Reflecting on my first few games of LoL and how I thought the game was totally different than it is

It was the end of Season 5, I think Illaoi had just come out (though I had no idea) and I wondered what those cool blue tentacles were from. For sure it was a guy champion... I picked jinx and went top lane. I'll put a skill point in this ability (E chompers) because it looks cool. (uses E) That is a cool ability! I'm not sure what it does but maybe the explosions at the end do a lot of damage? Hey there's the enemy bot (B-lines to attack them) (throws chompers completely ineffectively) (ignores all cs because what does that matter?) I then put a point into all the other abilities as I leveled up. Okay, level 4 now. I really want to see how strong I can make this E ability... I bet the explosions get huge or they do a ton of damage. Level 2 chompers! Hmm.. kind of the same. Whatever, I'm just going to keep maxing it because I don't have time to read and everything is really colorful. (Gets to level 4 chompers) (gets repeat killed by enemy illaoi bot). Man this game is fun! But this champion seems weak I'm gonna try a different one.

This memory just popped into my head and it reminded me how different my expectations were from the reality of the game. I had thought champion's skills would be similar to how they are in a game like Diablo 2. That you had a fixed number of skill points and you could only max one or two abilities at the cost of leaving your other abilities weaker. But LoL is a bit different. Instead, the champion's end game strength of their ability's is determined and one uses items to favor certain skills over another. This gives a lot more predictability to champions and makes them more limited in the roles they can play but also makes the champion more niche and defined gameplay-wise. If instead only 2-2.5 abilities could be maxed on a champion at level 18, and all their ability's had significant strength/utility at higher levels, champions would be much more versatile and it would mean you'd have to get a read on your opponent more to guess what skills they were maxing.

I find the idea fun to think about. It makes me wonder if they'll ever make a champion that doesn't have a cap on how much they can max an ability and has different end-game skill allocations than just 5 in Q, W, E and 3 in R.