User blog comment:Emptylord/Blogs/Upcoming class rework/@comment-1330314-20160611121557

I very much agree with your criticism of Riot's classification system, and I think their most recent list of champion-to-subclass matchings highlights a lot of critical errors they're making, including issues that they themselves pointed out to us not to make ("don't classify champions based on how they build"... then they list as a Vanguard and  as a Diver). Your point-by-point analysis is pretty spot on.

I'm a bit less enthusiastic about approaching League with a WoW-style classification system, since both run on very different principles (WoW is PVE-centric and has a lot of mechanics focused around defeating either large crowds of enemies or single, extremely powerful bosses, with a PVP mode that then runs on another completely different set of rules), but I agree that there are at least surface-level differences when it comes to the "average" team comp of 1 "tank", 1 support and 3 DPS.

While your original tank/slayer/support system made a lot of immediate sense, I feel the current fighter/slayer/specialist/support system has some flaws. For one, there's not all that much distinction between fighters and slayers in the definition you gave, besides slayers being squishy -- and even then, Skirmishers toe the line between the two, as you mentioned. The Specialist class feels more like a set of unique attributes you could give to individual champions, particularly since the number of Specialist champions is tiny and relatively debatable (is Jinx a Demo purely because she has good DPS against towers? What does "obstruct and deny" translate to concretely?). More generally, though, it might be difficult to derive solid design decisions in the future from this classification, since it doesn't really map all that well to itemization (you can't really overhaul "fighter" itemization in the above sense because each subclass has its own vastly different set of items, which come very close to the itemization for other classes), and the Slayer class doesn't really fit well with champion selection decisions (the Fighter and Support classes do fit very well with current positional selection, though). I think you did a pretty good job with the Support class, but I feel there's probably more work to be done with the Slayer class, which currently feels like the weakest link in the classification system.