Compendium of Balance Changes & Ideas. VOL.1
This is the first of several changes I have in mind for League of Legends to address issues that cause certain champions to be overtuned or otherwise simply too powerful when compared to other champions. I'm well aware that Riot likes to play favorites with champions, but nevertheless I wish to communicate what I think would be good changes that would also set the groundwork that would prevent future balance issues; assuming of course the balance team sticks to the ideas I intend.
This is the first of what I believe will end up being three posts about game, item, and champion balance. In this post I'm going to talk about Items; or to be more precise "locking items behind a gate of sorts that can only be opened through acts of objective or team-based activities, for competitive play". Lets get started shall we?
Remember Feral Fire or this  item? This item gives jungler some proverbial teeth and claws allowing them to be effective damage dealers. The problem is it can make a certain few, bad apples?, tremendously powerful and gets people raging that the item is op and must nerfed or deleted. This item, like the other items I'll talk about, has such a profoundly good or bad impact that just removing it will cause even more problems than what it will solve.
My proposal is simple in essence but can be a bit complex to implement: A new currency alongside gold is introduced called _**Medallions of Conquest**_. Getting Medallions of Conquest (we'll call them MoCs for short) is pretty simple; taking part in objective based play or assisting or killing enemy players will net you a single MoC. **stealing** (as in taking the last-hit of minion and having done less than 10% of its hp in damage) blue buff or red buff will also award you with a MoC. For supports, aside from assists, destroying 5 enemy wards will net you 1 MoC.
The following items would require Medallions of Conquest to buy them from the shop: , , (///), , , , and ; with Last whisper and Void staff only costing two MOC but the other items costing 5 MoC to obtain. in normal queue, for the new players mostly, MoC would be disabled by default but could be enabled in a custom game. If a player enters any type of draft mode, MoC is enabled.
The idea behind this is to lock big powerful items behind additional requirements, like playing to win not just farming away in either the jungle (yes not gonna work anymore), or in lane. Those who do well and play together as a team get these big flashy items, those who are uncooperative don't get these items as much. Its not enabled for new players, because new players have enough to learn about without having to worry about something high-end like Medallions of Conquest. The reason Void Staff and Last Whisper are only two is because they can effectively counteract any heavy resistance completely and if any old player can pick one up, it render tanks somewhat moot because someone could go 0/10/0 and still do alot of damage because these items are so potent; they are not as game changing as the 5 cost items, which is why they're cheaper.
Items like especially Infinity Edge are so strong that we could say it needs to be nerfed, but is so core to AD carrys that nerfing it would be crippling to all AD carrys. This idea is a middle ground that prevents certain champions from hitting a crazy damage spikes with "just a matter of time" and instead forces the players using said champions to be an asset for their team instead of just farming for that 1 item.
In the future if the balance team wants to add a big fun and powerful to the item pool they can add a requirement of MoCs to prevent the item from being game-breaking.
Thoughts? Comments?
I got atleast 2 more posts on the way so, expect more :)
