@ Riot and the community on Itemization and Balance

These are some thoughts a friend of mine had I'm posting them here:

Recently we saw a single item shift the face of the game radically. I am, of course, talking about Cinderhulk. The power of this item was such that the Metagame shifted from an Assassin oriented Metagame to one that is favorable for and heavily dominated by Tanks. By no means do I want to make a call for nerf tanks, buff assassins but rather I would like to talk about itemization in general. We saw the change a single, albeit powerful, item can have on the game as a whole. Yet often times many times a great deal of items lay forgotten in this game buried under ones with a broader, more accessible and generally useful amount of power and strength.

These more generally strong items are so good that they crowd out niche items which Riot had generally created to be useful in certain situations but are somehow forgotten and never seen. While there is nothing hugely wrong with one type of item being more prominent than another available form, such in the case of Locket of the Iron Solari being built more often than it's pendant the Banner of Command some item choices fall flat on their face in this game and I would like to hypothesize about the hows and whys of larger levels of disparity.

I will begin with an item many of you probably have never seen in use in this game, Ohmwrecker. The concept of this item doesn't seem to bad does it? Health, Armor, Base HP regen, Cooldown reduction, an active with 3 seconds for a free dive and a movement speed bonus near turrets. Sounds like this item brings enough to the table to make the cut doesn't it? However this is where it gets outshadowed by it's stronger and more useful "brothers" Frozen Heart, Randuins and even Thornmail.

So lets begin thinking about this item. What is the niche for this item? Well it's pretty clear cut and dry in that it's supposed to help with towerdives. However the defensive stats on this make it more of an appealing item for tanks/tank oriented supports than those champions who would be looking to dive, aka Assassins and other Carries. Their build paths simply can't afford this item to be placed at any point because it disrupts their power. So why don't tanks of any kind not build this item? Well if you look at Randuins 20 Armor more, 200 HP more, a passive AS slow and an active MS slow at the cost of 10% CDR. Frozen heart offers twice the armor, an AS slow Aura, double the CD and Mana at the cost of 300 HP. Both of these items offer value fighting against other players and other threats((Minions, monsters and even turrets) thus general power) by granting more presence when it matters than Ohmwreckers turret busting powers do. In the first place what team would be looking to dive a tower in an even situation 5v5, 4v4. It would have to be a team which would be struggling with waveclear, which has high engage potential but would be wary about tanking a turret on top of it. In the first place I couldn't come up with a team composition(by which I mean one which is not deliberately designed to be what one would call 'troll') with these kind of parameters. Teams which have problems properly setting up sieges are looking to make use of global objectives to force the opposing team out of the safety of their turrets. Thereby avoiding the turret dive situation entirely. And in a conflict between champions the powers of Randuins and Frozen Heart simply overshadow the powers of an Ohmwrecker. Simply because the situation, the niche which is required to make this item useful doesn't exist or doesn't come to pass turns this item into an exceedingly rare pick.

This is a case of the stats being not good enough for the niche passive effect to be worth the pick-up.

A similar problem is presented with the Zz'Rot Portal. The Hybrid armor it gives make it sub-par when compared to items which have a specific identity of dealing with either magic or physical damage. Again the general power of FH/Randuins over 60 Armor and SV/BV over the 60 MR are more valued. The second problem is the disconnection between its intended use as a way to help tanks splitpush versus the champions that do the actual splitpushing. Tanks splitpush because of the global presence afforded by their Teleport. But in general they do not seek to actively take the tower they just want to force the enemy team to allocate their resources unfavorably so that they will be forced in an unfavorable fight or position. This means that once again the general power of other tank oriented items overshadows the intended niche use of this item. So the question is, are there splitpushing champions which do seek to take towers? Assassins which lose their effectiveness in lategame teamfights and then just as niche champions like Master Yi and Tryndamere. This is a result of high AD(+AS) itemizations allow against buildings. However once more neither of these groups would consider buying this item. Either because of better, more generally strong itemization options or because their build path doesn't allow it.

I am not asking for these items to blatantly buffed because they can quickly turn up in the 100% must buy category. Rather these items present a kind of design where the overall support for these kinds of playstyle is missing and on their own they are overlooked simply because their stats are unfavorable but at the same time the kind of secondary power provided by them makes them tricky to be balanced as that can quickly turn out the bad way, namely when the general power of their stats start to meet and or exceed that of their competitors. I regard this as a somewhat flawed item design because it does not present the player with any viable choice. Either the item doesn't do enough for you or it does too much.

We saw this happen when DFG was taken out of the game and has now been replaced by Luden's Echo. The target audience capable and willing to buy Luden's is much, much greater than that of DFG ever was. DFG was a problematic item in and of itself no doubt but it had an identity as working for burst damage oriented mages (Leblanc, Veigar, Syndra...). And now look at Luden's. Who is buying it? Mages which are looking to enhance their burst (Ahri, LB), AoE poke mages (Ziggs, AP Kog'maw), DPS mages (Cassio, Azir). The general power of this item is so large that it has inflated the initial target audience of its predecessor to include virtually every AP oriented Champion.

I do not strictly regard this as a problem because the more generally good items we have the more choice is forced on the player, allowing for more diversity. However overall itemization is severely lacking in diversity as there is a huge lack of items which actually solidify certain playstyles AND are good enough to be picked versus those which provide a broad spectrum of strength.

An item like Ardent Censer whose current stats are largely unappealing has a well defined niche and the passive effect on it is as such that even with a higher set of base stats it would never cross the threshhold into a must pick item for all AP oriented champions as its main power is clearly gated around a certain kind of type of champion (Shields and Heals). The design of this item is extremely good because it clearly boosts a specific playstyle without leaving other type of champions in the dust for not having it. Granted the item currently does still have some problems but I believe that they can be solved given time.

At the current juncture however itemization is overall very, very samey. ADC rush IE with certain exceptions based on the champion design (Ezreal, Kalista, Vayne...). Mages rush their mana sustain Athenes and Morellos with some small exceptions based on champions where instead a Seraph's or RoA is picked up. But in the end Mage itemization too is largely samey. Were it not for some demand for counter-itemization as matchups depend we could probably see exact same build orders on Mage champions but by large we do end up with the same items at the end. Tanks by large build similar as well, with some exceptions made here too but once again they are champion determined and not playstyle determined. As an example: Liandri's Torment. This item seems like a perfect choice for the current Metagame. Long fights, lots of CC, high health targets. The passive would certainly be very useful in these fights which can take more than 10 seconds and yet it's once again not picked up in spite of its use. Who do you really see this item on? Rumble and then there is long time nothing and then you get such champions like Malzahar, Teemo and situationally Sejuani and Amumu. Once again an item which would have been useful, crowded out because of a good stat+passive combination turns it binary. As such it falls once again flat in comparison to competitor items.

We need more items which actively boost compositional strengths, like Ardent Censer could do for a Hyper Carry oriented playstyle and less items with the potential to be binary given that their stats were better (Liandri's, Ohmwrecker). Alternatively we need more items which are generally good enough to actually compete with other generally good items for their slot and that way create a meaningful item diversity.

I am not asking or for any immediate changes but I would like to know how Riot views this topic.

Put together by Scarthcaroth on EUW(b)est

I decided to post it here to see if it got any traffic.