Leagues drain tank meta along with shitty tank items makes me sad

It makes me too annoyed you can't do cool interesting builds like cinderhulk into deadmans rush on a jungler. Why? Because it doesn't deal enough damage and it falls off incredibly fast. But how does it fall off? It gives a good amount of health, armor and a cool movement speed effect with a slow on your auto along with damage depending on stacks! Sounds like a good item to me!

Yeah, it would be a great item if the majority of champions in everygame weren't all drain tanks and everyone is healing for 400-500 such as nami's heal due to athenes and everything has super low cooldowns. Maybe it'd be fine if 1 of these things were adjusted, such as conqueror not healing or rev hunter being reworked or adjusted so the only source of healing would be a champs kit, supports, and items that you have to actually invest gold in to get sustain.

Due to this, you are forced to build bramble vest, and either keep it the whole game or maybe even finish it into a thornmail a bit earlier. This is why tank itemization sucks. The only things that tanks build besides this are other damage items like sunfire/abby mask, only if they are very good at abusing it or need it to function.

But that's the thing. The only viable thing in this game seems to be damage or a healing reduction. Want to buy a randuins? Ok, cool. But what good does it do if too much armor doesn't do a whole ln terms of damage reduction (if you were to buy randuins + thornmail) and what does randuins do if you buy it as your only armor item? The enemy is just going to attack you and kill you with huge crits regardless and probably life steal off you. If anything, you are useful to them. Living longer doesn't do anything if you don't deal damage.

I was theory crafting a Sett jungle build such as just going pure tank, with cinderhulk, deadmans, and either spirit visage or a titanic after. Rushing the deadmans is cool and all, it makes him feel better to get to opponents. But so what? What good is going to the opponent if it doesn't deal enough damage and they just heal off you because you didn't buy an attack damage/health hybrid item such as cleaver/titanic/steraks/trinity force. All these items are bruiser popular items that is literally the only build you see on the majority of melee champions. Why? Because it's hard to go wrong with it and it deals damage and gives you health and other useful things like CDR or a huge shield to tank even more while dealing tons of damage. So pretty much the deadmans was a waste of gold you are better just going thornmail or just camping bramble the whole game because everygame is the same thing.

I even had a Sejuani game where the enemy ADC killed themselves attacking me due not having any life steal, not even bloodline, and my damage with my W. Does it feel cool and exicting? No, it feels questionable. I wish when I played Sejuani, I could get in there, survive, get E stacks on people to CC them, disrupt. But instead, when you play a tank, you are literally just a big ball that dashes in, tries to do something, and applies grevious wounds to anyone focusing you while dealing damage. That's all. If you don't build thornmail, you don't deal any damage to people, and they heal off you. That is poor gameplay.

I miss looking at the enemy team and thinking of a build to beat them. I miss having that edge over a superior build but instead we have obviously overtuned items or item combos overshadowing other items. Back in the day, if you saw olaf, you knew he could heal if low, but it was managable because if you bursted him or kited him, it'd be fine. But now we have 15% healing olaf with conq that gives him stat check AD and you can't kill him with his W. So he just becomes some unkillable thing that you have to build grevious and even then, is hard to burst down due to how much healing is in the game. If you aren't playing a champion that has a ton of healing, then the enemy team has an advantage. Why? Because then they can focus on their item spikes instead of investing 800-1000 gold in an item that they will just carry around for the rest of the game.

Triumpth I don't view as a problematic rune, as you have to actually get the kill for you to sustain, and there is a delay. So in essence it doesn't actually impact a 1v1 but can have huge play making potential in a skirmish or a teamfight. I think that's cool and exciting and not a problem on it's own and helps champions who don't have the means to life steal/drain tank back to a decent sized hp during or between fights.

However, I believe there is a balance and gameplay issue when there is a huge sustain source from runes (conq and rev hunter, mostly conq) that happens while you fight someone and is just an option before the game start. Oh look, an irelia. She's a pretty cool champ. But then we have to take into conqueror changes her as a champion completly and what her limits are and we have to play around a rune, not just the champ. I miss when runes were just something that complemented what a champion was, not define what the champion is capable of.

