User blog comment:Zilverdael/Seperate itemsets and why they are good/@comment-5168889-20140621222406/@comment-6281696-20140622165438

The point is that allowing them to combine high end defense, offense & utility items, allows for abuse as there are no real downsides to these combinations. And in fact, moba's are the only genre I've ever seen anyone do this (and somehow gaining a large following claiming this freedom is good). By comparison take the elder scrolls. You can also combine everything as you want, however, wearing heavy armor makes you slow, or like in Dragon age, heavier armor ruins your mana regen. Those games have an open system but with actual trade-offs, or well, trade-offs beyond just the fact that you might have higher AD than AP values so item X might not be optimal. If you want to go for an open system there need to be inherent tradeoffs to each build preventing you from just combining everything together to make some kind of superbuild. As for the meta now enforcing bruisers to be bruisers and glass canons to be glass canons, yea that's kind of the point, when I refer to metabreaking I usually mean mages being played as bruisers or sona going ADC or playing without a jungler or something of the sort. However with the current open system you essentially get bruisers going tank with a splash of ADC, which I don't so much consider meta-breaking as just abusing a major design flaw within a system. Roles are there for a reason, they are essentially soft rules enforcing the flow & balance of a game. Allowing people to break the way roles work, as opposed to which champion can play which role, essentially just means you get a game without rules, which in turn leads to inbalance. Also, obviously there'd need to be a lot more items for it to work as when you just divide up the current items according to roles I doubt any role would get much more than 20-ish items, and ADC"s would have no defense whatsoever while tanks have no offense, obviously they need to have a modicum (that or the base stats need to be considerably better).

As for others now not being able to use certain items that they really want because it has a good mechanic, I do think a lot of items would need to have a variation in each itemset. E.g. each itemset needs its own variation of sheen, as certain mechanics just work well with certain champions. But it'd stop bruisers from going full tank, yet having high damage, or assasins from having massive burst without being squishy. And so on.

Yes there'l always be dominant picks, which isn't the actual problem, the problem is the whole jack of all trades, master of all trades such an open system without trade-offs allows certain champions to be. Plus all the issues it gives balancing wise as certain high end support items are in the current system toxic by definition as bruisers will abuse them. Which this system would fix.

And no I don't think this is the only way. Another way would be a system akin to elder scrolls with actual inherent tradeoffs in items. One of the suggestions posted by someone here was to give tanks more powerfull defensive items that also diminish your offensive capabilities, thus discouraging bruisers from abusing said items.

As for alienating existing playerbase, I don't really care it'd alienate the existing playerbase, given that I don't need to make money with this game ^^. And yes I'm aware this is unlikely to actually ever be implemented within LoL because of that & just the amount of work that'd be needed. Someone simply asked me to explain my views on this subject and as I've had not all that much to do other than wait for my science to finish it turned in a rather massive epistel.