Void Staff and Rabadon's Are Holding Every Other AP Item Back

If you are playing a champion that goes for a full AP build, so basically every AP mage and assassin, you MUST buy Void Staff and Rabadon's or only one of those 2 if you are planning on finishing the game pretty soon.

That kind of means that besides boots, you really only have 3 items to pick from. 2 if you're jungling and you have to pick up Luden's Echo.

Not only is that kind of boring, I also feel like both of these items are holding back other AP items because you always have to factor in their general damage enhancement.

With Rabadon's it's actually pretty simple. Because of the % bonus AP it gives, you always have to factor that in when balancing virtually every other AP item which means that those have to be made weaker in turn.

When it comes to Void Staff it gets more complicated. Most peple think that it is a anti-tank item first and foremost and while it is made to deal with those, this is not necessarily true. Because of the way diminising returns of resistances and magic pen works, you will apply flat pen after the % magic pen of Void Staff and maybe that one mastery. Which means that not only is it good for countering MR stacking but it's also really great at getting the MR value of squishies closer to 0 to burst them better and make those diminishing returns matter more. So basically, it's not like the "I have to deal with tanks"-item like its AD counterparts, the Last Whisper upgrades are but instead it's more like a "I want to amplify my damage overall"-item.

So with Rabadon's and Void Staff being such generic items and overall amplifying your damage by such high amounts, this just means that every other AP item has to be made weaker. We all watched it happen, the AP items you could buy gave less and less AP while their prices skyrocketed over the patches, which I partly blame on Rab and Void.

Not only makes it the early game of most full AP champions weaker, this also means that actual AP bruisers that only want 2 or 3 AP items and no Rab or Void are actually kind of struggling a bit and are kind of hard to balance. I mean just look at Ekko and Gragas, both of which have kits that are basically made for AP bruisers but they still have to resort to tank items because they are just flat out better, which I also partly blame on Rab and Void.

I really haven't thought of what could be done against this problem, maybe make Void Staff more like its AD counter parts to only penetrate bonus MR. On what could be done with Rab I'm clueless, just flat out removing it seems kind of drastic but something would have to be done about it either way.

Thoughts?