My whole point is that, although there are plenty of (expensive) items that give a decent amount of magic resist, there aren't ANY that give a WHOLE LOT of magic resist now that FoN is out. If you say to yourself, "I want to dedicate one item slot to my anti-AP defensive stats", you can't really; you're paying for lots of other stuff on the side, and getting less resists. This is in CONTRAST to the other defensive stats, armor and straight up health. You can buy straight armor (with damage reflection) in Thornmail, or straight health (with regen) in Warmog's. Banshee's Veil is about as close as you get to even MR+HP, and you're still paying for mana and the bubble.

If you want to add more than 50 MR, you have to build two extra items. Period.

What about Bulwark?

My mistake. I stand corrected, although that item is also the epitome of the basic complaint "MR is now spread to the four corners of the earth, dispersed among other stats in items, and hard to stack". One person on the team can build that to its best use, every other person on the team is "wasting" the gold they spent on aura if they are with the other Bulwark holder.

Oh, trust me - they totally aren't wasting if both really want the durability because the aura stacks for them. It just won't have the amazing cost-efficiency jump from your team not having the aura and now they do.

Yet there are ap champs that do sustained damage, like cassiopeia, or ryze.

I dont really get the change, its not like people were using all ad hamps when FoN was in the game, the meta hasnt changed.

I do miss FoN, and the lack of a really magic resist item makes the game weaker IMO, specially now that we have more viable magic pen items.

The post you quote talks about FoN being somehow really overpowered.

I may not be remembering right, but i dont remember many tournaments where FoN was built in even 10 of champs participating in it.

Infinity Edge is an overpowered and outrageous powerfull item, not FoN.

I'm fairly certain it was removed in tandem with the jungle changes and passive income increases.

I haven't seen FoN be to bad in Summoner's Rift, because most tanks would have around 2/3rds of the income of a typical AP carry, so defensive items being cheap isn't bad thing - because most defensive units have less farming prowess and kill capacities than AP or AD carries.

FoN is nightmarish in ARAM when you're a burst caster though, when everyone has the same cash flow it completely shuts down burst DPS to become nearly useless.



For those fo you comparing Magic Resistance to Armor I feel it's also important to note that Ability Damage scales linearly - the only thing that really increases it is Ability Power (Though CDR and magic penetration help). For auto-attack damage you have Attack Damage, Attack Speed, and Critical Strikes (Though CDR and armor penetration help as well).

Armor just has to put up with an exponentially increasing damage output, were Magic Resistance is just a linearly increasing one - so the %damage reduction armor offers should logically be higher than the % damage reduction magic resistance does.

And with Magic Resistance there are still plenty of options to pick it up, you've got at least 3 solid items that offer it if you want to go defense, physical, magical, or supportive with the item slot. Throw in Mercury Treads and Guardian Angel and you've got an end-game build with plenty of Magic Resistance. You're just forced to stack it the same way Burst Casters are forced to build their damage, with as much thought into countering them as they have to put in to countering you.

this is true, but they also added a lot of new powerfull damage items. they made survival more expensive, and damge less expensive (yes, i know they increased the price of t3 items like infinity edge, but overall, dollar for dollar, damage is cheeper in S3) Don't even get me started on all the DoTs going everywhere...

IMO the fights in S2 were over too quickly, and they seem to be even faster in S3, not a trend I'm a fan of. I know that this game tends to snowball for a team that is winning, but even of teams on equal footing, the fights are determined at the item shop, and then 3-5 seconds of actual confrontation. I'm not a fan of that sort of mechanic.

The game is not in a good position now. Double black cleaver dominating, burst champions doing insane damage without much counter. Too many armor pen and magic pen, too little defense.

I dont know why Riot wanted to follow the path of other MOBAs that are having less sucess than them, but burst fights are not fun IMO.

The problem was basically this: every tank buys 2 massive armor items, 1 Warmogs, 1 FoN, 1 massive Damage item, 1 boots, and proceeds to be completely unkillable (because 500 armor, 300 MR, and 4000 hp means that nobody can touch you) even while you put out decent dps.

For example, Singed, Rammus, Galio, and Mumu would shred towers, and nobody could do anything. Even non-tanks like Garen, Nasus, Darius, Irelia, and Riven would ignore damage while dealing lots in return.

Magic damage has been persistently nerfed (overall) in the past, with increasing CDs, lower ratios, lower base damage, and higher costs. Auto-attacks always scale at 1:1 (or sometimes 2-3:1), are free, and have as little as a 0.4 second CD. The shortest spell CDs in the game are Karth's Q at 0.6 seconds, and Kog'Maw's Ult at 0.25 seconds; but Kog ult's cost doubles every time it's cast more than once every few seconds (i.e. 2x mana, 3x mana, 4x mana, 5x mana ad infinitum, and Kog has very little mana).

By forcing you to buy more than one item to get "lots of MR", and you only have to buy 2 items to make up for the old FoN: 2 Bulwarks give both bearers 90 bonus MR, or one Bulwark & one SV will give a single champ 110 bonus MR. So you can very easily run around with 250 MR, no runes, masteries, or abilities. You just can't have that and 3000 hp, and 300 AR, and do 600-1200 DPS.