What happens when you overspecialize

To overspecialize means you and your entire team focus on doing one thing and one thing only. The example most prevalent everywhere across the entirety of League is everyone goes all AD melee single target assassin with almost 100% basic attack dependency. All of their strengths are the same, as are their weaknesses.

In this scenario, you better sure as shit get an early lead, because the instant the enemy starts exploiting your weaknesses, you will have no answer for it.

An all AD melee assassin team lacks so many things. Ranged attacks, crowd damage, crowd control, durability, lane defense, magic damage and so on. More importantly, their strengths DEPEND on them not just getting ahead, but also making sure the enemy can't do the same thing. It depends on so many things going right for you, that a single champion, a single item, a single SKILL could irreparably fuck up the entire team. YOUR team.

Overspecializing ironically runs the risk of making the one strength you have so heavily invested into completely worthless, and it doesn't take much to make this happen. Tanks are anathema to assassins. If a tank becomes too difficult to kill, if you cannot get through to kill the squishies or requires all of your team to focus one person for ANY reason, you have just hit that brick wall I have been warning you about for three to four years now. Worse yet, overspecialized teams also lose their ability to teamfight, since it's not so much a team as it is a rabble scrambling over one another to get the killing blow on the enemy. Damage is the thing you are dependent on. Damage requires lots of gold, and there's not enough gold to go around for damage-heavy teams that depend on snowballing like this. People don't tolerate two ADCs in bot lane, so why do they consistently do this across the rest of the team?

I always see countless threads talking about how broken X character is (generally assassins), as well as comments like this in game, and every time, it's because said team overspecialized and either fell into the trap up there, or both teams overspecialized in the same thing and started an arms race.

That's the other thing that happens. If both teams have the exact same one strength, it becomes an arms race, which is just as bad, if not worse. Suddenly their strengths are the exact same as yours, and if they get ahead, you don't have an answer to it, once again, and you completely lack the abilities to shut them down.

And all this overspecialization seems to be the intention, these days. Every game I see both teams ban half of the assassin roster and then try to lock in the rest of the assassins before the other side can. And then people come onto the forums and complain about how imbalanced everything is.

Most of the imbalance comes from player's terrible decisions. An all assassin team will never be properly balanced in a million years.