Riot felt Conqueror+high penetration was necessary. Defense deserves a looking at

this is part of a much bigger design "problem" overall but I'd rather focus on the dynamic that involves tanks and the interactions around them

Defense in LoL has been a recurring balance problem since the dawn of time. There's been a handful of metas where champions become so impossibly bulky that they can kill anyone by virtue of just not dying to them. This is not exclusive to tanks; fighters have done it in the short-lived Metagolem era, juggernauts did it in their season 5 prime, and assassins did it in season 6 with Sunfire+Iceborn into full tank builds. I could even point to season 7, where in competitive play fighters like Jarvan, Renekton and Kled would get just a BC+Titanic into full tank with Gargoyle's Stoneplate and effectively become a massive soak for a teamfight, either relying on it to do CC or to pop it after using their rotation to weather the counter-attack. Part of the old "noodle fight" in top lane before fighter items came to be in season 5 was that many fighters would just directly rush a tank item like Sunfire cape, and in lanes where both of them did it, they reduced each other's damage to the point of it being the best option to just ignore each other and farm until later.

Coming off of preseason 8 most fighters could tell you that new tanks who have shifted into lane bullies are very hard for them to deal with. Champions like Ornn, Sion, Maokai and Cho'Gath in preseason could actually duel fighters with Grasp and win - while still retaining the massive teamfight power that tanks naturally have. Their combination of very high base damage, often percentage based, and high defense through shields or sustain meant they could often just stat-check any fighter and come out on top, and then outscale them hard when it's time to group.

People point to right now at a time where true damage, % damage, and overall penetration are very high right now, but they never seem to consider why. Well, defense is why. All of those old metas were awful to deal with, no matter if it was a tank, a fighter, or an "assassin" benefiting from it.

• The underlying issue: HP and Resists on the same item

This is, in my opinion, the key flaw with tank items. Many of them offer you a sizable increase in both HP, a stat that lets you soak more damage, and resistances, which lets you reduce damage that hits you. What this means is that you effectively double down on being better at surviving someone every time they buy an item, with few exceptions; this is a common complaint among bursty AP champions that one finished MR item like Visage is enough to let you greatly negate a mage's impact vs you until they finish all of their penetration, usually on their fourth item. When tank items are good and a champion is capable of snowballing on a tank build then they can quickly become a massive, unbeatable wall that chews you down by simply not letting you damage to them. The solution has been to steadily add more and more means of letting fighters and carries reduce, penetrate or outright ignore the tank's defenses. This is, more or less, the right result, done the completely wrong way, which brings me to my proposals:

• Separate HP items from resistance items; raise HP, and lower total resists

**Almost ** every tank and beefy champion should have a strong HP pool. Focusing in this way would actually be a much healthier design choice because it allows the tank the enjoyment of a strong early-mid game stat where tanks are generally meant to shine, allows carries and fighters the opportunity to win a long fight through sustain and sustained damage, and greatly reduces the abusability of tank items without needing to simply make tank items bad.

Through this design, we can also justify cutting down on the absurd amount of tank killer bullshit that Riot's had to implement to counter the numbers. Conqueror is no longer necessary as a response to 4k+ HP 250 armor builds because they'll have less armor to worry about. Champions who have innate armor reduction can feel a little better about having it because it's not just a bandaid powerup anymore. Black Cleaver, Void Staff, and Last Whisper won't be as needed to feel like you can finally make an impact on tanks, and can be reduced in their efficiency or have these functions replaced entirely. Trinity Force will still need a nerf. Crit carries would be allowed to come online a little sooner because tanks don't hard-wall them from doing any damage until 4 items, but tanks would still maintain ability to soak their DPS and kill them in the early-to-mid game until they've acquired lifesteal and sufficient DPS. Thus, we can smooth out a crit carry's currently absurd curve to allow them to contribute to the game sooner.

• Why this is a good idea

As counter intuitive as this might sound, this approach would actually make resistances stronger; even if you have a much smaller total cap for armor compared to right now, each point of armor you have then becomes more valuable, especially if there's no longer a necessity for every AD champion to reduce your armor by half. Resistance-based tanks like Malphite and Rammus become MUCH better at filling into their intended niche of countering a specific type of damage, and heavy resistance items like Frozen Heart, Wit's End, Stoneplate and Thornmail become more valuable for a nice boost of specified defense. Other item that are meant to be specific counter-buys like Adaptive Helm and Randuin's can be spec'd harder into that specific defense, raising their impact on what you're actually buying them for. Champions who have abilities that grant resistances would be allowed to actually feel that power-up later into the game, even if they'd still naturally fall off at the time when DPS starts to come online. The tanks who naturally get obscenely high amounts of HP thus become less obnoxious because they have less resists; they'll be bigger flat soaks than now but they'll reduce less damage.

Fighters benefit equally from having this generalized defense as much as they'd gain as the person being tanked. Lifesteal would become a viable choice on fighters again, and with survivability generally raised for most/all of them I think most can either be persuaded with or without balance changes to push a little closer into less one-shot, full AD focused builds and playstyles. Juggernauts obviously benefit massively from being tankier and we can finally stop doing the "throw more damage on their kit and see if it finally gets played high ELO now" B.S. that we've been doing with Darius and Nasus for the last 2 years.

That's all, thanks.