A few thoughts on how to help tanks

At the moment League of Legends feels like such a burst-oriented game. Sustain champions are unviable because of grevious wounds, tanks have their resistance shred by armor pen and magic pen. Furthermore, Champions like completely burst tanks as if their resistance are butter. Guest starring : (VOID STAFF TOO COULDN'T FIND THE ICON).

I'll admit this much, I feel like Riot has their heart in the right place, but no matter how I see it Riot often have a very..roundabout way of really balancing out champions. In my opinion the reworks for champions Sejuani and Maokai were successful because the DIRECT issues concerning those champions were touched, and when Maokai reigned supreme he was put in his place. This was a much better approach to balancing tanks in general.

Despite a lack of diversity in season 4, there were still tanks and bruisers played top lane. But nowadays champions like Gnar & Lissandra are some of the most common picks, and Gnar mostly because of his incredible damage despite building one damage item.

I've composed a list of problems I see with preseason 5 at the moment.

1: Hp regen is an unviable stat for tanks, there's simply no use in building it. Only the oddball champion like Mundo actually benefits from building a warmogs, and even at that, there's no point since bork champions will have a field day tearing you to pieces. I think a good fix to this would be to have items like locket give higher hp regen amounts, so that a few tanky hp regen items would give you viable sustain yet taking only one item would't do much to help you if you were a carry.

2: The hp regen on the jungle items is alright, but trying to find a middle ground between sustaining based on damage dealt, and having a static sustain option is better. Season 4 actually had more junglers being chosen, the occassional ap champion here and there, even tanks. Aside from Sejuani who is quite strong right now tanks generally aren't touched in the jungle, It's just bruisers and autoattackers. Maybe changing the jungle item to 10+(1*Level) would help smooth out early to late game power curves.

3: Dragon buff, aside from movement speed doesn't really benefit Tanks that much, but maybe changing one dragon buff to "+5% bonus armor & magic resis" would help them along those lines.

4: Modernized tanks like Maokai and Sejuani are quite strong right now and don't really need many changes. But giving a bit of love to some of the kits of the older champions might help. Champions like Malphite, Galio, Rammus (who's a little hard to balance after his sudden surge not too long ago), Cho'Gath and Nautilus don't need many changes to their kits. But a few slightly lower cooldowns or mana resource buffs could really help them feel in line.

5: Penetration items. These dont need large changes, but 300 armor feels no different to 200 when the enemy adc buys a last whisper. I'd say, tone it down just a tad. Masteries do little to help alleviate this problem because -5 damage per autoattack really makes no difference when an adc is smacking you for 200-500 damage per autoattack. Maybe having a % reduction such as 5% would help this mastery scale slightly better into the lategame, but have it deep the skill tree so carry champions can't go 21/9 with it.

To close off, I don't think that tanks need to 100-0 a carry in order to be viable. Not at all, but they do need to lay the groundwork for the rest of their teams to fight well. Right now, that's not the case, there's not much reason to pick them since they often have "void" time when they can't spam their abilities. Tanks are dependent on this and cannot keep up with all the 3-5 second cooldown carries that endless spam abilities.

Also, pls lower the damage on Nautilus W and change it to a bonus on hit for a period of time, or simply give it to him as a flat bonus like Cho'Gath. That shield will pop in one spell and render his main damage source useless. This is like, my first post on the forums. totally nervous.

tl;dr READ IT.