User blog comment:Zilverdael/Seperate itemsets and why they are good/@comment-4068613-20140615123959/@comment-6281696-20140615141931

The issue with buffing stuff Leona's ratios is that she'l be used in sololane/jungle as an mage or AP bruiser (similar to how AP cho, or nautilus work) because a higher ratio with proper AP levels would be broken. However with her current AP you are in this awkward spot where the bits and pieces of AP you get from stuff like frozen gauntlet are just meaningless. The issue here is that such low ratio's don't do anything if you only get a handfull of stats. Whereas when you have proper ratio's people will try to take their advantage and abuse it with in this case a proper mage build. So if you'd improve Leona's AP ratio's not only would the AP of gauntlet suddenly be usefull, but the AP on Zhonya's would be even more usefull. I find it highly unlikely a balance will be found to prevent this kind of abuse while keeping the lower-value AP items usefull with just number tweaking. It's the reason why in pve games generally gear is limited to certain classes, so they can give the mage the high magic values while the paladin gets high enough ratios to make use of his more limited magic values.

Similarly, nerfing the champions that have these kind of super effective items would generally require you to break the champion. In the case of Udyr, unless his base AD becomes nonexistant Trinity will always be a massive powerspike to him. Or any sheen item on him for that matter. In this case it's the mechanic of the item that becomes broken as opposed to the actual values. Liandry's for example suffers from a same issue, on the right champions it can be abused to make for hilarious damage outputs (try it in combination with Rylais on Nasus and Mr penetration runes, his ulti will now just flat out kill champions that don't build much MR). Similarly on brand liandry's adds 8% current health damage to hell of his damage with just the passive, you can nerf brand all you want, the item will still be a must have offensivewise.

THe only real possibilities here are to nerf or buff an item. However if you give gauntlet the AP necesairy to make it feel impactfull on Leona it'd take like 80 AP which would make it well, an extremely good mage item and squishier mages would start taking it to increase their defense without losing much. Similarly if you nerf trinity's proc to more acceptable levels the item would fall out of favor because champions who don't get the same large powerspike from it will just go somewhere else. In the case of trinity, it was relativly recently buffed to set it apart from gauntlet as an offensive item (from 150 to 200% base AD if I remember correctly) because apparently the fact that gauntlet came with freaking armor while Trinity had AD, crit & AS wasn't enough to set it apart as the offensive choice. Which frankly is idiotic.. but gauntlet for a while was much more popular, and because riot wanted squishies to use trinity as opposed to gauntlet they buffed it to a point where the passive singlehandedly is already one of the best offensive items on anything that has the CD's for it... And thus all the udyr's stopped using Gauntlet because the defense and added slow was not worth the giant difference in damage...

Fine tuning the stats and ratio's doesn't do much more than just have the biggest powerspike sway between one or two extremely effective items for these kind of champion & item combinations.

As for the exclusive support items, obviously items that help your allies should come with a drawback in the case you're not using it to support your allies. If only because that supporting power of the item is now gone. However, take for example bulwark. The problem with it was that everyone and their mother started using it as the goto MR item because it had good stats even on your own. We then for a while had a locket that only gave 20mr and 20 armor, which as a support felt horribly weak because it didn't work as your MR or armor item. The only reason to get it was because it helped your allies, not because it was actually a good item. Now it's back at 40MR and supports actually are using it again because it now functions as their MR item. But bruisers also still use it frequently. Similarly take zeke's herald. Does anyone actually use that thing? The aura is decent, however the actual stats it gives to the carrier are bad on pretty much everything. The issue is that as a support, the items that I build need to actually be usefull to myself too. My main focus might be helping others, but if my own stats are low and my abilities are weak my help isn't going to amount to much.

As for the issue with overbearing steriods. Yes and no. It is indeed part of the problem but take for example Yasuo. His shield is quite powerfull. However, adding in a randuins omen suddenly almost doubles the effective health that shield provides pushing it from powerfull to broken. But, if you'd lower his shield it'd be useless without the large chunk of armor Randuin's omen provides. Tanks often suffer the inverse issue. Braum for example with a full tanking build is nigh on unkillable, if he however isn't done yet with his build, or takes any offensive item, he suddenly loses a significant chunck of his powers. If I didn't know better I'd almost say that certain champions have been balanced under the assumption that they ABSOLUTLY would not use certain items, or ALWAYS have certain items. Which just seems silly if that were true. Anyway, the point is that simply tweaking their values, even extensive tweaks, aren't likely to do much. It's usually a mechanic that is extremely powerfull, so reducing the numbers will nearly always mean the mechanic is now useless without said super item.