Class Updates: The Good vs. The Bad
#What did class updates get right?
Honestly, the one thing that Riot got right when they were doing class updates was that they further broke down the classes. For the first time, Riot showed that they could differentiate between Vanguards and Wardens, or Assassins and Diver, or Bruisers and Juggernauts. What this meant was that we knew that Riot knew that champions such as Alistar and Maokai fulfilled very different roles and benefited from vastly different itemization.
#What did class updates get wrong?
Riot used them as a corrective measure
Put simply, Riot had their own ideas as to what any given class' role was, and how they should fulfill it. This is a good idea in theory, but realistically Riot's idea of how the class should function within the game and how it would actually function within the current state of the game at the time were incompatible for the most part. If Riot really wanted this experiment to be successful, they would have essentially needed to simultaneously update every class in the game with the same goal in mind with very close monitoring of the relative power levels of each class - something Riot was either too incompetent or too unwilling to attempt. In the end, all of the class updates (with the exception of Vanguards and Wardens) were either (partially) reverted or required additional changes to Runes and role-specific itemization over the next 2-3 seasons.
Riot's scope was too narrow
As nice as it was that Riot finally recognized, for example, Juggernauts and Bruisers as different classes, they failed to recognize that they filled the same role within a team composition in spite of how their kit functioned in order to achieve it. Consequently, when we got Class Updates for any given class, their cousin class received no direct changes. Perhaps this was a good thing considering how many of the Class Updates turned out, but many Bruisers took individual Champion Reworks before their kits could function in the modern game.