The 'Fighter Problem' has got me thinking

To reiterate for those unfamiliar. The Fighter Problem, simply put, is that they're competing with Rangers, Tanks, AND Assassins in terms of both relevance and team role. If Rangers are the ranged sustain damage guys, then how do you make melee sustained damage guys desirable? If you just give them way more damage, then that tends to leave people feeling icky when their whole team gets aced by pre-nerfs Samurai Bob. How about making them more durable Assassins? Nope, dealing with someone who has high damage while being durable AND slippery is hell. Tanks with more damage? Then why would you want to use an actual Tank if a Fighter is just as durable while having similar CC and better damage?

Let's break things down a bit. What are the things champions do?

Attrition damage is pretty straight forward. It's typically augmented with auto-attack steroids of various kinds, but it can also be boosted by AoE damage over time effects. There are a few notable outliers like Ryze and Cass. You want to be careful about giving a champion high burst AND high attrition because it means they can erase someone, and then roll over the top of everyone else. Champions with that sort of play style (Kat, Akali, Samurai Bob, Riven) have typically run into balance issues over the years.

Burst damage is the counterpart to the above, the archetypical example involving the act of throwing fire and bears at people. As long as Tibbers is up Annie has a pretty solid source of attrition damage, but when you compare it to someone like late game Graves there's no contest. The purpose of burst is to either instantly erase a target completely (sup, Veigar) or to chunk several folks enough that your buddies can polish them off (hey Brand). Burst is really touchy since vanishing in a cloud of damage leaves people wondering what the hell just happened.

Utility is kind of a grab-bag of various effects that help your team or hinder your foes. Shields, heals, movespeed buffs, helpful steroids both offensive and defensive, and even nerfing the defense or offense of enemies. Utility acts as a force multiplier for your team, augmenting their effectiveness in combat. Ostensibly, all a Support is at heart is a Mage with damage dialed down and utility dialed up. Most of the time. Again, we have outliers like Orianna who boast fairly high utility AND damage (and control, we'll get there next).

Control comes in two main flavors, crowd control and area control. CC is your sundry list of effects that directly inhibit a champion's ability to function. Slow, silence, stun, root, so on and so forth. AC, on the other hand, creates an area of 'don't go here'. It can do this directly with effects like Anivia's wall or indirectly with effects like her Ult. A lot of Tanks (or tanky Fighters) have area control effects that are centered on them (Tree, Amumu, Sej, Shy, and many others).

Soak is simply how well a champion can eat damage and keep on ticking and can be divided into hard defense vs sustain. The former consists of all the various defensive steroids (including Tenacity) in the game while the latter covers self-heals, heals over time, and lifesteal/spellvamp. For the sake of simplicity, we'll include mana-sustain abilities (or manaless kits) under the general heading of sustain since both are meant to mitigate attrition.

Threat is how large of an area of influence a champion has, basically how large of an area a champion can threaten enemy champions within. Ranged auto-attacks are the more persistent form of threat, though ranged abilities are certainly worth taking into account as well. Some champions like Blitz and Thresh can zone out opponents with the mere threat of their reach so long as their respective Qs are off cooldown. Once the ability is whiffed, their threat drops considerably for a while. Typically combining high threat with high mobility leads to a great deal of frustration, more on that in a moment.

Mobility is a measure of how effectively a champion can move around the map both in and out of combat. Dashes, flashes, movespeed buffs, and teleports all fall under this category. We'll also include here abilities that allow a champion to avoid attacks, including spellshields, invisibility, and brief windows of invulnerability/untargetability. When a champion boasts high mobility in addition to high threat they can become incredibly oppressive for champions who are lacking in those aspects to deal with.

Okay, great, so what does that have to do with the Fighter Problem? Well, what do the other classes focus on, typically?

Mages are primarily (AoE)Burst and secondarily Control and Threat. Rangers are primarily Threat and secondarily Attrition and Mobility. Assassins are primarily Mobility and secondarily a strong mix of both Burst and Attrition. Supports are primarily Utility and secondarily Control and Threat Tanks are primarily Control and secondarily Soak and either Attrition or Burst damage depending on the Tank. A few Tanks sport both (Amumu and Sej) but they have really weak Soak to make up for it.

So what about Fighters? Well, how about we look at the three Fighters who are most successful right now (Lee, Vi, and Jman) and see what they're doing for their team.

All three of them have strong Attrition and Burst. They all provide varying degrees of Utility (resist shreds, friendly buffs, true sight). They all have amazing Control. They all have at least one means of Soaking damage (with both hard defense AND sustain on Lee). They all have incredible Mobility. The only thing they don't have is persistent long-range Threat, but because each of them have two two dashes they can easily reposition to place foes in their Threat range.

Fighters exist in a limbo between the other five classes. Either they need to be a jack-of-all-trades, or they end up as a melee hybrid of two (or more) of the other classes. They have no focus. So what does Riot need to do if they're ever going to fix the Fighter Problem? They need to nail down what a Fighter's three main contributions are to their team and (with obvious rule-breakers to keep things interesting) stick to those aspects.

Soak is important, I think. It's what a Fighter shares with Tanks and what distinguishes them from Assassins. Mobility is also important and Fighters somewhat lacking in the Mobility department (hi there Olaf) should be significantly compensated for it. That leaves one aspect left. And it should either be Attrition or Burst. When a Fighter boasts both you get horrifying Assassin/Tanks like the current three most popular Junglers.

So there you go. That's how we fix the Fighter problem.

Fighters get Burst OR Attrition, Soak, and Mobility. Leave the double-dipped damage to Assassins and the heavy Control to Tanks.

Fighters like Jman and Vi should probably be pushed in a more Tank-y direction since Control is so central to their kit (less Attrition, more Soak). Most other Fighters would require some minor tweaking and remaking. Lee should probably have all the Soak aspects of his W removed and the ability remade into a purely Assassin-type Mobility skill so he can keep making his #BigPlays without being a Mage/Support/Fighter/Assassin/Tank/Jungler who excels at everything.

There! Lots of rambling and a few real solutions offered. What do you guys think, what should the primary team role of Fighters be? Should they even have one, or should they waffle back and forth between Damage and Soak depending on the Fighter?

EDIT!

The question keeps coming up about the fact that 'Fighters' should probably be broken down into several different unique classes of champions since they're so different in terms of what they do. I've broken them down into several sets that I think cover all the bases pretty well.

Bruisers are super tanky, but a bit lacking in the hard CC department. Garen, Shy, Nasus, Mundo and friends go here. Darius would probably fit here, too, even though his defensive level isn't that great. Fighter/Tank would be a good way to describe them.

Peelers are the next step down. They've got much better CC than the above and often aren't quite as tanky. Jax, Panth, Wukong, Irelia, Aatrox, and a ton of other champions fit into this category. If 'Fighters' did get broken up, I would probably vote for this group keeping the name 'Fighter'. They are, I feel, the healthy form of 'jack of all trades'.

Strikers are more or less melee-Rangers who are trading out persistent long-range Threat for TONS OF ATTRITION DAMAGE. Yi, Try, Fiora, and friends go here. Most of these champions would be classified as Fighter/Assassins right now.

Skirmishers are champions who provide Assassin-level mobility with with solid damage and Soak. Some of them aren't that bad (Riven) while others are just a tad bit overloaded right now (hey there Jman). Jayce sorta fits in here as well, though I would probably peg him as a Ranger/Assassin/Fighter. It would probably be healthy for champions like Jman, Vi, Lee, and Jayce if they got their kits focused rather than just giving them all the things. As it happens, Nidalee sorta goes here as well, Trinity/Tanky Nid in particular.