The Most Broken (And Useless) Items In League of Legends History

when it comes to video games seldom are things ever removed since the idea is to add new stuff as time goes on that's because a game's experience is developed around what already exists and so it's usually considered too risky to take stuff away as opposed to creating new content the only instance where it's okay to remove content is when you replace it with something of equal or ideally greater value simply deleting features is frowned upon in game development because it's essentially an indication of poor implementation or bad handling of whatever problems are gang stem from it one such case that drew a lot of scrutiny was pokemon shield and sword for the uninitiated you know how whenever there's a new pokemon game released there's the regional decks and then the national decks the national decks allows you to locate and catch pokemon from previous generations allowing for continuity from game to game on release pokemon shield and sword excluded over half of all pokemon which rightfully pissed off a lot of players as some of the ones left out are huge favorites in the community guard chomp swampert axel wasn't a very good look since then they did bring in some more but the damage was already done many long time pokemon fans became dissolution with the franchise for thanos snapping half of all pokemon out of a game whose entire experience is based on catching and collecting every single one especially considering there was no real reason for them to do so now fortunately we don't have anything of equal magnitude in league of legends riot never removed the champion from a game in the 12 years he's been out for unless you count gangplank being disabled for like two weeks because he died but there is one system in the game that routinely bears witness to things being taken out items it isn't uncommon for items to be rotated out of circulation within league on an annual basis for years we've reflected on past seasons and reminisced about the memories of fun or crazy metas that took place all of which were typically founded upon a single or combination of items just this past year there was a massive overhaul of the item system giving way to a new category of equipment known as mythic items designed to provide champions with a meaningful first purchase and charting a build path for the rest of the game but in light of all the different metas we've had for a lot of mythics such as turbo chem tank gore drinker and stridebreaker the community's been divided on whether season 11's rework was a positive change to the game or a negative one regardless of which side was correct many people have expressed their longing for some of the items that were taken out for this new system so today i want to make an episode analyzing some of the most iconic items removed from league of legends just like champions items are a point of balance they provide you with bonus stats some of which give extra benefits that can also be considered boost to your sets now as for what purpose they serve the goal of an item is to be pronounced from its counterparts and serve their own distinguishable function each individual purchase needs to have an incentive behind it to aid the player in the best way possible for whoever or whatever they're up against if the enemy team has a lot of healing or lifesteal champions the most logical choice is to itemize grievous wounds if your champion has an ability that sends you deep into the front lines even though you're squishy then zhonya's hourglass or guardian angel can buy you some temporary protection riot's main philosophy with items is for them to create unique interactions and also respond to unique interactions that being their motive for reworking the item system last year alongside removing or changing those that see far too much general use the objective was for them to create their own sense of contribution towards champions build whether it's through synergy or individual output oftentimes the removal of an item falls into one of two reasons where most of them fall into is that the item itself doesn't do anything or is just too similar to an existing item we used to have a lot of items that did nothing but give plain old stats either that or an assortment of stats that didn't have very good synergy with each other how many of you guys remember the brutalizer costs 1337 gold gave 25 attack damage 10 cooldown reduction and 15 armor pen it was one of the most popular bruiser and assassin items because it was cheap gave you all the offensive stats you could ask for and nothing else it was literally just a stat stick i mean it was a great stat stick don't get me wrong i miss brutalizer so much you have no idea but it's a statistic it didn't even build into anything after they took it away from black cleaver before removing it that same season and giving a serrated dirk and caulfield's warhammer other examples would be rod of ages i'm sure anivia rised and casted and mains really missed that one there was one of the ancients which while a very popular item from vladimir mordekaiser and sometimes katarina back in the day was only bought because lifesteal is an overpowered stat and they wouldn't have gone for it otherwise one might make a counter argument that rabadon's death cap or manamune archangel staff should be thrown away by that same logic and while they may be considered stat sticks for doing nothing but give a bunch of ability power or mana respectively they do have a defined purpose death cap is essential for ap champs because without having significantly more ability power than physical champions do attack damage they would fall off in the late game due to mages being forever hindered by cooldowns compared to 80 carries with attack speed tier of the goddess items are of course to supplement champions with steam mana cost even if the item did have a unique passive or active property they could still get removed if that property is too specific or not very practical in other words if no one bought the item things like frozen mallet on