How much should an item's cost come from stats? Let's reimagine the role of items in League.

Exclaimer: This is an opinion piece. I claim no absolute knowledge on the matter and this was written purely for the fun of imagining new things. I'm happy if this only serves as a jumping point for further discussion. Civil disagreement is welcome and encouraged :)

Through base stats alone, by level 18 champions will have on average the equivalent of: - +2 completed armor items (roughly +2000 effective health factoring in increased mr and armor) - +2 completed AD items (combining AD and attack speed) - +1 completed Ability Power item (unsure on this one, couldn't find numbers for this stat so correct me if I'm wrong)

So looking at this purely from a stat perspective there's about a 1:1 ratio between a champion's base stats and the stats they get from items (assuming 5 items completed and a slot for boots).

Power-wise that seems about right to me. Overall a full item inventory should be about an equal entity to a champion. But I propose to you to ask yourself if that 50% share of the power should be mostly consumed by raw stats as it is now. What if only about 25% of it was stats (meaning the damage/health/armor/mr was halved) and the item's actives and passives were made more distinct and impactful? What might that do to the game? Would strategy and theory crafting be improved or worsened?

But we also don't want a game where all 6 item slots have these mandatory actives that you have to play twister with your fingers to pull off to reach the baseline proficiency to play the game. To this concern I think there are a few possible directions item rebalancing could go.

One direction I think would be worth exploring would be to reduce the number of itme slots to 4 and then buff items across the board to keep the max inventory power ratio at around 1:1. Imagine if items had around the same amount of stats they do now with even more impactful actives/passives but you could only choose 4 of them? In this scenario the skill floor to play proficiently remains low enough to accomodate casual players while making the actives/passives more critical to pull off in order to justify the item's cost. With this setup you could even do a simplification of the entire item roster to weed out everything that only differ statwise and leave/rework all the items that are more distinct/specialized that significantly affect how a player will strategy in teamfights and macro decisions in order to utilize the item to maximimum efficiency. This would further reduce the information overload many new players face when confronted with not only a ~150 champion roster but a comparatively large item roster as well. Just to point that out as I think that's a valid concern for this game.

Maybe you don't like this proposition at all. Can you think of a way you'd like to see items reworked/rebalanced? Or maybe you like the stat-heavy design of items as they are, consider sharing why you think this is good for the game moving forward.

Thanks for reading :) [vlad-salute]