All hail Leviathan, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the Botrk

Greetings summoners,

Lately there have been quite a few threads about tanks and whether or not they are underpowered. I'm not here to argue one way or another, I'm just here to suggest an itemization change that might help tanks vs the current shredding options. I've heard a few arguments for a "tank deathcap" but most of them seem to focus on the spirit of the elder lizard that appeared at the end of season 4 and added 25% to bonus health. This item wouldn,t really solve any issues since Botrk would be doing extra damage to you if you bought it, aside from this it has the potential to make health stackers or champions that scale with health into nightmares to deal with. Here is my solution, bring back a modified version of the old item Leviathan. For those unfamiliar with the item, leviathan was an item that was a stacking item similar to Sword of the occult and majais soulstealer, but for tanks, which was removed in V1.0.0.152. It used to cost 1275 gold and granted the following stats:

180 health Unique: Your champion gains 32 health per stack, receiving 2 stacks for a kill and 1 stack for an assist. This effect can stack 20 times; you lose a third of your stacks if you die. At 20 stacks, your champion takes 15% less damage.

The reason for the item being removed was in part because the stacking mechanic didn't make sense for tanks, and caused players to act in counterproductive ways. Seeming to favor bruisers more than tanks. My suggestion for the reworked version of the item is as follows:

Builds from: + + + 800 gold

+200 Health +100% health regen +50% mana regen -10% cool down redux

Unique - Tenacity: The duration of stuns, slows, taunts, fears, silences, blinds, polymorphs, and immobilizes are reduced by 35%. Unique passive: 5% damage redution after resistances from all sources excluding true damage, 1% additional damage reduction, and 25 health per stack, gain 1 stack per minute up to a max of 10 stacks.(+10% additional damage reduction and 300 additional health)

Compared to 100 AR/MR, this 15% might not seem like a lot, but the damage reduction has a few advantages that AR and MR lack.

1. Does not suffer from the same diminishing returns that AR/MR, e.g. 100 AR/MR = 50% redux, while 200 AR/MR = 67% redux, while the % from this item is constant regardless of other resistances.
2. Is not affected by penetration or resistance shred. LW, VS, abyssal, BC, wits end, and champion abilities will all have no effect on the % amount reduced by this item, however the more armor that is bypassed the more damage will be blocked by the item.
3. Defense against mixed damage. The damage reduction vs all sources will provide some protection vs champions who have the potential to deal substantial magic and physical damage e.x. Kog'Maw.

On top of this the passive acts like a health multiplier without the need to balance for scaling, effectively giving 575 health on its own when fully stacked, but only 500 for abilities that scale off of health. The 10% cool down reduction and mana regen help tanks use damage mitigation and cc spells more often. The health and health regen allow for staying in combat longer. The tenacity offers tanks more itemization options in lane, to buy either Ninja Tabi for additional damage mitigation, boots of swiftness for help sticking on enemies, Mobility boots for roaming potential, or sorc/zerkers/lucidity to help win trades.

The stacking over time nature of this item and the fact that it scales better with base defense stats make it a good tank item, but an unattractive item for bruiser builds, since buying this on a bruiser would mean sacrificing early damage in order to allow it time to stack. Not an issue for many tanks who rely on high base damage rather than scaling to trade effectively in lane. Enemies who buy BotrK will still have part of the damage from it, but the % reduction would bring the damage down on the item even after penetration items.

Edit: turns out ninja tabi does not reduce on hit effects, updated to reflect this