Item Concept: Spirit Crusher (Hybrid Shield Break/Penetration)

As strong as the shield meta is in professional play right now (Karma/Lulu/Ivern/Orianna constantly picked/banned in MSI), the natural response would be to just say nerf shields. I think the problem is that there aren't enough counterplay options against shields; the only way to counter shields right now are mostly to either pick/ban the shield champions away from your opponents or to focus on getting picks early against their team. Why is there no item designed to fight specifically against shields?

I know people will say something about hybrid, and I understand hybrid items are very difficult to balance between both power and gold efficiency, and not enough champions will get use out of all the stats to make it widely useful, but more hybrid itemization could be useful on champions like Ezreal and Kog'Maw that have combined damage ratios on their abilities. We could also see a resurgence of very uncommon picks, such as Kayle, which could potentially do an absolutely dirty amount of damage with the right itemization.

(The combine cost was picked as 98.9% gold efficiency for all stats minus the active effect)

Spirit Crusher Cost: 3800 Gold Haunting Guise (1500 Gold) + Serrated Dirk (1100 Gold) + 1200 Gold

250 Health 25 Attack Damage 25 Ability Power +20 Movement Speed Out-of-Combat +10 Lethality

Passive: Unique - Eyes of Pain: +15 Magic Penetration Active: Unique - Shield Break: For the next 6 seconds, you deal an additional 10% true damage against shielded targets that bypasses all shields.

As far as the active goes, there are a few different ways to combat shields. The way I have listed is to deal bonus true damage that bypasses shields and damage reduction. Another possible way is to deal bonus damage to shields, but that can be broken into a couple types:

• Bonus damage as % of damage dealt

• Bonus damage as % of shield value

Both of these types would need to be capped at the remaining shield value, so you can't do 15% bonus damage or 15% shield value when there's only 10 shield health remaining.

There's also a possible combination of the two, cut down so they don't overlap too hard (i.e. 5% of base damage as true damage shield bypass, plus 5% of remaining shield value against only the shield).