Why I miss Atma's and SOTD

Yeah, I get it, both of these items were traps on a lot of champs. There were instances where they were genuinely good though, and they did things no other items did. Now that they're gone they leave behind a niche unfilled.

Atma's was a good way for champs like garen and GP to build tanky and still provide some threat. Now that it's gone there's literally no way to itemize for AD and armor at the same time.

I personally thought SotD was actually a really good design. It had some obvious high moments attached, and seeing somebody just blow up in three hits from an ulting Twitch was obviously plenty of fun. More to the point, SotD had actual tradeoffs unlike many other items. Compare it to DFG, for example. Someone using DFG pays no real price for using the active and failing to kill their target. The items still gives plenty of great stats and you're only marginally worse off with a cooling down dfg than you would be with a deathcap.

Someone using SotD had to make an actual decision: is it worth the risk that I'll be considerably weaker for some time if I don't get the kill? Compare that to shiv, which adds to your burst while having really short windows of relative weakness, all while giving waveclear and a respectable boost to dps. You don't have to make any decisions or take any risk to use it, and you don't even pay much of a price in dps compared to phantom dancer. The biggest weakness of shiv is its so-so build path.

I really hope both of these items return in some form as was hinted in the patch notes.