Thread:Willbachbakal/@comment-6016076-20140625164717/@comment-6016076-20140626090802

Actually, I'm not sure if it matters anymore. I just saw the PBE notes. They've added in a "Quill Coat" for junglers as a new recipe item in Spirit of the Ancient Golem. The gold efficiency remains the same. The unique passive of Butcher has been replaced with a new  "tank-themed" one that I assume is about equivalent. The Tenacity has been replaced by a ward, like with Wriggle's.

However, the kicker: It now provides additional health according to 25% of total bonus health, a "tanky deathcap." Prior to this, the trinity of jungler items all had about the same efficiency and similar passive effects. The difference between the three boiled down to:

Lizard - AD theme; burned true damage over time

Wraith - AP theme; added more AP in stacks

Golem - Tank theme; tenacity

Now, the balance has been upset with this new passive which makes the item far more gold efficient than others. I agree the tenacity was a mismatch for tanky jungler needs, but I am afraid this is a buff that turns it into the Athene's of tanks: wildly efficient and mandatory across all lanes.

It moves tanks closer to bruisers by scaling their offense more rapidly from stacking defensive stats. It provides essentially a 25% increase to all bonus health ratios. The current problem with bruisers is how well-rounded they are; we may be turning tanks into the same thing, only trading some damage in their kits for more CC.

My goal with my blogs was to explore a new stat, called spirit, that would provide a metric to adjust tanks/supports' offensive and utility scaling without risking the overlap with other roles that has troubled progress so far.

Riot is apparently taking the same route for tanks, but using bonus health as their "orthogonal" stat. The only thing about this is it ruins the idea of making conscious decisions to spec into either offense or defense, which protects against well-roundedness and its lack of counterplay by creating inherent weaknesses in whatever direction you pursue.

I don't know if this change is a good idea, and I wonder if we are just trading one problem for another.