What we can learn from a cancelled Guinsoo's Rageblade rework
To those who don't remember, the tl;dr is that the proposed rework had no stat limit, however you only get stacks via auto attacks (?) and each stack independently falls off (you lose that individual stack based on when you got that stack itself, not all the stacks you have at once since the last time you auto attacked). This was before Guinsoo's Rage. What this means is that if, for example, you have 2.5 attack speed and each individual stack lasted 3 seconds, you can just maintain 7-8 Guinsoo's stacks at once as you gain a stack each time one falls off at that point.
Now what if I said this sort of mechanic fixes a lot of our current Guinsoo's problems while also giving it a great strategic niche? Obviously you need to fine tune a lot of numbers first, but let's suppose that we have a Guinsoo's Rageblade with independent stack falloff, grants less attack speed, and only gets Guinsoo's Rage at an arbitrarily medium to high amount of stacks.
In order to get to X stacks, you must have a certain auto attack speed. Going back to the 3 second duration I used in the example, if you need at least 6 Guinsoo's stacks in order to active Rage, you must have an Attack Speed of at least 2.0 Auto Attacks per second. Assuming our version of Guinsoo's does not have overinflated Attack Speed values, this necessitates that the champions that use Guinsoo's Rageblade are champions that invest into Guinsoo's Rageblade. No more Jax first item rushing Guinsoo's in lane and suddenly becoming untouchable; if you want to use Guinsoo's Rageblade to its maximum effectiveness you must dedicate your whole build, or at least a large and significant chunk of it, towards garnering the Attack Speed necessary to push you into that 6 stack range. With enough fine tuning, this can even solve the Bruiser Yi issue running around and return him to his squishier more offensive roots, all while maintaining the Hybrid itemization style that Guinsoo's allows into his kit.
Now here's the thing. It's not that having enough Attack Speed gives you Guinsoo's Rage, it's hitting a target that gets you your stacks. Even if you have 2.0 Attack Speed in our current example, you need to be auto attacking your target consistently without fail to hit Guinsoo's Rage. If there are significant breaks in your offensive patterns, like CC from the enemy team, or chickening out from enemy burst, you lose your potential Guinsoo's Rage. Not only do you have to build like a hyper carry to use Guinsoo's, you must play like one as well, maximizing the effective time you have in battle by avoiding enemy CC and Burst before you commit to the extended fight. Counterplay built into itemization.
And mind you, this doesn't really take away from its split pushing strength. I mean, yes you need to itemize more attack speed for the AOE effect, but you can still effectively get the high speed AOE wave clear that current Guinsoo's already gives. If it was an intended strength, well great we didn't just kill it.
Okay, what about the melee bias we should keep for the item? We could try lowering the time stacks last while proportionally dropping down how many stacks you need. For example, the current example is for a stack to last 3 seconds, and you need 6 stacks for Rage. Well, how about we make that Ranged, and Melees have 2 seconds to hit 4 stacks. This puts more pressure on the melee hyper carries like Yi to make sure their consistent DPS counts, while at the same time creating a distinct time frame difference between Ranged Champions and Melee Champions using this item.
I remember one of the biggest reasons why the rework got scrapped was because nobody understood what it was supposed to do (it was worded really badly). However, I do think if we combine that version of Guinsoo's Rageblade with our current version, we can create a much healthier version of this item we have today.
