The new item list is full of many ups and downs. The imporvement to many items, like black cleaver, and the addition to support items, like the new ward items, will help players in the roll their character fits. However, the improvements and changes seem to assist only carries (AD or AP), and support. What about the tanks?

The first downside to this change has been to the removal of many of the tank items. The addition of the Runic Bulwark is a possitive, but this does not make up for many of the major decreases to the ability to build a tank. By removing items like Force of Nature and the changes to Warmogs, tanks are now limited greatly on what they can build to counter the improvements to the carries. By limiting tank builds, tanks have become less viable in game. These changes may affect all tanks, tanks without mana are the most affected by the changes. Many of the new tank items focus mana and ap, but these stats are usless on many non-mana tanks like Shen and Garen (If played as a Tank like I do).

One last note to be made, by getting rid of Heart of Gold you not only removed a way for support to gain gold (Although the changes in the Mastery Tree for utility help with this), you also removed the Gold per five item for tanks. All other play styles still have their gold per five item of choice, but now tanks ( Especialy Non-mana tanks) are lacking.

Overall, The changes are good and the ideas are heading in the right direction to add veriety and new life to the game. However, from the perspective of a tank character, these changes are crippling to the gameplay.

Why is there no love for the tanks?

Look at Randuin's Omen again, it's pretty amazing. And Banshee's Veil. Tanky items have got some pretty nice boosts even when you consider how tanky stats have been hit.

As for building nothing but survivability, true "tanks" hardly show up in torunaments - most initiators are bruisers with bruiser items, and whenever Shen shows up he generally carries a bruiser build over just pure survival, so seeing a hit to pure survival items isn't much of a big deal on that front.

Especially with all the hybridized defense and offense items available, such as that Gauntlet you're mentioning.

And Garen isn't a tank, his kit is way to kill-orientated and lacking in CC to ever call him that. "Bruiser" would be more appropriate, or "Tanky DPS". Building Garen full tank is like building Teemo as a support.

First off, I understand alot of the focus of the game is for the tournaments and High ELO matches, but this is a poor excuse to completly ignore Lower ELO players (or those who dont play ranked at all) altogether.

I do like some of the changes to tank items. I just feel that they removed alot of the key items for tanks.

As for my Garen comment. I said that "I play him as a tank." But you are right, he is more like a tanky Damage Dealer. It is just a preference to play off his passives and build to counter the enemy carry.

I used to play a virtually unstoppable amumu tank, now that they have made so many changes to the tank items, he is totally useless they ruined the game for people that play straight tank.

the thing that I see that took the most hit is MR. There is no really good MR item out there that is along the lines of Force of Nature. It saddens me that for those items that have high MR are not really geared all that much for a tanky role.

I wouldnt say that MR is missing. Runic Bulwar (The upgraded Aegis of the Legion) gives alot of MR. There are other items as well. The issue is the overall decrease to tank items compaired to the increase to damage items. It is now much harder, if not impossible, to counter a good damage dealer. This issue is more prevelent for Non-mana tanks as well. Take a look at the new items for tanks, many of them are geared toward tanks with mana.

Amumu has had the highest win rate, or at least has been in the top 5 for the last 6ish months or more according to LoL King, and he's made some pretty solid plays in IPL 5 before the season 3 changes were made. Tanking stats would have to be hit substantially harder for him to become "totally useless". Also, Amumu's synergy with Liandry's Torment and Blackfire Torch insure he's still terrifying.

If another item like Force of Nature was added, it would defeat the purpose of removing it in the first place.

Also, MR isn't lacking by any means, you just need to put the same effort into countering mages that mages have to put into countering tanks. Mages scale more or less linearly with items, generally pumping out damage through ability power alone (though CDR and magic penetration also help). Armor can be higher because with attack damage, attack speed, and critical strike chance, physical damage stacks multiplicativly (and armor penetration and CDR can pump that up more as well).

As far as MR options you have at least 3 solid item choices that don't hinder your build path if you want to build survival, physical damage, magical damage, or even support allies. Throw in Mercury Treads and Guardian Angel and you can essentially have a 5 item end-game build with MR on everything, so I wouldn't say MR is lacking.

Heart of Gold got removed because it was TOO GOOD on non supports. It was nto desigend for tanks, it was designed SOLELY for supports, but gave bruisers and tanks too much, so they removed it so that tanks couldn't get cheap tankiness and make loads of money out of it, Riot NEVER, NEVER, NEVER wanted it to be an insanely good must-have on tanks.

Also, tanks have been too strong for some time anyways, many of them could survive a 1v3 if not even massively fed, that was not what Riot wanted, if you egt focussed as a tank by 3 people youa re doing a good job, but you should NOT be able to come out of that alive unless you have ENORMOUS skill and luck, but that was the case too often prior to the update, so they changed it.

Although I do think that tanks were good, I wouldnt go as far as saying they were overly so. If anything, Riot has always focused on making carries (Especialy AD) extremly over-powered. The reason for a tank would be to counter that carry, while also taking fire from the other team. With the new patch and items, being a strong tank is near impossible.

I think they tried to nerf tanks because before tanky dps champs were very strong, and even with champs like amumu or darius , you could build straight tank a still have a fair amount of damage output from skills alone.