wrecker static ship spellbinder and sanguine blade they may each have a use for a few champions or situations but they weren't practical enough to be anything other than a fringe purchase thus their purpose while there is not distinctive enough to be used commonly that said not every item needs to be bought on a regular basis there are a few legendary items in the game that you don't see all too often such as silvermere dawn but those exist because it would be far worse for the game if they weren't there if that makes sense okay basically back in the old days grievous wounds was only on morale and nomincon that was it thornmail didn't give grievous wounds until very recently and we've also never had kempong chainsword mortal reminder or chemthai putrifire some items are in the game as a just in case measure a response to things an atom like frozen mallet doesn't have any contingencies like that at any point in time there's the matter right meaning some items will be more frequently picked than others there's nothing wrong with having staples in a competitive game in fact that was sort of the idea behind mythic items to give every champion in league a staple option ideally though you wouldn't want a single item to get so much attention in a way that the rest of the game is played around the inclusion of a sad item items can be removed from the game if they're too popular as an analogy let's go to yu-gi-oh for a moment the competitive scene over there has a forbidden and limited list which places restrictions on the number of a type of card that can be used if the card is forbidden then that means it's banned you are not allowed to use that card in any competitive format if the card is limited you can only use one copy of it in the game's history there occasionally exists what is known as a tier zero deck an archetype or number of cards that sees more than like 70 pick rate in tournaments meaning 70 of all players are running that type of deck naturally this doesn't make for a very fun game state because every match devolves into figuring out how to counter that specific strategy usually when we think of tier zero we think of champions during the chem tank meta hecarim and udyr were tier zero or s tier they had an incredibly high pick ban rate and were very very strong but they can extend two items as well and they have case in point spear shogen one of the more recent tier zero items back in season 9. the base stats were nice to have but not very gold efficient given the price however it had by far the best single item power spike in the game surpassing even death fire grasp another notorious one in an average game having the gestalt of multiple item components would grant you a noteworthy advantage over an enemy who had just the sum of its individual parts because every completed item had a big passive shojin was built with a bf sword kindle gem and longsword not the best build path out there but combine them together and you got awakened dragon upon casting your ultimate you would get 50 bonus attack speed for 6 seconds and your basic attacks would refund 20 of the remaining cooldowns on your q w and e during that time what ended up happening was whichever top winner got their hands on children first which is turbo one behind the game jax would have perma counter-strike riven turned into katarina renekton would chain stun you it was a pretty fun time depending on how bad the situation is riot would have to either nerf or rework the item to be much less gold efficient but in some cases they would flat out remove it if the item itself is just too obnoxious to deal with and that's exactly what happened for a banner of command atmos impeller or i think it was admiral's reckoning i don't remember which one tracker's knife and deathfire grasp it didn't necessarily have to be super broken tracker's knife was merely a jungle version of sightstone but as you know in pro place macro-oriented environment there was literally no reason for you to take skirmisher saber or stalker's blade vision was way more important than a small slow or 20 reduced damage so they asked it the irony in all of this is that by trying to standardize item purchasing for champions in season 11 they've increased the risk of tier zero items appearing in the meta more than half of all mythic items had 15 minutes of fame where everyone and their mothers were building the item just recently we had to deal with the gore drinker meta every physical melee damage dealer was taking it and that happened several times over the course of the year with others it seems like after one method gets nerfed another just takes over and becomes tier zero the obvious downside to them is that it smothers out any possibility for creative freedom in build paths if you didn't build the best item you would be at a significant disadvantage for the rest of the game strangely though there was one item in particular that was taken out that was neither purposeless nor too popular so did the occult in case you weren't around at the time sword of the occult is the attack damage equivalent of metric soul stealer scoring kills or assists give you more attack damage per stack and at a certain number of stacks you would also receive twenty percent bonus attack speed why was this item removed but not mega soul stealer the answer is simple sword of the occult was way stronger than mentions proportionally speaking see if you take a look at 80 items and compare them to ap you get far more ability power than you do attack damage ad mythics give you at most like 60 while ap mythics can give you 80 to 90. you may have heard the term adaptive force thrown around such as when talking about runes the offense of runeshards provides you with either 5.4 bonus attack damage or 9 ability power attack damage is generally a more useful stat because you can apply it through both auto attacks and abilities whereas ability power is locked to just spells and no nash's tooth and lichbane don't change that it's still abilities that brings us back to the argument behind rabadon's death cap ap items need to give more