An in-depth look at keeping item sets.

"We're currently not planning to bring over the item set creator feature from the legacy client. Basically only an incredibly tiny percentage of players ever used the feature, and we've heard from many players that y'all don't care whether we bring item sets over so long as we continue to support 3rd party item set customization tools like Championify—and we will! "

Only a few hours after this post item set supporters have been flooding the forums, so much so that it has become the main topic of the updates to come. Riot has stated that we should use 3rd party programs to keep using item sets, one they keep bringing up is Championify, this program doesn't even provide the ability to create your own custom item sets. Lets disregard that for a moment though and I'll bring in a quote from Riot TMX.

"When you download League of Legends, we want it to be the complete experience -- you shouldn't have to go digging for other apps and add-ons just to stay competitive.

It's also important that the games you play are stable and secure, and 3rd party applications can potentially affect the stability of the core League experience."

Although now you're telling us the exact opposite, you're encouraging the use of 3rd party programs which can jeopardize the stability of our client. League of Legends has a lot of items and the list continues to grow, with another 4 items on the way. When I was new to this game, going through all the items on the item set page and reading them all was a core part of my learning experience. Creating different item sets that met different needs such as reaching maximum CD on certain champs, then going in game and testing out these item sets to see which one had more success, this was a huge part of me being able to "stay competitive".

It was stated that "When fewer than 1% of players use a thing, you can safely say it's a lower priority than other things." I personally find this extremely hard to believe. Items sets have always been a major profile feature on League of Legends, every player I know uses item sets and there has been far too much retaliation for it to only be 1% of players that use item sets. I personally have an item set for every champion in the game and on top of that most of these item sets have more than one item set inside of them. It helps being able to adapt to my team composition and the enemies composition / build order. I don't have to spend any unneeded time at the shop pulling up an item from the search as any items that are relevant to the champion I'm playing are ready to go. Personally I know every item in this game inside and out, I know their names, stats, and cost. However I know plenty of people who don't know all the items as well as some of us do, which means trying to pull up a certain item without having it planned for ahead of time could be costly or even lead to them forgetting to buy that item.

Here's an All Chat episode which is item related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGQuzDGMNq4

These are experienced players who can't even tell you the NAME of an item by it's picture, that's not even going into the stats of an item. So how can you expect everyone to perform on the spot and remember exactly what item they need for every situation? Need a QSS for that cc that keeps wrecking you? Well you can't remember the item name, so you have to go and check the magic resist box and go through all the magic resist items to find it WHILE in-game. This is of course assuming you'll recognize the picture or item name when you see it, otherwise you'll have to read every magic resist related item in the game until you find it. Sure this may seem easy to some of us, but not so much to others.

Even more so in the case of newer players who wont know all of these items, creating a set of items will help them learn all of the items better and be prepared to compete on a more competitive level. Having an adc item set that has a Maw set aside for when that LB is focusing you and removing you from team fights, or a top laner having a Zz'rot set aside to help a lane split push.

I'd like to quote this again one more time before I close.

"When fewer than 1% of players use a thing, you can safely say it's a lower priority than other things."

There are plenty of features in the game which are around for the smaller population that use them, such as the color blind feature, chat filter, clubs, mini map / champion portrait positioning, ect. You took the time to add in all these things for a minority of players that use them, but you want to remove item sets from the game which have a major impact on play, from new players to seasoned vets. If you leave newer players to use the recommended build, play will dwindle down and we'll be seeing god awful builds from players who wont ever learn to counter build or try something different. Going to see Last whispers on every adc even when the enemy team has no bonus armor items.

I could sit here and quote all of the other valid points that have been brought up from other players, but I'll leave that for the comment section and for riot to find in all of the other threads that I've read already.