So because Irelia already has heals in her kit, and has conq, you are forced to build healing reduction. If you don't you just lose. No building items like frozen heart for CDR/mana, because who has mana issues now a days? Mana costs are a thing of the past. We have lux whos got her mana costs lowered so much that she doesn't have to build any mana regen anymore. That 10 armor it gets is totally going to make people invest that much gold into an item that gives CDR/mana/armor when you could have bought a bramble vest and been infinitely more useful and/or damage/health items to actually kill stuff. We have champions like Garen who don't even have mana going trinity force despite not having mana. Why? Because it's almost as if mana isn't even factored in the balance of the item and it's so trivial of a stat (it doesnt matter) that you don't look at the mana of trinity force, but what else it does. Doesn't that just raise a red flag when stuff like that is happening? Sorry, I'm going off topic a bit, but it's just there are so many problems with this game imo.

I got worried when in one of the "ask riots" or whatever they are called... When Riot was asked what they think of conqueror, they said they think that healing up during fights is cool and allows for more extended plays, such as being able to push a tower due to having higher hp from conq during the fight when if you didn't have conq, you'd have to back. This worried me, because we already have a rune for that since forever ago, and that's triumpth (12% of your missing HP is healed).

So when we start putting in things such as conq, which now heals 15% of damage dealt, along with rev hunter, you get insane levels of healing. Conqueror healing that much at level 1 allows you to make risky plays or just win a lot of duels you otherwise wouldn't and allows you to start stacking up rev hunter easier and earlier than you would otherwise. This is kinda what I mean by conqueror is the main culprit here. It's such a strong rune that even if you were to get rid of the healing or the AD, it'd still be picked up by people. That's how good of a rune it is on specific champions or even on champions on general. It is hard to go wrong with it. When in doubt, just pick Conqueror.

The true damage imo was never an issue with conq. We have people everyday saying tanks are dead because of conqueror because of the true damage but that wasn't true at all. The less armor a target has, the less the true damage matters. People just tend to exaggerate just how strong/effective something is if it has a big number or true damage in it. For example on Vi, conqueror wasn't that good before because of the true damage being part of the runes power budget. Why? Because she arleady armor shreded. If you ever looked at the stats of how much damage conqueror did via true damage, I think you'd be surprised no matter what champ you played. Even if a tank had 100 armor/mr at say 10 mins in the game, which is 50% damage reduction, and took a 100 damage hit, that would hit 50 damage. however, with conq, that hit would deal 54 damage. Conqs true damage wasn't just 100 damage + 8% (or whatever it was) of the damage into true damage, it was turn 8% of the damage into true damage of the original hit. So in reality, this was not the issue.

The issue was the healing. So many times I'd pick Sejuani, get the edge on even a kayn jungle, get him close to dying... about to kill him!!! But what happens? Oh, he got conqueror and all the sudden is healing out my damage and I just die. I have to wait until I do my cinderhulk/thornmail rush build because you are forced to do that as a tank if you ever want to 1v1 someone with conqueror. And yes, believe it or not, a lot of tanks actually deal a lot of damage, but if they don't deal enough early (such as ornn), they can't actually do anything to the champion without healing reduction.

The new 15% healing from conq on melee champions pretty much means new conq heals for more damage until you get around 90+ armor. That means during the most important parts of the game, where a lot of games are decided, they are healing more than they used to. Why do you think olaf suddenly became meta this pre-season? Was it because no one knew how strong he was? No! He was already being picked, but wasn't really ban worthy. However, due to this huge healing increase, he has become one of the strongest duelers in the game.

So... I think I've rambled on for too long. I don't think rev hunter is that big of an issue, as you have to get kills to make it good/decent. I also don't think triumpth is an issue. I do, however, think conqeurors healing is the most toxic thing about it.

My suggestion is to simply make the healing scale, from something like 5-15%, based on level. This also doesn't need to be level 18... It can even be to level 13-16... I just don't think it should be a 15% flat regardless of level. That is just insane. Ranged users can get a similar treatment with 3-8% per level or something like that.

So yeah. I hope if you read this you enjoyed my insight on my thoughts on the game and itemization. I just truly wish you didn't have to build healing reduction everygame and could go for more interesting tank items instead of only having thornmail for armor. Going for thornmail + other armor items tend to be a huge waste of gold as stacking armor is just a garbage tactic as it scales poorly and leaves you vulnerable.