So I’ve been on the PBE for a little while, trying out the changes, seeing the items, and well there is some cool stuff, I don’t dislike it. But a trend I saw in the past continues again. Armor items getting really cheap and cost efficient, but kind of weak as a full slot.
It’s general knowledge that 1 armor is not as valuable as 1 mr.
Then why do we have a fat new 80 mr item with 18% max health magic shield, a force of nature that goes up to 110 mr when stacked (though its probably worse than the % magic damage reduction iteration) and we have 70 armor frozen heart, 55 armor (?) randuins.
Like, Frozen heart is 2300 gold. Wow. Now that’s cost efficiency, it’s really strong and viable. I kinda… don’t care? We as players want fantasies fullfilled. Having one item slot filled with a big armor number is a fantasy.
And I firmly believe that while Frozen heart will see a whole lot of play in competitive, creating an item that gives a ridiculous (100,110, even 120 ?) armor but is expensive as shit and not really worth the price would be cool. It fullfills a fantasy and makes people happy cause big number, yet isn’t overbearing cause well… it’s bad (not cost efficient).
Everybody knows FH has always given an AS slow aura, and randuins has had several iterations with crit reduction, 30% is pretty big I will admit.
That being said, we’ve seen times where tankmelting was less powerful and frozen heart had 110 armor, thornmail had 100 armor and a %dmg reflection, randuins with 70 armor, 400 health, 20% crit reduction and 15% attack speed cripple. And these weren’t even overpowered at all at the times because they were more expensive, clearly it’s not about weakness, but about Riot’s decision that armor items should be cheaper but less powerful overall.If I remember correctly part of their motivation was to have supports be able to afford some of these items.