Why is Riot So Afraid of "Melee Only" Items?

Nocturnes·Sep 18, 2013·3 votes·717 views

Put simply, a number of items (Blade of the Ruined King, Iceborn Gauntlet, the new Trinity Force, etc...) in the hands of attack damage carries are blatantly imbalanced. Why then is Riot so afraid of making these items, or at the very least, components of these items applicable only to melee champions? This seems like a much better solution than simply knee-jerk nerfing the item as a whole which in fact does little to affect the ranged carry but heavily affects all of the other classes that make use of the item.

6 Comments

ShinRaigekiSep 18, 20132 votes

Probably Hybrids like Jayce.

Could you imagine someone going melee mode just to use BORK's active then swap to ranged?

DesideriumSep 18, 20132 votes

To be fair, that's just part of the perk of being able to switch between Ranged and Melee. You have the best of both worlds if you are skillful enough to use them when they are best applicable.

SedirexSep 19, 20131 votes

Sounds like a good way to demonstrate skill. Not every champion needs to be easy to play.

A Dying DreamSep 18, 20131 votes

They never want to admit that hashinshin is right a lot of the time.

JackAquaSep 25, 20131 votes

They were testing a new Melee only item in PBE around the time of the Yi rework, but I haven't heard anything about it since. It gave mag res and crit chance.

NocturnesSep 28, 20131 votes

I've yet to understand as to why the Spellbreaker was so quickly silenced...