Riot Games had intended that a full overhaul of the item system in Season 11 would diversify the League of Legends playstyle and build, but things did not go as planned.
With the 2021 preseason update, Riot Games brought us one of the biggest updates in League of Legends history. Heavily focused on changing the items of the game, the update’s purpose was to bring to League one of the reasons why its competitor Dota 2 flourishes – Item builds diversity. But as we have known by now, although the update brought a huge breeze on our League of Legends experiences, it fails to accomplish its goal of item build diversity.
Recently, u/firewall245 shared his thoughts on the League of Legends subreddit about the state of item diversity in the game right now:
With the popularity of building guide websites such as op.gg, Blitz, and many more, players would always easily check Champion’s stats with a specific build and quickly select just 1 Mythic Item or just 1 identical set of items for every game.
True, some classes of Champions in the game suffer from a shortage of appropriate things to pick from, but the cause for this is our community’s viewpoint. Riot is aware of this, and numerous improvements have been made to assist some undervalued things to perform better, but a large number of players would still buy the same playstyle they see on these websites without hesitation.
They see that most people will choose an A build, while a substantial number of players will build like the B build, and those are the two builds they will buy from now on. A not underperforming build will never see the light of day until a high rank player spams it and has fantastic results, because only then will the numbers on these websites alter.
Despite all of the above, the absence of diverse builds in League of Legends is not a hot topic or a pressing issue that needs to be addressed; in fact, I believe League would be much more fascinating as a competitive game. At the end of the day, the game is still a very fantastic game with or without the diversity in item builds; after all, this is League of Legends, not Dota 2.