In League of Legends, items are an essential part as they provide champions with a lot of unique power. Therefore, creating or modifying items in the League of Legends store significantly impacts the game’s meta.
Speaking about item design, according to the Head of Champion Design for League of Legends – Riot August, he very rarely creates items that reduce champion stats. The reason given by Riot August is that such items always possess beneficial effects to compensate for the reduction of certain champion stats. However, this often leads to players discovering overly effective ways to use these items without regard for the negative effects.
Riot August: “In reality, designing an item with an effect that reduces champion stats is just too difficult. Typically, such items end up being too strong on certain champions that can mitigate the negative effects they bring. For example, an item that increases 50 Attack Damage but slows the champion by 10%. It becomes too strong on Master Yi because this character, when using his ultimate, is not slowed.
In fact, we once designed this type of item with the old Stoneplate Beast, which activated to increase health while reducing damage. However, it became too strong on Cho’Gath and Sett because at that time we did not apply a damage reduction effect for true damage. Ultimately, the whole team had to completely redo the effect of Stoneplate Beast in the recently completed Season 11.”
It can be said that items designed with negative effects in exchange for certain stats are quite a good idea. However, in a game like League of Legends, it is rarely applied because, as Riot August said, such items will become too strong on a few champions. This forces Riot to balance the item based on the champions that use it most effectively, which in turn makes the item become extremely weak for other characters.
An item created to be effective only for a few champions is clearly not the goal Riot Games aims for. Essentially, Riot always wants to create diversity in League of Legends, where champions have many options for item builds. Therefore, items that require players to trade off stats for certain effects are gradually disappearing from League of Legends recently. Players may have to wait a long time to see an item like the old Stoneplate Beast appear in League of Legends again.