Riot: the synergy problem

The game is currently (and has been always) centered around champs with high synergy with the current item / mastery offers. The balance team is unable to solve this, since reducing the strength of a combination just strengthen or weaken others. This could only be fixed with a different design strategy: every champ should have an own limited item set. This doesn't mean you have to design items for each champ, but the game should offer around 150 items from which each champ can buy 30-40. Potions, wards should be available for everybody, but certain items should not. Also, the price of an item could be different for each champion depending on the champion design. E.g. the price of the critical strike for a high risk - high reward assassin could be cheap, but life steal is expensive or not available. The most important thing: the available items should offer meaningful choices. So champions can be buffed / nerfed individually without affecting other champions. You also don't need to overnerf certain champions because of synergy with certain items, killing all other playstyles. You could introduce this slowly, just modifying the cost for certain items for certain champions first.

Please don't forget: some choices are better than no choices, but many choices are worse than some choices.