ability power to keep mages in the same power skill as they d champions towards the mid to late game since they can't use auto attacks how this pertains to sort of the occult it gives you 110 total ad at 25 stacks versus meja's 145 ability power meaning occult was way way stronger to keep both items comparable magiz would have to give around 165 ability power or so also ap by itself is not very good because most magic damage champions need cooldown reduction and mana early on to really get going magicized and sort of the occult are predicated on snowballing early game aed champions could fit a cult into their builds more comfortably than ap champions good and megiz so it got removed early gamers are also usually a d lee sin rengar pandy on renekt and stuff like that we've had quite the history of removed items in league of legends and i can't really in good conscience say was all that healthy either mostly because there is a lingering question why did ryan choose to remove so many items instead of just keeping them there even if the item was unpopular or had nothing special about it what was the problem with it existing why couldn't they just leave it alone there are definitely some items that were a big blow to lose on some champions hextech gunblade was a staple on those with hybrid scaling like katarina akali and kale and once again rod of ages was necessary for anivia rise and kassadin because they needed the mana and health to scale into the mid game and neither item was particularly degenerate either they didn't see rampant usage across too many champs so why get rid of them the main thing i can think of is that they're trying to reduce clutter let's give credit where it's due the item shop definitely improved in terms of usability and interface the current item selection is pretty simple each one has a unique function and it's become more clear which items belong to which class collector is for marksmen and assassins starix is for fighters and skirmishers anatomist chains is for tanks there is much less ambiguity in items nowadays whenever i looked at some of the old items it would be difficult to figure out who it was intended for zephyr would arguably be the most prominent example of this is afraid he carries for assassins fighters skirmishers it was too general and therefore not that great however there's a bit of a dilemma that comes from this riot was aiming to standardize items so that every class had an option for every situation or at least the basic ones knight harvester and luden's tempest are essentially the same item it's just that one is for ap champions with mana and the other is for ap champions without there's the five grievous wound items guardian angel and zhonya's hourglass being time stallers for ad and ap champs respectively sorel does grudge for ad champions ldr for crit and void staff for mages if we're trying to give an item for every class though why only in select cases and not for all i know it was changing to frostfire but why did they remove iceborn gauntlet it was a spellblade item for tanks why did they remove rod of ages a bulky option for mages when ad champions are sterics gage that's what bothers me about their reasoning behind removing certain items according to the rationale neither side of the spectrum should have privileges that are withheld from the other they went out of their way to make grievous ones accessible to each class and yet the only counter to shields is serpent's fang which is exclusively locked to 80 assassins and skirmishers by the time you watch this video we obviously have the new magic pen item on shields but that should have been there since the very beginning it's weird for them to not be fully consistent with their philosophy on item purchases because their two goals contradict one another on one hand they want each item to have its own unique purpose but on the other they want to give every class their own version of an item so which one is it they do deserve a pass for any item that was removed way way back at the start of the game because they had no idea what they were doing at that time but when they add an item to the game and then take it out some champions needed those items to function no matter how few actually the only reason they had to fix glacial augment in pre-season is because they removed hextech glp and twin shadows the only two items that worked with glacial and kind of makes me wonder did they even think that through at all with all that said i still stand by season 11's item changes being a positive one for the game there are some janks and loose ends we have to tie up but at least to me this is the closest in terms to balance i've seen from items 80 carries have satisfying purchases fighters do too majors could use some more love but they're getting it in season 12. assassins and tanks are doing okay too at least now that we're out of the gore drinking meta i still miss brutalizer though man i want that item back so badly it was so good we're gonna end it off here though i hope you found this insightful in case you were wondering about items that were removed from the game if you enjoyed the video i'd appreciate it if you left a thumbs up subscribe to the channel if you want to see more content like this consider following me on twitter and joining my discord server and lastly check out my previous discussion videos if you haven't yet until next time thanks so much for watching and i hope to see you again soon take care [Music] you

Channel: Vars

Views: 485,210

Keywords: league of legends, league of legends pro guides, proguides, riot games, lol, lol items, lol item removed, lol removed items, league of legends removed items, lol spear of shojin, lol deathfire grasp, lol sword of the occult, lol banner of command, atma's impaler, lol season 11 items, lol mythic items, lol new items, lol preseason items, lol item rework, lol discussion, vars league of legends, lol items explained, lol items season 12, season 12 items, enemy, msi

Id: 4ePb6tUF5UQ

Length: 14min 49sec (889 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 06 2021