The future of Itemization: if you haven't figured it out, read this.

#In this thread How Riot will fix mage itemization, supports and mages abusing each other's items and kits, Bruisers abusing tank items, and more.

Feel free to read just the sections that are interesting to you.

#My street cred: I tend to be very close to the same page as Riot. I proposed something very similar to the rift scuttler, graves new aa, had some influence over the Fiora rework, and proposed removing stealth wards (bring on the downvotes).

#tl;dr They're tweaking everyone's base stats and scalings so that certain classes synnergize better with certain stats.

|Class|...|Stat| |- |Juggernauts, Bruisers||HP| |Tanks||Armor, MR| |Marksman||Crit, AS| |Mages||Mana, AP| |Supports||Mana Regen|

Repertoir and Ghostcrawler have confirmed some of my observations here, which makes me wish I'd posted earlier for more street cred; oh well, some of this is just me.

#Juggernauts and bruisers build HP

• All the items that juggernauts and bruisers happen to love have lots of hp attached, with few resists.
  • This makes them appealing to champions that have high base MR and Armor.
• Notice how Garen's W gives him bonus MR and Armor? It's to make HP a good stat on him.

If juggernauts build hp to get tanky, what do tanks build?

#Tanks will build lots of resists.

• When the tank class update comes, expect them to have really high base HP.
• This will let them to make items like thornmail strong on tanks without being overbearing on juggernauts, because juggs want HP, not more armor.
  • Notice how thornmail scales with your bonus armor now? It's another brick in the wall.
  • For example: They could make sunfire cape a tank item by reducing its hp and buffing its armor.

#Marksmen: Crit & attack speed are the marksman stats.

• Notice: IE and ER both scale super well with more crit. The only other way to get crit is with zeal items which also have AS. A typical marksman bulid: [boots] + [IE/ER] + [LW upgrade] + [zeal upgrade] + [Defensive item] + [situational]
  • As you can see, it's hard to make room for IE and ER (since you usually want some LS). This further emphasizes the whole, "people who want dps from aa-ing do it with crit AND attack speed" thing.
  • Since attack speed + crit on the same items works so much better on marksmen than anyone else, it prevents other classes from abusing this itemization.
• Finally, notice what they did with Last Whisper: % bonus armor pen. Who's buying bonus armor? TANKS.
  • The lesson: adcs and only adcs can kill tanks, because other classes don't want to waste an item slot on a LW upgrade (since it's useless vs most squishies).

#Emphasis because it's important: Remember all the QQ about "Zed just buys bork and 1shots tanks just as well as squishies?" That was because old LW was a problem, because of the way AD itemization hyper-scales. Now AD assassins have a weakness: they're less good at helping damage tanks than their AP counterparts.

#Mages will build mana while Supports build mana regen

#This is good because mana pools are easier to balance around than regen.

• With regen, you either have enough that you're effectively manaless all the time, or you don't and you're oom all the time.
• With a large mana pool, you're effectively manaless until your pool runs dry, and then you're oom forever until you base.

• First, just look at support itemization. Mana regen is everywhere.
• Mana regen is based on your base mana regen. Remember when they buffed Lulu's base mana regen while nerfing other things about her?
  • So, they're going to nerf mages' mana regen to hell so they don't can't abuse support items for the mana regen, but give them bigger mana pools and better mana itemization
    • Note: They tried to do this with support items recently: 150% regen on FQC and Talisman -- but they haven't done a pass over mages to lower their regen and prevent them from abusing the support item yet, therefore League of Frost Queen's.
• They're going to keep void staff as %totalPen. It makes the AP vs AD choice really interesting:

AP means you'll deal more of an equal amount of damage to everyone, whereas AD means you need to choose between squashing squishies and tickling tanks, or being weaker vs squishies but killing tanks as fast as juggernauts -- thus, aoe magic damage champs will be stronger than aoe physical damage champs.

#Questions or Criticisms? Comment on this post and I'll do my best to respond.