creating an environment where you can freely pick and choose whatever you want is bad in itself. For how much MTG you seem to base your design principles on you seem to forget the massive principle of "you can't always get what you want, but if you try some time you might find you get what you need." If only Red could get an amazing evasive beater to chip off your last bits of health.

If I could play Tau and just build my kroot 100% stally defense then that'd be perfect. But I can't, because then my opponents would need to powercreep themselves to defeat my min/maxed out army.

Right there is the issue. If I can min max then you have to powercreep to meet my min max, then there needs to be counters to min maxing, but the counters need to be so powerful that... bla bla it ends up with LW+QSS ranged carries.


Also, on topic to the thread, thornmail sucks. If it had an active that reduced my damage taken by 50% and reflected that damge for 4 seconds that would be ideal. Tons of counterplay in that I just built 2200 gold in 0 damage and you can ignore me to ignore the effect. The fact its passive is "always on" means it has to be weak enough that thornmail doesn't autowin lane, weak enough that you can still focus me, and weak enough that nobody bothers building it.

Also thornmail is another 2k gold defensive item. You can't just fill your inventory with mid game defensive items no matter how hard riot tries to make that a reality.

Considering that LW+QSS ranged carries aren't particularly good right now - I'm not actually sure what you're driving at here.

Red does have amazing evasive beaters to chip off your last bits of health - Hasty Flying Dragons. Thundermaw Hellkite? Bladetusk Boar?

They cost them appropriately which is the crux of the issue here.

BoRK right now is clearly not costed appropriately for the deficiencies it's trying to make up for - and that's entirely my bad.

I kinda forget how early on Irelia came cause she was put in a closet for like half a year.

give me one second though, I just wanted to say that.

I had my full AS, Full Crits MF build, and I couldn't deal with enemy Rammus, due to thorn mail, Just wasted myself faster than him. Had to let other people soften him up or LS on minions and take him out in chunks.

Oh, and my build was 2xIE, PD, SS and BotRK.

I feel the new examples for red (and by that I only mean the dragon, dat dragon) are more driven by red being bad for so long that MTG gave them some bonus bucks. They still hardly compare to the powercreep all (nonblack) colors have gotten in creatures.

BUT THEN AGAIN I hate MTG and their forced creature powercreep because they refuse to stop printing cheap easy counters to creatures which caused thrun the last troll which caused an artifact that can beat hexproof which will cause X and Y on the horizon and-

which is why I hate counters. People should be able to play whatever they want to play and counters should only be forced in heavy abuse situations (such as a tactical marine blob) and should not be used because eventually people are just going to naturally get enough armor or HP to make your item worthwhile in the end.

Which is the crux of the issue. Udyr with masteries and a spirit visage (200 HP) gets 2900 HP at level 18. That is not HP stacking. Yet BotRK becomes ideal against him, and so does LW because of his passive. So Udyr just being udyr gets hard countered by itemization and has no end game. What does Udyr do in response to that?

I really think BoRK was overnerf due to the fact bruiser and tanks will still a fair amount of armor, the lifesteal active is too weak if you take armor into account. Option A will still be abused because it also counters magic damage.

Hybrid tank/damage items sound dangerously like bruiser items to me. A lot of Jarvan/Vi/Xin/etc. with Sunfire, Locket, Maw, etc. already doing decent damage while being a pain in the ass to peel and kill. We don't need more of that.

There is also the reach that burn allows.