int damage/ pen builds/ tank balance

[Slushiestclub60]

I can't stress this enough how damage is running the game and mopping tanks clean off the battle ground. Even if your counter building a player building full damage can easily kill you with 2 full rotations of abilities even if you have 300 of each prots which is insane. Defense out trades damage yea right :/. smite 1 tanks make smite 2 tanks look like free punching bags and the amount of prots you get from items is absolutely horrible.

[HEX: SOLO QUEUE]

I only play Arena. I have several tanks and several mages at mastery 10. It doesn't feel good on either side. Is that balance? Maybe.

The best tank items are not pure protections, they are flat damage mitigation, Onis and Prophetic Cloak are basically always required as is Anhk. It doesn't leave a ton of flexibility. Spirit robe for the spike prots and healing, and Draconic for stacking prots are good too. Tanks tend to have to rely more on CC and mobility skills to get away or they're dead from focus fire and over the top CC with seemingly 0 diminishing returns - but Arena is 100% team fights unless people are bad, those are less common in Conquest until the end.

For mages you're also always required to build anti-heal and cdr to some extent. Pen is not always required depending on team comp, sometimes int/cdr are better. There is more build variety here but not by much, almost all builds require Tahuti and if you're going to build any kind of pen Obsidian Shard is the obvious choice, these two together are over 6K GP forcing them to be your last two items generally. Even Anubis point blank with Totem of Death and Obsidian Shard can't melt a tank who has any escape cooldowns to use, in my experience, even from earlier today.

Hunters seem to have the easiest and best scaling (crit and attack speed are both broken). Some of them are just broken OP like Artemis. Warriors with hybrid builds are often both out tanking and out DPSing pure tanks. This kind of ♥♥♥♥ is where the bad balance is, and some of that is down to stupid aspects.