Lack of Itemization

I've been playing this game for about 2 years as my best estimate without looking up when the Darius Patch dropped (I still remember his loading screen, then Draven's about a week or two after I started). I spent over a year in Bronze V with an extremely toxic and self centered attitude (though I was, somehow, never reported/banned/punished for it). Now that I've reformed my "toxic" ways, and am much more a team player, I figured it would be a good time to voice an opinion on something that has bothered me since I learned how to determine my own build, as opposed to just following the "recommended items" that used to be across the top of the shop menu: Lack of Itemization.

Itemization on a whole seems to be lacking, across the full range of roles and champions. Say you're playing a tank, What do you build? You have a total of roughly 8 items to choose from each game, 2-3 for armor, 2-3 for MR, and 2-3 for health (between 6 and 9 options) that are truly acceptable items for a tank. Sure, there's and , but realistically, those are not tank items.

Lets say you're playing an ADC Marksman, common ADC Marksman builds are either full glass cannon, or have 1 defensive item to deal with the main damage threat on the enemy team. Occasionally you'll find a Marksman that has 2 defensive items, but that's usually only if they're someone like Vayne that doesn't need the full 5-6 damage items to be a hyper carry, and usually only when their team isn't winning flat-out (somewhat rare to see 2 defensive items on a marksman). All that being said, Marksman usually have a build that looks like this: Lifesteal Item, Attack Speed Item, Armor Pen Item, Damage Item, Damage Item, Boots (potentially if the game goes long enough).

There are only really 2 3 lifesteal items that benefit Marksmen, one of which () being a bit of a niche pick that works best on Marksmen like Ezreal, who uses his skills for a good amount of the damage he puts out, and uses them frequently.

There are only 4 Armor Penetration Items in the game, one of which isn't even a "final" tier item. So you only really have 3; of which being the most common. I know that has made somewhat of an appearance lately on some Marksmen, but that's still only two items to choose from.

As for AD items there are a plethora to choose from, but only a few that offer the AD required in order to get the damage output a Marksman needs to be a real benefit to his team (maybe 3-4).

What about Attack Speed? There are really 2 viable options for attack speed, and . If you have innate waveclear in your kit, feel free to pick up the , otherwise, you should stick to .

Considering the build path options for Marksman somewhat depend on what you're already building, this limits Marksman to 2-3 (maybe 4) viable builds, which makes the game a little stale. I understand that, even if we had 50 viable options for each of these item-lines, only an iota of those would become known as the "strongest" and we'd still be left with a fraction of the possible builds actually seeing use. But I feel like there would be more variety than there is currently in the game.

This isn't just a problem for Marksman though, every role has this issue. Mages have roughly the same amount of options to them, Junglers have the same deficit of option available, bruisers (who probably have the best potential itemage) have this issue. Even Supports, the champions that work best with no items, have this issue.

Now that I've told you the issue with item choices, I'd like to say that the items we have are fine, they work, the game goes on, and we have awesome LCS matches to watch. I do however, feel like more options in itemization would benefit the game greatly. It could even open up potential for bringing lesser played champions into the foreground and let them see new play.

TL;DR Just my thoughts, I don't feel like there are enough item choices in the game right now.

What do you all think?