User blog comment:Zilverdael/Seperate itemsets and why they are good/@comment-24905320-20140616103305/@comment-6281696-20140616182036

Tanks are the biggest victim yea, which is mostly due to riot's obsession with damage. You can get much better damage values than you can get defense values anyway, so the difference between a full tank build and full tank + trinity is fairly minimal in terms of defense. Supports also suffer quite a lot because they just get awefull items due to potential abuse by other

Excluding supports, in my experience, tanks are pretty much never played. There's just a load of bruisers running around who (try to) fullfill both roles. And the only reason those are picked as support is basicly because of their utility & CC, not because of their actual survivability (with the exception of braum who's utility & survivability are much closer intertwined than say Leona). It should probably also be noted that the majority of stuff in LoL that I would actually classify as a tank are supports, and only a handfull hold sololanes or jungle in the current meta. And even those are frequently played as if they are a bruiser (e.g. shen with trinity...)

You could attempt to use those kind of items, but it's increadibly likely they'l just be abused by bruisers. For example take atma's. You could give it a decent passive ratio and remove the crit (seriously why is that on there..). However, as soon as the passive provides a good amount of AD bruisers will want it. It might work if you'd do something like gives 0.01 * (armor + mr)% of total health as AD, as that might put enough of a requirement on it to stop bruisers from buying it, however, then tanks have the problem that early on the passive does basicly nothing... Maybe if you'd give it a usefull base bonus it might work (like manamune's 20 base AD).

As for an item that massivle boost defense at the cost of offense. The issue there is that against anything not squishy tanks already do insignificant damage. Try duelling a udyr as a tank, you might as well just run around him in circles, it's just as likely to kill him as your nonexistant damage is. Unless it is also combined with an offensive effect such as thornmail, or sunfire, within the same item, it'l just mean they get to wait a long time until they die without being able to actually do anything back.

However, if you'd for example make an item that for example reduces damage done with AA's (including onhit effects) & spells by 50%, increases armor/Mr by 50% and provides an aura that does damage equal to 10% of total armor + mr that might work. Also, for clarity, these numbers obviously would be wrong, but you get the idea. Also, you'd still need to make sure that it doesn't make the character borderline immortal without the addition of a proper tank kit. This would mostly be a concern with the bruisers that have powerfull healing or shields in their kit, e.g mundo with 4K Hp and 500 armor + his passive will regen most of the damage suffered for example, and I doubt anyone can really outdamage the healing from his ulti when he has 500 armor...

It might help, however I don't think it'd solve the problem. Also, supports are still left with their halfbaked items in this case, and utility items are even harder to stop others from abusing. So that'd still need some sort of solution.