@Riot The Problem with Itemization in League
The problem with League itemization is that there isn't enough item choices. More specifically, there isn't enough significant or unique item choices. Let me give you an example. The other day I played 
top vs 
. Normally, this lane isn't too bad since can use his shield to soak up harass while quickly clearing a minion wave. My build path was essentially:
(starting item) ->
-> 
-> 
Of course, as soon as my teammates died to a 
gank they immediately went to "gg ff @ 20 noob top laner build armor against " because at the time the only items I had were .
So you may ask: why did I build ? Well, unlike who can literally cast his abilities on any target anytime he wants completely for free with increasingly nonexistent cooldowns, is a champion who has very high mana costs and actually needs to build 40% CDR so that he doesn't have to wait 8-10 seconds for a full rotation of his abilities. He's a CDR-reliant tank like 
and unlike 
. Therefore, I think it makes sense to invest in an early for the 250 mana and 10% CDR that I can sit on and upgrade into 
at a later time.
As an aside, I had 10% CDR in runes so don't give me that bullshit of "oh why don't you invest CDR into runes" because I did. I'm not going to run a 40% CDR rune page on a tank and even if I did I don't even have enough rune pages (20 is the limit) to even support that. THE ONLY reason I went with is because I really didn't have much choice. The only MR item that also gives mana sustain is 
which builds into a 
or 
none of which I want to build as the sole tank on my team. As an aside, I have actually gone on a top lane tank in the past vs certain team comps (with pick/assassination potential) but it was a situational thing and sub-optimal in the grand scheme of a 6-item build. Additionally, gives 20% CDR whereas gives only 10%. The only other way to complete my 40% CDR if I did not get would be to build yet another MR item (
) which was nerfed since patch 5.16 (35 MR is less than ) and I don't want to invest in so many MR items when there's strong AD threats on the enemy team that I also want to deal with.
What about 
? As a tank I didn't feel like 
was a good investment and 
is so weak now that there's no point in ANYONE building it anymore. I would get more out of building 
, which is also sub-optimal. Also, is one of the best hard-engage champions in the game so I wouldn't really make much use of the active.
A summary of the problem I had IN THIS CASE:
-
is a MUST-BUILD in many cases not because it's cheap and gives 90 armor, but because of the UTILITY it gives. Nobody buys thinking "yep there's no other item I can buy that would give me more survivability than this". I have no 20%-CDR item alternatives. ESPECIALLY none that give mana sustain. Am I supposed to build
on a tank?? -
is one of the few tanks that doesn't really make good use of the passive since his tankyness revolves around his shield rather than a bunch of heals or whatever. However, I needed the 10% CDR from that
doesn't have. -
This problem becomes emphasized against an AP top laner that I had to "interrupt" my build with
, but it also exists against AD top laners because current itemization has made it that I have no choice BUT to build at some point or other.
A summary of the OVERALL PROBLEM:
-
MOST items in this game either have interesting and unique passive and weak base stats (
) thereby making them terrible purchases in MOST cases, OR they have too good of raw stats with little equal or alternative that players don't really have to think about what to buy ( ) and just mindlessly buy the same items every game. This is one of the reasons why you see builds become so redundant and stale. -
Entire classes of champions are completely devoid of options for certain stats. For example, %movement speed on tanks. The only non-boots movement speed items that tanks have are
which does not provide as consistent amount of movement speed as, say, a 
or 
, and the latter of which is highly situational in the first place. Another example: tanks are basically required to buy every game because there isn't really a tenacity alternative and every fucking champion and their mothers IN ANY ROLES (including ADCs) have some form of CC, enough to justify needing Tenacity. -
There is a trend in this game of one or two champions completely ruining items for other champions. A good example of this is
. Remember when built out of ? Back in the day this was a great item to buy on tanks who needed the sustain and also the MR. However, was nerfed to no longer build out of because 
basically abused the hell out of this similarly to how he abuses despite not even needing the CDR anymore. This was the main reason this item got nerfed. We see something similarly happening with 
which is getting nerfed because Rito is about to release a ranged "marksman" jungler that can abuse the hell out of this item, more than most other champions. Remember when 
got nerfed because 
abused it in top lane?
We SIGNIFICANTLY need to re-hash the item system. I like the direction that Rito started to go with AP items in patch 5.13 giving a lot of similar stats and costs but different unique actives and passives as to not discourage some items from ever being built (I'm looking at you 
and 
my two favorite AP items). They need to do something like this with ALL ITEMS (tanks especially). The 5.16 armor changes patch made this worse because it created MORE disparity between the armor item stats and made some passives like {item:3075}} significantly weaker than before making it less likely that players would buy it, despite it already being the least popular armor item in the game in terms of how many players and champions actually buy it.
An idea I had was to maybe give multiple versions of the same item? I think someone in another thread mentioned this by having build out of EITHER (like the old days) OR 
(like currently) so you'd have the same MAJOR properties of the item preserved (60 MR, shield passive) with some minor yet NOTICEABLE differences (sustain). Another idea I had was to just make every item modular to some extent. By modular I mean you get to pick-and-choose whatever raw stats you want but the unique passives and actives are preserved. For example, I could buy a 
that builds into an MR-version of which can be used to build into, say, a -like item that gives some mana instead of some just HP. Maybe I want waveclear and MR so I can build 
into an MR-version of 
. Just some ideas.
This wouldn't be a problem if we didn't have such a large champion pool with so many "unique" different types of champions. Each champion needs different things so we can't have such a small pool of items to choose from which inherently serve a smaller group of champions much better than others.
**TL;DR: Itemization sucks and we need real "strategic diversity" in one of the most fundamental aspects of the game (items). **
+ 900 g = 2650 g