Any concerns about Rammus? The stat that he is designed around is the one you guys are making both more expensive and more counterable, not to mention that he wasn't doing all that well before S2 ended.

Survivability doesn't kill enemies though. The best you can achieve by stacking survivability is a stalemate, which is a good thing when you are behind but not useful when you are ahead. At some point you just get ignored and killed last.

Shields are already much more powerful in lane than in teamfights because damage comes in much slower. They deserve the power boost in order to stay relevant during teamfights.

You have 400 auto attack damage and you shoot Rammus. He loses one bar of his health. You don't need to know exactly how much armor he has, all you need to know is you'll be shooting at him for a while and you should probably shoot someone else who loses more bars of health.

And in the end, champions still have innate armor and magic resist which randomly gimps your damage for no clear reason. Some champions take inordinately low or high damage from your attacks regardless of items and pretty much regardless of champion type - for some reason tanks do not have scaling MR while squishy melee does. If anything, this is a readability problem.

Items are much less of a problem because you can always click on an enemy and observe the frozen heart in their inventory.

Nice theory, but the reality is that there is so much overlap between LoL champions that half of the roster is already outclassed and therefore not viable. By making champions more interchangeable, you only encourage players to grab the best and ignore everything else.

Sure, it would be ideal if champions had intrinsic strengths and weaknesses, just like an RPG should encourage varied spell use through good spell design and not by forcing it with immunities. HOWEVER we all know the majority of LoL champions do not have significant intrinsic strengths and weaknesses compared to a game like Dota. Therefore armor and magic resist are needed to prevent the overlap from getting worse and players from picking only the few best champions.

You can already see this, with AD casters displacing AP mids. When you can have an AD burst caster and an AP burst caster, you just pick the better one! It used to be the case that you needed one or the other, but now they are in direct competition and you just pick the better champion and ignore the other.

Not arcane.
Blunt, piercing, magic.

Damage oriented AP mids were weak and unviable compared to League of Bruisers but you needed one on your team. Now you don't. GG half of the AP roster.

Doesn't this fly in the face of saying that you want to make itemizing health early the ideal? So if your opponent builds a Brutalizer, you should build armor, since it takes less? Are you saying that it should be 'health>resists unless opponent is building penetrations?'
Sure, later on, you want to have the resists, but early on, aren't we in the same spot as Season 2, where you want to get a resistance item first, rather than Health? Certainly not as bad as it used to be (partly because almost every armor item gives health), but still similar.

One counterarguement would be that early on at least, Ignite is 10-15% of someone's health, effectively reducing someone's health pool if they build armor, since almost every lane grabs ignite. Everyone who builds a Brutalizer early, at least. I will accept this, and it's another reason that health is often stronger than resistances.

I don't have a problem with %pen, since it acts as a positive feedback loop for damage to eventually beat out tankiness and actually end the game, but flat pen generally just forces players to buy certain items -- for example, Bulwark counters 2 magic pen items, and the armor pen from Brutalizer. The fact that penetration started taking the center stage in Season 2, with Haunting Guise becoming a more acceptable item, was I think the reason we started seeing earlier Aegis' on teams, opting to rush it on the jungler rather than wait for the support to get the gold for it.

Couldn't we just get the old warmog's back? Reduce the base health it gives to begin with but increase the size of the stacks so that when it is stacked it is just as it was last season? From what I understand Warmog's is too powerful early game, pretty strong mid-game, and balanced late-game so can't it just work the way it used to or have it stack the same way Rod of Ages does?

Thornmail is supposed to greatly reduce the effects of lifesteal, but it doesn't really do that well, could the returned damage be changed to true damage that way the 35% magic damage returned isn't more like 15% magic damage returned? I understand that 35% damage returned as true damage is a bit much and it would make more sense to have it return 20 or 25% as true damage. Just an idea to make it more valuable as an item and a "truer" counter to lifesteal.

As an aside, how do you feel about atmas?

Yeah Xyph health sucks and making resists fairly useless entirely is good design 100%, you dont even have to think if you could benefit more from armor or MR and balance them with health, just stack exactly the amount of health you need..

Also **** tanks, make their design as simple as possible, but bruisers ftw, they deserve a buff.

I think warmogs is in a good place itself right now and doesn't need any changes. The problem seems to me that since resistances went up in cost so much on a lot of champs core defense items don't come into play until very late game. At the same time dps champs reach the same damage potential as S2 much earlier, so the most efficient way to defend is light resistance and mass health. You can turtle your way into late game with a health/ bruiser squad on SR now more effectively than getting resist to make fights more even. Then just out tank the other well balanced team into the dirt and push mid for the finish. Unless it's just bad early play most games I see are determined by who got the most benefit from being beefy in champ select. Simply put early game decisions about health or resist are gone and make the game less fun and interesting.

Not quite. Tank / CDR builds for example excel at dealing sustained damage through high base values on spells.

Tank / CDR Kha'zix deals roughly the same amount of damage as glass DPS Kha'zix through a fight - he does it in a less bursty fashion but base damages are multiplicative with survivability for higher overall damage output in the course of a fight.

Otherwise known as, this is how Singed kills you.

Yes and no. In lane, you have the option of ignoring a shield if necessary. In team fights, you typically don't, because there's a time pressure element involved.

While laning shields are great in soaking damage that comes in or that soaks damage from harass - you typically can't force targets to DPS a shield down in lane because backing away is a much stronger option.

Also, shields tend to already scale decently for team-fights with CDR and innate resistance gains. Resistances doesn't have to be the best form of mitigation for shields to stay relevant.

While your example rings true for autoattackers or characters who have quickly repeatable effects, it's not so obvious for characters who damage comes primarily from spells.

Scaling MR. No, agreed, scaling MR is rife with issues that we can hopefully address.

As to items being much less of a problem - one click is still one click too many.

AD Casters displace AP mids because the AD Caster versus AP mid matchup is so lopsided in favor of AD Casters because the AP caster has no strategic itemization path to build. They are forced to take true damage for the entire laning phase.

As for characters not having a strategic niche so that players will only play the best ones - sure, I agree with that. However, I view that as something we need to fix on a champion by champion basis as well. Nothing is perfect at the moment - but finding that strategic niche is incredibly important and something we need to add to characters that don't have it.

To me, that's actually incredibly exciting because then it'll be patently obvious that some things need to change to gain strategic variety where none exists. Something that I want to throw a lot of effort into so badly. :x

I just want to ask, but is there much point in tanky characters to build any type of MR other than merc treads, bulwark, and negatron cloaks? It seems that to build any item that gives a considerable amount of MR (for a tank) costs too much gold that could go into a better item - especially with how much MR negatrons give in the first place.

Maybe as a placebo you guys could lower the effectiveness of MR numerically and rise the amount gained from items to make players feel like they purchased something more worthwhile. Joking. kind of

Twin Shadows will add to your core initiation / Spirit Visage will greatly help if you have a strong self-heal (Hecarim or Alistar, for example) and Abyssal Sceptre always helps your team and yourself, depending on who you are.

Although, yeah - I do suspect that Negatron is in an odd spot - it feels like it should be cheaper and give less MR so that its upgrades could also be slightly cheaper or give more MR. The build path for the MR items providing most of the MR you need seems to be strangling how good the final MR item can be sometimes. Not sure.