off tank.

Another solution may be the inclusion of more mechanics that scale with amount of recent damage taken, or %health missing. Seeing this on a champion usually denotes a vast majority of players building tank on said champion, or at least a mix of tank and bruiser items with a preference for tank, . The one exception I could think of would be , simply because of the rest of his kit lends itself to DPS and dueling and that part of his kit exists as an outlier.

This would add much more variety, and 'solidity' to the tank class. At the moment, tanking takes some of the most precise decision making, especially in skirmishes, and is often the least rewarding to play. I am talking about actual tanking here, and not abuse of tank and bruiser items by mobile champions with high base damages.

TL;DR Balancing league isn't going to be done by tuning sources of damage, by and large. It would be done by allocating more diverse mechanics for tanks to mitigate damage, and/or reward them for taking damage, that are balanced to be completely unattractive to any champion that relies on DPS to contribute.