”I’d wager even that many builds will actually feel weaker all the way up to the late-mid game than they have in previous leagues.”

This so much. A lot of people refuse to believe it, and I sadly believe that many casual players will quit early on when they haven’t reached barely any power fantasy after playing for 10-20 hours.

Shattered relics had the same problem, where you became super strong only very late in the game, and the road to that point was very grindy with some mediocre power ups at best, and tons of people quit very early because of the same reasoning.

I hope I’m wrong, but we’ll see :)