User blog:Willbachbakal/(Item Concept) Revamping Life Steal

Life steal is the most prominent form of item-based utility in the game, as well as a central stat to a huge part of the champion roster, as well as one that raises relatively little controversy. In spite of this, it's occasionally caused a few severe problems: back when it was particularly strong early on, bot lanes turned into very passive farm-fests, with champions rushing sustain items as fast as they could and avoiding combat at all cost. Even now, life steal tends to have a lot of variance with respect to many different stats, including AD and attack speed but also stats like crit, armor and armor penetration. Life steal tends to be precarious to balance because it's dependent on too many stats, all of them damage-related, and it's this dependence that invariably skews it towards pure damage-dealers more than it should, which in turn tends to make marksmen, squishy fighters and some assassins occasionally more durable than they should be.

On the flipside, another issue with life steal is that it occasionally lacks definition: while the rework to in V4.10 and the more recent changes to  in V5.8 gave those items slightly clearer sustain niches, there is ultimately no real branching path to life steal, and sustain for AD champions tends to be used in pretty much the exact same way across items. While the nature of life steal means it'll always stay somewhat consistent as autoattack-based sustain (which is a good thing), it also has a ton of potential to develop into multiple different systems that would each support different niches and playstyles:, in my opinion, would be the perfect opportunity to implement a kind of spell vamp item for AD casters, and could have its niche as a waveclear and anti-group item pushed even further via its sustain.

Updating The Item Roster= {{#tag:tabber| Scepter= {{infobox item }}
 * name     = Vampiric Scepter
 * type     = Advanced
 * effects = +10 attack damage
 * passive = {{sbc|Unique - {{nie|Life Steal}}:}} Basic attacks heal you for {{as|5% AD}}.
 * buy      = 800g (440g)
 * sell     = 560g
 * menu     = Attack > Damage

Changes

 * New unique passive: Life Steal.
 * Allows the wielder to heal for on every basic attack.

Changes

 * New unique passive: Life Steal.
 * Allows the wielder to heal for on every basic attack.

Changes

 * New unique passive: Life Steal.
 * Allows the wielder to heal for on every basic attack, and converts the overhealing into a shield that absorbs up to  damage.
 * If the shield breaks, it's disabled for 5 seconds but doubles the item's on-hit healing.

Changes

 * New unique passive: Life Steal.
 * Allows the wielder to heal for on every basic attack, also granting a stack for 8 seconds that increases the on-hit healing by  and grants, stacking up to 5 times.

Changes

 * New recipe: +  +  + 350g (see here for more details on the new component, which is basically a cheap AD + CDR item).
 * Total cost increased to 3500g from 3200g.
 * New unique passive: Life Steal.
 * Allows the wielder to heal for every time they deal physical damage.
 * Mana restoration removed.