My thoughts on itemization.

Hello. This is my first time posting something on the board. I would just like to give my thoughts on what I see as issues with the game's current items. To start with, I am a tank and bruiser player. So my views and opinions will be more focused on them and will mainly focus on the issues with Tanks, Mages, and Marksman items. I do not feel qualified in talking about assassins since I never play them, and I feel bruisers items are fine for the most part.

Tanks are simply too good at building against physical damage and not nearly good enough at building against magical damage. Marksman are also not nearly as good at dealing with tanks as mages are. When it comes to tanks, they have a huge variety of Armor items they can buy based on the situation. With 60 armor being the average amount you can get for per completed item. With the highest amount of armor coming from Frozen Heart with it's 100 armor. The lowest being 30 on righteous glory.

For Magic Resistance a Tank usually picks from Locket of the Iron Solari, Adaptive Helm, Abyssal Mask, and Spirit Visage. With all of them but locket having 55 mr and hp on it. Locket also has the highest MR out of all items that grant MR at 60. That means that the highest single armor item is 100 armor, with the highest mr item being 60. Neither of these items gives HP to be clear.

So let's list off the Armor + HP items you will commonly get. Righteous Glory, Deadman's Plate, Sunfire Cape, Randuinn's Omen, Thornmail, Knight's Vow (if you're a support tank).

For MR + HP items you have Spirit Visage, Adaptive Helm, and Abyssal Mask.

You have half as many options in total. It is also worth noting that the passives for Armor items in the above list are generally better in more situations than those of MR items in the above list. Randuin's is an AoE slow that also reduces the crit damage and attack speed of attacks, sunfire cape is aoe damage, thornmail punishes AA attackers, deadman's gives movement speed, righteous glory is an aoe ms buff, etc.

While the MR items are far more specific. Adaptive Helm for those who use the same spell over and over again or relies heavily on Dot damage. Spirit Visage is only useful if you have built in sustain. Abyssal Mask is solid if you have a lot of magic damage on your team and you have mana.

Just the amount of options for each one shows a clear imbalance, though when you look at the options Mages and Marksman have to deal with it just further widens the gap.

First, let us start with the two major means of bypassing tanky targets. Lord Dominik's Regards 45 Attack Damage 35% Armor Penetration 2800 Gold cost

Void Staff 70 Ability Power 40% Magic Penetration 2650 Gold Cost

So not only is Lord Dominik's Regards more expensive than Void staff, it gives less penetration and damage. And remember, it's easier to get a higher amount of Armor than it is for MR. So that also means the lower penetration has to go through more armor.

For Flat penetration. Physical Pen Lethality Items (which is designed to be better against low armor characters) and that is it

Magical Pen Sorcerer's Boots Morellonomicon

The lethality items are also similarly priced to morellonomicon, and when combined with the fact that there are 3 lethality items, the disparity of flat pen is not really as bad.

Marksmen can also pick up Black Cleaver and Blade of the Ruined King to help combat tankiness. Though they are situational items because of how they typically build.

My last point is that over all, Mage items are just better than marksmen items. Thanks to items like; Rod of Ages, Morellonomicon, Liandrys, Rylais, Protobelt, Banshee's Veil, and Zhonya's Hourglass, a mage can gain a large amount of durability without sacrificing too much damage. While a marksman that wants some durability with damage on it can only take Black Cleaver and Guardian Angel. They do not have any Magic Resist options while mages do. Additionally, mages can build all of those high survival items without slowing down power spikes too much while a Marksman that tries to do so cripples their power growth because they also need to build Attack Speed and Critical Chance. Unlike mage items that can give you most of what you need on a single item, many ADC items give only a couple of stats you need per item. You don't have any one stop shop items. In fact, because Marksmen rely on crit chance, which is RNG based, if they want to reliably crit. They will have to buy 4 items with crit chance on them. Of course, not all Marksmen are crit based, and they will have more wiggle room to get lethality and CDR. But Marksmen that are very crit based will have to get those 4 items. Then their 5th item will be boots of some kind and then they'll probably get Guardian Angel as their one defensive item. Meanwhile the mage oneshotting the team has HP, Armor, or MR on most of its items and are harder to kill as a result.

My proposed fix is to make more magic resist items to increase the options you have for building it. Give a small nerf to Armor items. Nerf Voidstaff's Mpen and gold cost. Give Marksmen a few more durability options, and maybe add some to a few of their already existing items. It wouldn't hurt to tune back some of the durability on mage items too.

Tl:DR: Itemization is too heavily skewed against Physical Damage champions and needs to be adjusted. I think we need more MR items, slightly weaker armor items, a nerfed void staff, and more durability options on Marksmen items.

I know this would be a lot of work and can't happen over night, and might not even be the best way to approach what I see to be a problem. I'm just voicing my thoughts in hopes that something could be done if the problem is in fact a problem. These changes would also allow most sources of True damage to be safely removed from the game I think.

So please let me know if you agree, have a better idea, or if I'm just delusional and full of crap :D

[galio-happy]

P.S. Please buff Tank Galio.