@Ghostcrawler "Melee vs. Melee isn't that well explored or particularly interesting"--Xypherous
Unless the fundamental expectations for what people want out of a melee champion change - I somehow doubt it. Part of this problem is that 'Glass Melee' is an archetype that people expect tremendous payoff for - but currently, there isn't a good way to translate personal skill into better melee combat ability.
You can certainly make complex judgment calls and the like - but on the whole, Melee inputs aren't complex enough and melee combat at its core is fairly uninteresting and thus something has to change fundamentally on what melee combat means before even talking about melee vs. range. Melee vs. Melee isn't that well explored or particularly interesting - for example.
For example, you can imagine a world in which every Melee character had some kind of roll innate basic ability that was slow but could deflect damage. That's the kind of fundamental mechanical basic you would need on Melee in order to have the proper inputs to justify what people expect out of the fantasy of Glass Melee.
Here is an idea to make melee vs melee combat more interesting:
An melee only item that grants a very small (less than 45 even at max, scales with levels) shield on hit that disappears if you have not done damage with an auto attack in the last 4 seconds.
The shield increases in magnitude each time it is refreshed by striking a single target up to a cap (around double or so); perhaps it would take as many as 5 or 6 auto attacks against the same guy to reach that value. If you hit something else the shield defaults back to its base value.
A fight between two melee champions would very much entail who can keep their shield at stacked levels while denying the opponent his stacks.
Since the shields of both champions would deplete if you merely moved out of attack range for 4 seconds, you would want to stay inside of attack range but find some other way to keep your opponent from auto attacking for 4 seconds. That would mean juking in the brush or using some kind of disable or dash in a clever way, or cycle aggro with a buddy. Usually your reward for that play would only be a small chunk of health saved or damage dealt, but with this item the reward is much larger.
In other words, it is a way for melee champions to engage in combat with eachother in such a way that the result isn't preordained based off of who has higher numbers. What this item does is takes the relatively small impact that player skill has in melee combat, and magnifies it.
An item like this one alone would not be sufficient for making 1v1 melee combat a motivating experience, but 2v2 and small skirmishes do become far more enriched. It becomes a game of cycling aggro and keeping track of who has how many stacks on their shield, and what cooldowns can be used to deny stacks and who can refresh their stacks faster via attack speed steroids and such. It could be a very tangled web of conditions and decisions, and that is the depth you are looking for.
Making melee vs melee combat in a 1v1 circumstance have depth isn't a prerequisite to making melee vs melee combat in skirmishes interesting and creating depth in the choices that melee champion make in team fights, as this suggestion shows it is possible to implement a change that creates a number of decision points that scales with the number of people in the fight.
In fact, I don't even think they are strongly related, so don't let one hold you up from fixing the other.
