why was stoneplate removed?

I removed Stoneplate for several reasons:

1. Tanks only have space for one capstone item in a non-mythic system. Jak'sho has a much stronger theme and is much more in line with the tank fantasy (become more durable if you can survive for a while), so Jak'sho was chosen for this slot over Stoneplate.

2. Stoneplate's active in its most recent form was anti-burst, which is at odds with the general structure of tank builds, particularly with the changes for S14. We wanted to make tanks more durable across the board (which we did, by ~7% slower time to die in champ combat for tanks) which removed some need for anti-burst tools - if you're just tankier at a baseline, this naturally makes anti-burst tools less relevant and therefore less deserving of a spot in the shop.

3. Stoneplate's shape required it to be heavily teamfight bound (via the %resist scaling per enemy) in a way that was low-satisfaction and overly biased lategame tanks towards only being useful in 5v5s. Tanks are naturally good in teamfights, so we didn't want their capstone item to overly sharpen that and preferred to have a capstone that would still be powerful in smaller skirmishes and sidelanes (e.g. Jak'sho).

4. Overall satisfaction of Stoneplate was low for most players - even when it was powerful, the purchase rate was low and it never rated well in our player feedback/survey data.

None of this is to say that Stoneplate was an unsalvageable item or terrible for the game or anything like that, it was more that it didn't fit into the system that we were making given that we didn't believe it could coexist with a Jak'sho that was actually powerful as a scaling later purchase.

One thing we considered was making an IE/Quickblades type structure where tanks could buy one of either Stoneplate or Jak'sho but given that tanks are not a naturally scaling class and are not overly bound to their capstone items having two items in that slot seemed like a low-value proposition - as you can see today, with Jak'sho not being purchased for most tanks until slot 4 or 5 (5 or 6 for some tanks), meaning they don't even finish it in most games.

To be clear, Stoneplate was not removed because it was an active - in fact, I tested a few active items to try to maintain the same number of actives in the tank system as a whole, but the items that tested well and fit into the slots we were looking for ended up being non-active items so we ended up -1 active in the system.

Not that we tested for S14. However, I did make Mantle of the Twelfth Hour in Wild Rift as a Lifeline tank item before I left WR to come back to work on League. Based on my experience making that item in WR, I believe HoT effects usually serve the tank space better than shields for Lifeline items for a number of reasons, not least of which is that it gives tanks more power in prolonged engagements (again, similar to Jak'sho vs Stoneplate where core tank patterns are best supported by long-term power rather than concentrated momentary power - the shield is much more temporary than the heal).

No problem! I enjoy being able to talk through thought processes and design decisions, so it's nice being able to pop in every now and then and answer questions.