User blog comment:Zilverdael/Seperate itemsets and why they are good/@comment-8506165-20140620104839/@comment-6281696-20140620152604

Let's take Udyr & sheen as an example again, cuz he's kind of a good one.

The Tank set would have acces to frozen gauntlet (or well, some variation thereof) and not to trinity. Now Frozen gauntlet still provides Udyr with a considerable offensive powerspike, however it is significantly more manageble and less effective, to the point where it no longer should be a massive problem.

First, the tank items would flat out have less powerfull offensive bonusses (e.g. trinity does 200% base-AD, frozen gauntlet does 125%) Second, the tank items would have a LOT less offensive stats. (e.g. frozen gauntlet has 30AP and that's it, trinity has quite a lot)

In comparison, frozen gauntlet doesn't even give half the powerspike trinity provides, which hopefully would make it acceptable.

If it turns out that Udyr would be doing too much damage as a tank regardless as long as he has acces to a sheen item the item would simply become inaccesible to him.

Also I should probably rephrase that part. I meant, regardless of the actual values sheen'd be good on him because it synergizes well. Now you can potentially nerf parts about sheen or him to balance that out. However, if you nerf Udyr, you'd end up making sheen mandatory if he wants to do any damage, and if you'd nerf sheen you'd end up making sheen useless for other champions who have a less absurd synergy with it(and ultimatly for him too). And if you nerf either too much they'd simply be left behind for other more dominant picks. Hence just tweaking values won't solve the problem, not without creating new ones that are at least as bad.

Similar issue with the whole sheen thing. Also, I do consider liandry's on brand to effectivly be a toxic mechanic (also before anyone moans, no toxic is not OP, toxic is just increadibly obnoxious, cheap and frustrating to deal with... in general I consider %-health attacks to be a bad mechanic in a game that already has increadibly high flat damage in comparison to defense). And again, nerfing either him or the item would result in either the item becoming useless to others, or brand becoming useless without said item. Neither of which is a good solution. For a lot of these cases I don't think that sweet spot exists. Hence the limitation of itemsets. A different solution could be to give tanks acces to items that DIRECTLY counter such utility-based attack-items (yea it isn't really utility, but I can't really describe it otherwise), which again would require itemsets because if an assasin would get it he'd suddenly screw over the balance the other way round.

The issue with rebalancing the items in the current system, especially with respect to tank items, would be that that'd require a complete rework of tank-items anyway. Offfensivly you've got the multiplicative scaling of crit AS & AD. Defensivly you don't have anything of the sort. Similarly, you can gain MUCH more offensive stats than defensive compared to your base stats (at least in a somewhat balanced build against both magic & physical damage) AND defensive items don't have the neat tricks that offensive items have (e.g. sheen, liandry's healthshred, armorshred) making them synergizes even less well.

As for making it more complicated, it'd literally be the type of gear-sets you have in virtually every other game ever. It really should not be terribly confusing for people to get into, if you want a bruiser, take bruiser items, seems logical enough to me. As for it making for a large item-base and thus large knowledge requirement, it's not like we don't have close to a 100 items anyway. And compared to other RPG's it isn't exactly special.