Thread:Willbachbakal/@comment-1920550-20160422050145/@comment-1330314-20160503133845

I've read the recent patch notes, and what sticks out the most for me is the addition of ability damage scaling via Intelligence. Up until now, non-scaling spells were a core difference between Dota and League that developers on both sides cited as responsible for fundamentally different design and balancing policies. It'd be interesting to find out exactly why such a decision was made, besides making casters scale better into the late game.

I think there probably is reason to justify on-hit variety, and one basic example could just be anti-squishy versus anti-tanky damage, e.g. BotrK / Bloodrazor versus pre-rework Guinsoo's. If the enemy team's very aggressive, perhaps there could be a more self-preserving on-hit item to compensate and so on.

I think it's alright for defensive items to have the self-synergy they do, because it lets them feel more powerful individual without hyperscaling off of each other later on. In Season 2, for example, there was a huge amount of items that gave pure armor, pure magic resist or pure health, and the result was that those items didn't feel all that good individually, despite having massive values, yet once you bought a health item and a resist item you suddenly became nigh-impossible to kill for anyone with the countered damage type (mages were hit especially hard). Generally, the more internal synergy you have on a single item, the less raw stats you have to inject into it for it to feel strong, which means you also have less messy inter-item synergies when combining items that scale really well off of each other's stats.