Thread:Willbachbakal/@comment-1920550-20160422050145/@comment-1330314-20160502051924

I have at least two item reworks planned for future dates. The first one's gonna be focusing on health regen and utility, and the second one is a sort of catch-all rework that addresses stats, gold and item recipes, and will feature on-hit items, even if I didn't think about it with on-hit effects in mind specifically.

I think the current issue with on-hit items isn't necessarily that they themselves are fundamentally broken, but that itemization allows champions to build a couple of on-hit items, go for a full tank build, and be able to be really tanky while also dealing tons of damage, and therefore make no real tradeoff either way. By all rights, the tanky on-hit builds we see should provide terrible tankiness on champions intended to be squishy, and only insufficient DPS on their own. There are a couple of changes happening in the next patch that will likely address that (namely, and  getting their passives redone), though they likely won't solve the problem completely.

At the risk of spoiling my second item-based blog project, one of my main problems with the current state of itemization, imo, is that most stats are fixed, so an and an  will end up with very similar amounts of health and resistances with the same full tank build, for example, despite having vastly different base health and resists (this is just an example; Anivia doesn't get too tanky, though you could substitute that with, , , etc.). Part of why this annoys me is because it takes away from the uniqueness of each champion, which I think extends to base stats (e.g. the above case, where buying tanky items kinda smooths out the differences between a really squishy and a really tanky champion), and it's also problematic for balance because champions intended to function very differently can opt into the same items and get very similar returns, even if they ignore their innate weaknesses or contradict them entirely. This is why so many squishies get to do well with, for example, which is an item designed to cater to a subclass of champions who are allowed to benefit from it due to being innately tanky, DPS-heavy and low on mobility.

Regarding on-hit effects, specifically, I think one core problem with them is likely that they're designed to be really late-game oriented (most champions who build on-hit scale really hard into the late game), but offer all of their bonuses all at once, which can often be really early. Rito sort of tried to counteract this on Guinsoo's by capitalizing on its mostly useless AP stat and making it more expensive than it should be, but I think the issue is again with base stats: attack speed is interesting in that it's the first stat to have started with a base value and have items amplify that base, but attack speed increases per level also work as an amplify, instead of increasing the base. If each champion's base attack speed increased by a flat value per level, instead of a percentage (with attack speed items receiving stat nerfs in compensation), all attack speed-based builds and champions would have their power shifted later into the game. While many marksmen could/should probably get some rebalances as a result, on-hit champions could probably be in a better spot with a power curve that doesn't spike into the mid-game and stay there.