User blog comment:Zilverdael/Seperate itemsets and why they are good/@comment-4068613-20140615123959/@comment-6281696-20140617112942

The difference between buffing her AP ratio's in the current situation or giving her acces to (mildly) better items in a new itemset would be the following:

In the current state she doesn't get much more than the 30AP from gauntlet, which adds a very insignificant amount of damage to her skills. Making any AP feel pointless unless it comes in rather large quantities.

If you give her say 0.8 on all of her skills, she'd now have mage ratios and going full mage would be viable which is not something Riot (or I ) want. She'l activly seek out AP.

If in contrast she gets new items that give a reasonably high amount of AP, but at the same ratios. Say gauntlet provided her with 80AP. She would not activly seek out AP, but the AP on gauntlet would not feel as wasted as now since it actually adds a noticable amount to her rotation. Say she ends up with 200-300 total with the new items, she's still nowhere near mage levels damagewise, but her full rotation does now have a significant amount of extra damage as opposed to what gauntlet gives (Seriously, minions do more dps than the AP that would provide her with...)

Marksmen mostly retain their use in the meta by grace of having range. Which makes it extremely difficult to push them out of their position in the meta. Replacing them with a bruiser would lead to a much stronger team (in most compositions at least) because of how easy marksmen are to kill, however, during the laning face their range advantage makes it very difficult to put a melee bruiser there. THey do still have better damage, however it's not like bruisers have any trouble killing stuff, the advantage they have damagewise is kind of well, pointless outside of pushing towers. Most champions die in <5sec anyway, regardless of it being a marksman or a bruiser beating away at them.

As for tanks, LoL has barely any true tanks, and the handfull of true tanks that do exist are either played as a glorified bruiser or only used in a supporting role, in which case more often then not they have utterly retarded builds from a tank point of view because the meta demands they build sighstones and mobility boots and ancient coin, yay three slots spend on items that barely provide any tanking ability... The issue I take with udyr, and others like him, is that his stats are on an equal level as true tanks. His survivability is just as good, if not better when combined with lifesteal. This, combined with the fact that fights last ~5 seconds on average, means that these type of bruisers push true tanks out of the meta because the utility advantage true tanks bring doesn't become relevant. The fight is over by the time their CC advantage starts shining, or buffs actually reduce/increase damage taken/done by a full attack. The mages that relativly recently came down to bot to pretend to support function by the same notion, annie isn't a good support, but if you kill your opponent before say Leona's massive advantage CC-wise becomes relevant it won't matter anyway.

Also, you don't see dedicated tanks every game, and in most games they're hamstrung by the need for support items...

In my experience those circumstances happen all the freaking time. He is more than fast enough to just force the circumstances. As long as his team follows up there's not much to do against him. Kind of similar to the "use cc on tryndamere"-discussion. It works if noone else is around and you can waste everything on him as a team, as soon as his allies come in, or you're not with enough allies, you have a massive problem.

Issue is that it isn't just Udyr, he's just one of the more powerfull examples. Virtually all bruisers have this problem, some are less problematic because their kit is different and doesn't give them the same ability to force situations, but pretty much all run into this issue where they just become this massivly sturdy, high damage monster by combining high end items that they really shouldn't have acces to. Hence the need for itemsets to stop bruisers (and certain other champions) from abusing this.

Removing the AP would work in making gauntlet feel better, but won't ultimatly solve the problem of lackluster support and tanking items. As for liking a mix of stats. Sure, having a bit of AP or AD thrown in is nice, but it'd be nice if it were a relevant amount. Currently gauntlet doesn't even add 3 dps unmigitated when combined with full CDR, it's just too little to count as "rounding" your stats. It's just a tiny amount in combination with bad ratios.