People said it felt like a bad buy? What people? I've never heard anyone say FoN was bad. Pretty sure it was one of the most used items on tanks and sometimes even bruisers.

Yeah no one thought it was bad. It was one of the single most popular items for MR. Its only serious competition was Banshee's Veil which had the nasty problem of making tanks a less attractive target, and having mana on it which can in fact make it an awkward item to buy on a tank like shen.

I'm completely and utterly pissed off at Xypherous for thinking that ANY decent player would actually believe he was doing us a favor by removing it. They wanted to take movespeed away from tanks and to weaken MR even further by making the only powerful MR item in fact awkward to buy.

Basically the official reason for removing it was that it was an awkward buy, when the reality is that every other viable MR item can be awkward to buy and Force of Nature was the one MR item that was good on ALL tanks ALL the time. It was NEVER an awkward buy. It might not have been optimal in every situation, but EVERY tank could use it.

Here is the exact quote from Xypherous on the matter:


Force of Nature has been the go-to high MR item for tanks who want to counter magic damage. The item, however, is kind of confusing. Is it a movement speed option for fighters and tanks? Or is it meant to be a regeneration item in sieges? Force of Nature’s odd stat combination made it particularly difficult to make it feel like a quality purchase. One of its attributes was probably redundant or unnecessary on your character. -Xypherous

NONE of Force of Nature's attributes are EVER redundant on ANY tank. Every tank appreciates high mitigation, regeneration, and movespeed. The only problem you could EVER run into is needing movespeed on a tank and being up against an all AD team and it's not like with the S3 changes, that they've given us that option anyways. You'd probably STILL build FoN as your only MR item (to help stop their vestigal magic damage) and then stack armor and health and be done with it.

If the only way to make an item redundant is to put it into a situation where the enemy team has to be playing at 200 elo in order to make such terrible decisions as an all AD team with absolutely no magic damage then I say the item is probably a good purchase.

im not seeing any good reasons why it was removed. Only ever saw it on tanks mixed with warmogs which was to stronk. The survival of tanks was almost unparalleled. THE only reason i can see them getting rid of it was because tanks who had FoN were almost unkillable but im pretty sure thats the role of the tank?

Instead of giving some lame excuse that makes no sense, he could have just come out and said: "we think it's OP and its limiting the viability of other MR items."

There is no way you could argue with a straight face that FoN was ever considered a "bad buy."

Great MR options that were being built instead of FoN already by most players are Spirit Visage (which got a significant buff), Maw of Malmortius (for AD scaling champs), and Abyssal Scepter (for AP scaling champs).

The health regen component was moved onto Warmogs, which makes the health regen component much stronger than it was on FoN.

Also, there's the new upgrade for Aegis of the Legion which is a great mr item and gives a lot of mr to your team.

Even so they could have just nerfed it or removed some stats to make the others usable. MR and Movespeed are a wonderful combination.

While I agree that FoN wasn't the ONLY option available, it was the strongest on the largest number of champions. Other items were situationally better, but you could always count on FoN.

Don't fool yourself. Warmog's + Spirit Visage =/= Warmog's + Force of Nature. The former is strong, but the old combo was about 50% stronger by my estimation. It just doesn't compare.

Runic Bulwark is indeed the most effective item for MR but it has a few problems:
1. You can't buy negatron cloak to build it. This means you have to buy it in bits and pieces and you can't just buy a large amount of MR and sit on it.

2. You have to pay for a LOT of other stats. As a tank player I'm not opposed to more regeneration armor and health on an item, I'll always take more. The problem is if I need that Chunk of MR I have to pay over 3k gold to get it because of the other stats that come with it.

3. It's restrictive because of the Aura. As soon as more than one person buys it your team is wasting gold. If more than two are bought the waste of gold becomes exponentially worse. I keep seeing supports and tanks arguing over who gets to buy runic bulwark now. The tank needs the stats, but the item is great on supports and the Aura is their domain. If there is two tanky DPS a support and they all need it the REAL fight starts....

Runic Bulwark is a nice item, but it can't be the only high end MR item. It's just not meant to fulfill that role.

It's not supposed to be equal to. However, whenever you bought FoN, it was either for the MR or for the health regen passive, with the other stat being just a nice little bonus. The health regen passive in particular was not that useful unless you were also building Warmog's. Now, you can get that lovely health regen passive along with a massive amount of HP without having to pay extra/fill up two inventory slots, and you can do so even if you're against an essentially all-physical team.

-Most- players in season 2 were buying Abyssal on tanks that had any AP scaling instead of FoN because Abyssal is quite a bit cheaper and increases their damage output through both +AP and the mr shred aura (which also helps increase the damage of your APCs, many of which are too long range to really benefit from having their own Abyssal), and tanks often need that extra damage to help make themselves something that can't simply be ignored, especially tanks like Cho'gath who also have pretty decent AP scaling, and most of the true tanks do magic damage for what damage they actually deal (such as Leona, and Abyssal would help her passive do even more damage due to the aura).

Honestly, I loved FoN also, but I got to where I was pretty much never buying it except on Mundo because it was just too expensive, and Mundo was the only champ it truly synergized well with, where you were always wanting all the stats on it and making good use of all of them.

On most any other tank, you were wasting a lot of the item's stats. More often than not, you'd just buy the Negatron cloak and wait forever before upgrading it, which means you only really needed a Neg Cloak's worth of MR, making pretty much anything else that builds out of Neg Cloak and is significantly cheaper than FoN a better option.

this.