Ok, but one could argue the very same for Health stacking early, especially with large health items like Warmongs. It counters %pen items, burst, and true damage, and the uncountered case is too much to allow. Of course, the same could be counted on for %pen items, except they only counter resists, which all got weaker.

Maybe the answer ISN'T nerfs this time, but rather buffs to the cost of resists? Nothing crazy, but maybe so that it is cost effective at 2500 HP over 3000 HP?

Or are you telling me that Health is OK to be powerful and lane warping, or is that next on the chopping block?

Warmog's Armor is not as powerful as most people make it out to be at the moment - However, the incentives to build it are there, because there is no readily apparent counter that your opponent can take.

Essentially, let's say I gave you two options:

Option A is generically strong and has no real weaknesses.

Option B is situationally strong and has a real weakness.

In general, players will tend to gravitate towards option A unless option B is so overwhelming powerful that it dwarfs option A's power. Part of this is the natural human tendency for risk aversion - part of it is because it you can't point out a situation where something is bad - you automatically gravitate towards that because there's nothing telling you 'no'.

We've seen this effect before on the more generalized fighters like Irelia. In order for a champion to be seriously considered versus Irelia - their strengths had to frequently be far more dominant than Irelia ever was to be considered "viable" - when you could just choose Irelia and have a safe time. In general, whenever we've done Option B without adding a real weakness to Option A - the results that came about are frequently more toxic or infuriating than Option A ever was.

For example, a lot of Riven's number tuning and damage was tuned to overcome Irelia's sustain strength - and making her all physical damage so that armor was an effective counter.

What this meant was that Riven was simply more toxic and frustrating to fight against than Irelia ever was - because in order for her to be played, she had to overwhelmingly destroy Irelia for people to justify picking her when she had clear counters.

very good explanation of what you have been trying to say in other threads
if you build thornmail/Randuins/Frozen heart to counter BotrK that counters health stacking which counters burst items... you dont have the burst items, you will buy pen, which leads back to health... etc...

This sounds almost like you're saying that someone should always build Frozen heart and Randuins because there will always be a BORK or more in the game. That in itself is removing item build choice.

Right - I'm saying that when the item is so strong that it necessitates a counter-item or you simply lose - that item is suffocating item choice.

However, the thing it was built to counter was suffocating gameplay in a different way - in that you tend to always gravitate towards options with no counters available rather than more powerful options that could be countered. Risk aversion/mitigation is simply that strong of a desire.

It's two things: A Health-Stack item counter needs to exist and it needs to be a viable choice - and additionally, when your opponent builds the health-stack item counter - it also needs to be a viable choice to make some other option to not directly counter it.

Basically if A > B and C > B, there needs to be some option D that D < B but still equal to C.

Maybe I'm translating this wrong, but is the Option A in this scenario Health? and Option B being the new BORK? If so, wouldn't it make sense to add a weakness to Option A(in this case health, in your example Irelia), instead of what you did by tuning Option B (in this case BORK, in your example Riven) to be competive to Option A?

Honestly, if the above is translated correctly, doesn't that imply that Health as a stat is too good, in one way or another? That WAS the reason that HoG was removed, right? There was not a single champion in the game that would not want it?

Option A in this scenario is Health. Option B in this scenario is Armor / Resistances.

We added a weakness to Option A - Health by introducing BoRK because Option B - Armor has a weakness in Armor Pen.

This is why there needs to be a counter to health directly - because if you nerf health - all you do is force the issue - now armor is much much more overpowered than Health ever is / was and that's why you'd build it.

Essentially for the Irelia analogy - instead of making Riven (Option B) overpowered in a lot of ways - we should've given Irelia a real weakness so that Riven didn't have to be so overpowered to exist in the same environment as Irelia.

I see your point, as lately every lane/role (even support) seems to build Blade of Ruined King. My concern was mainly that it brought many older champions that had been far less used (AD Irelia, Sion, Fiora just to name a few.), which was rather refreshing in the new meta.

Thank you for the detailed explanation Xypherous.

In a lot of ways, DoTA essentially forces the issue. You cannot realistically build defenses in DoTA without building offense - minus INT based heroes, who admittedly kind of suffer from this.

However, both the Agility and Strength routes force a lot of defenses onto the character. With enough Str or Agility - your survivability goes quite high. In many respects, melee carries in DoTA function very similarly to bruisers in our game - the ability to tank a large portion of the team while doing respectable damage.

In the AP/AD scaling case that we have - we have completely separate defensive/offensive itemization. In many ways - this does present a lot of new problems as you've pointed out - but in many ways, it also allows us to make true glass cannon characters without simply making them feel like glass cannons because everything else's baseline damage is so high.