Riot's philosophies on champion design are getting stale

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they're bad, and I understand why they're doing things the way they do. If the only difference between two bruisers is how they deal their damage and various CC numbers, that adds some consistency to the game. IE a lot of the things you have to watch out for against a Garen when toplane translate well into a matchup against a Riven. It makes sense from a design perspective to not shake things up too drastically in a game with this many characters.

However, I'm finding it hard to log in and play a game. It's felt like a chore for the past few months. It feels like my selection of champions is a lot more limited than it appears. I could pick Nautilus, Maokai, Malphite, Amumu, Sejuani, or Zac, go jungle, and get a very similar experience. Sure, there are minor differences that make one preferable over another, or, depending on the patch, straight-up better than the others, but that doesn't really feel like a big change to gameplay. They all fill a similar role.

There are some champions that do stand out as unique, though. Singed is a pretty good example of a champion that actually feels different to play from your standard AP-offtank. Singed can't really fight people head-on like most melee champions do. Singed is going to farm up, go back, farm up, proxy some waves, and through avoiding as much interaction with his opponent as possible, secure an advantage over them toward the mid and lategame. Even when he gets there, he still feels unique because he's so good at just running away, and that's what his whole design is based around. He's not a fighter, and he's unique.

That's all I want, some more unique playstyles, and not just champions with damage gated behind "minigames". League characters don't exist in a vacuum.