Yesterday's patch preview made a comment about how Ornn items are a little problematic to develop, so let's look into what exactly that means and some possible solutions.
Currently Ornn items are almost completely copypasted variants of their base items. This includes both their data (their stats, what they build out of, and their tooltips) as well as their scripts (any special effects they might do beyond just stats). Any active spell attached to the item is its own object so those don't have to be copypasted since it can just reuse the existing spell.
The Data Copypaste Problem
The data side of things currently means that any time an Ornn-upgradeable item gets a stat change, the upgrade needs to be considered as well. The data is defined as "this item gives X and this item gives Y". For example, Infinity Edge is currently +65 AD, +20% crit, +40% crit damage, and Ornn upgrades it to +95 AD and has the same value on the other stats. When Riot increased the crit damage to +50% on PBE, they had to also separately increase Ornn's upgrade to +50%. If they wanted to change the base item's AD, they would have to separately consider whether they want the upgrade to remain at that +30 AD offset and update it accordingly.
The tooltip side of things also requires some manual work, although it's a bit more self-updating. Tooltips are defined in multiple pieces, such as name, stats, and description. The Ornn upgrades are able to reuse the description, and obviously want to override the name, but they also need to override the stats to show the special "Ornn icon" to signify which stats have been upgraded. However, should the tooltip be changed too drastically, such as to add flavor text or a "dealt this much damage" tracker, then the Ornn item will also need to be informed of this change, because those are defined as new pieces of the tooltip (although like the description, it's still able to reuse the base item's pieces).
Then there are also the data values for things like base damages and scalings. These also need to be updated on the Ornn item if the base item is changed. However this is probably not entirely necessary since conventionally almost every Ornn upgrade is purely an upgrade to stats rather than their passives or actives (although shoutout to lethality for not actually being a proper item stat and having to be a data value instead). The scripts would still be able to look up the values on the base item without necessarily needing them to be located on the Ornn item as well. One complication here though would be tooltips, but it's still possible for an item's tooltip to access another item's values, for example instead of deals @Damage@ damage it would look something like deals @Item.1001:Damage@ damage (and in the case of lethality you would just not do this so that it grabs the upgraded value). This however is kind of annoying to have to write constantly.
The Script Copypaste Problem
Now we get into scripts. This part gets kind of weird for historical reasons. Because there used to be no limit on how many times you could purchase an item, most legendary items were built in a way that sort of made them easier to copypaste. Unique passives were implemented as the item constantly applying a buff that handled the passive. If another item tried to apply that same buff, then it would just get refreshed. The end result is you only have one copy of the passive running at a time. Almost every legendary used to have unique passives. For example, Infinity Edge's bonus crit damage was done this way, so that six iedges wouldn't give you +300% bonus crit damage. This meant that Ornn's copypastes only really had to copypaste the application of the buff and not much else, essentially saying "yo iedge give me that crit damage too please".
With the mythic item overhaul, Riot began enforcing the limit of one purchase of each legendary item. This also allowed them to significantly simplify the scripts for items, as they no longer needed to do the boilerplating of handling unique passives if every legendary item was already a unique purchase. On the initial PBE patch, they had not yet added the purchase lockouts, which meant you could do things like buy multiple copies of Bork and have each of them apply their passive as a result. Six iedges today (after the current PBE changes) would now give you that +300% bonus crit damage.
This simplification also extended to unique actives, for example if you bought multiple Redemptions or a second Redemption after having Ornn's upgraded Redemption. Unique actives were implemented as iterating over your inventory slots and putting all of your Redemptions on cooldown (I'm not really sure why the game was never told to understand unique actives better given it can still remember them if you sell and repurchase the item). Adding in an Ornn item means it also needs to add checks for putting Ornn's Redemption on cooldown. However nowadays you can't have more than one copy of an active, so this bit of work is no longer needed.
However the problem is now every item's passive is implemented in the item itself. This means that copypasting the item requires copypasting its entire behavior. There's no longer a nice way to just opt in to copying something else's passive since there's no buff to just slap onto the item owner.
Solution 1: Less Copypaste
Except... that's not actually true. We used to have "enchantments" on boots and jungle items. These function rather similarly to Ornn upgrades in that they are separate copies of the base item with some variations. In order to specifically not have to copypaste their behaviors, they built a system that actually allowed an item to define itself as copying other scripts for its passive effects. This also used to be done for Catalyst items pre-mythic overhaul, although I'm not aware of any other non-enchantment item being set up this way. Currently nothing significantly uses this system, although it's still functional (a few of the boots are still defined as working this way). This also would not necessarily require adjusting any existing items to make use of this. You could for example just tell Obsidian Cleaver to pretend to use Black Cleaver's script and Black Cleaver would never need to know.
But up to now we still haven't fully solved the issue of copypaste. We're still having to deal with multiple copies of the items in at least some regard. So is there anything else we can do?
Solution 2: Zero Copypaste
The solution I would personally prefer and the one I think they'll likely choose is to extend the item modifier system. Item modifiers are a rather niche but powerful tool. This is what Predator does to apply its active spell, icon, and tooltip to your boots without needing an extra copy of each. This is also how Magical Footwear is able to modify your upgraded boots tooltip to still note the extra speed. There actually is an Ornn item modifier already in the game, but its only purpose is to add the special border to the item icon (previously they had to use a separate icon file that included the border already applied).
What I would like to see them do is extend the item modifier system to support applying an increase in stat and changing its stat tooltips to reflect the modified stats (modifiers already support changing the item's name tooltip, although this hasn't been used in a while so it's possible it needs to be adjusted for the new tooltip system).
Now instead of having a fully separate item for the Ornn upgrade, they'd just have each literal upgrade itself (stat increases and new name and nothing else). This will solve a lot of extra hassle when updating Ornn-upgradeable items as they will now exist as a sort of separate layer over the base items. Infinity Edge can now automatically upgrade to +30 AD regardless of any change to its base value or its other stats. Obsidian Cleaver is now literally just a Black Cleaver wearing a disguise. Any passive values no longer need to be copied over, and you could easily extend the item modifier system again to support changing those as well if needed (such as again for lethality, although it should really be made a proper item stat). The biggest problem would honestly be just getting the stat tooltips to update dynamically because that part of the tooltip is not currently built to change mid-game, but even that has some obvious solutions (like maybe the item modifier just supplies a prefix and suffix to the stat line, which is normally empty by default). Clones also already copy item modifiers, although it seems to only update their tooltips and not their icons.
I will be very interested to see what they end up choosing to do. I wouldn't be too surprised if they decide to just keep copypasting to avoid needing engineering work.
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