User blog comment:Zilverdael/Seperate itemsets and why they are good/@comment-1330314-20140617111554

What you're proposing is made redundant by champion scalings. If you want a champion to do well with a certain build and not another, you tailor their mechanics, bases and ratios accordingly. If AP Tryndamere is toxic then you don't go about restricting his item choices, you just change his AP playstyle until it's healthy or simply remove it. If you want tanks to tank better, you buff them and give them better tanky scalings, and if you don't want a champion to use an item, you design or tweak the champion in such a way that they wouldn't want to buy that item. The alternate item system you're proposing would make itemization horribly confusing (the same item has different stats and/or effects on different champions), and while seemingly offering a solution to balance would make balancing a lot more complicated, since every new champion and item would require a lot of changes just to keep in line with previous items.

Some of the reasons behind your proposal are also not quite healthy to the game: your proposed AP playstyle would have a lot of problems, mainly because Leona is not meant to deal damage. She's balanced around having lots of CC and tankiness and very little damage of her own: give her better damage scalings with tanky items like would give her too much power. The same goes for supports: give them better items, and their utility, which is balanced around their current item options, would become overwhelming, or would have too much auxiliary power. and do provide massive damage spikes on certain champions, but that in itself is not a problem, particularly as they provide clear power milestones for those champions.

Additionally, a fundamental problem with this idea is that it constrains options in a heavy-handed way, to the point where it would discourage inventive yet healthy builds. Mage supports were not an intended subclass, for example, and arose only when certain players started using mages in bot lane and built support items on them. Your itemization system would not allow such developments to happen, especially as no designer can fully predict every single potential use for an item or champion. Everything you're suggesting could just as well be solved by making changes to champions, which would be a lot more effective than modifying every item around every champion and locking out choices. If you want greater differences between tanks and bruisers, you change tanks and bruisers to differentiate them, and if you want items to be less abusable you change items accordingly, as was the case with.