Quick Gameplay Thoughts: August 24

Yorick's projectile is already quite slow when you consider the animation. I'm not sure that bigger E + slower E would really change all that much. It's an interesting proposal though.

Maybe you can consider not that "extreme" nerfs at this point ? Something like :

2 4 6 8 10 12 14 20 26 32 38 44 50 60 70 80 90 100

instead of

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 14 20 26 32 38 44 55 66 77 88 99

(live values are : 2 5 8 11 14 17 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 60 70 80 90 100)

Because current PBE nerfs are too harsh for every elo

I appreciate the response, but it has left me wondering a few things.

1. Meddler initially announced that both him and Garen were being nerfed to target their effect on low ELO brackets, but now from your response it seems like you believe Yorick in higher ELO brackets to be overperforming also. Is this correct or am i misinterpreting?

2. If you want to take power off the Mist Walkers, then that is perfectly fine and expected - as i agree that a lot of players do not understand what they do and how strong they can be. My question for you then becomes have you considered the proposal of changing the ratio from Total Attack Damage to Bonus Attack Damage? If you were to raise their base attack damage to 15 and keep the current per level increments, then it would take a substantial amount of attack damage to even out with the current 8.16 Mist Walkers. Not only this, but it also becomes a heavy risk heavy reward situation where you build full damage at the cost of reduced tankiness - rather than having the best of both worlds for free. The number two reddit post outlines this idea heavily and detailed, in case you didn't get a chance to check it out.

3. If you're that content with an immediate nerf to his Mist Walkers, wouldn't it seem a bit more reasonable to go for an initial reduction of 2 per level instead of 1? Losing 6 damage at level 7 per Mist Walker sucks but it's not the end of the world and somewhat manageable until a better fix comes into it. I don't see why a champion with such a low playrate and such an unusual playstyle needs such **immediate **and **drastic **fixes. In fact, he's currently the 108th most picked champion according to OP.GG.

4. Please consider the impact that any change will also have on Jungle Yorick when considering changes. While you'd think we may be the minority, Jungle Yorick actually accounts for over 50% of Yorick games on the OCE server in Platinum and above ELO ranges and is slowly picking up more and more populartiy. Me myself am exclusively a Jungle Yorick player, having reached the tops of the ladder on multiple servers and the proposed changes will effectively gut any opportunity i have to compete with meta junglers around levels 6-9 which are supposed to be one of my strongest points.

5. One thing I would like information on is Yorick's win-rate at the time of nerfing his Mist Walkers way back in patch 7.13. The damage was reduced by half at this point in time, which then left his win rate high and requiring further nerf on the Mist Walkers at a later stage. Is it possible that the Mist Walkers are not actually a primary factor that is dictating his win-rate in lower ELO brackets? For example, what happens if your changes are implemented to live and yet his winrate stays at around 55% in low ELO?

At the end of the day, I really appreciate you and Meddler being vocal with us the community with whatever changes you intend to go through with Yorick. We all want the same thing after all.

Thanks for your attention.

wait but u actually think yorick is problematic when highly oppressive champs like gangplank and kennen are meta? ur a rlly good comedian

Hi there Wittrock, I'm BaronVonScrub, aka Tiny Penis.

My Reddit post on this matter is currently sitting right near the top of front page on this matter, and I would urge you to consider the points I make there. https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/99wqhi/yorick_ghouls_at_20_base_damage_of_release/

Both Ninetales and I agree that Yorick needs nerfs, and his opponents need QOL changes to make him less unfun, but there are ways to do this without further eating into Yorick's identity as a summoner champion.

The issues generally found in low elo are not that Yorick's ghouls outright do too much damage, but that they are hard to click/easy to ignore, and that they are too reliable in their damage scaling. That is, due to the fact they scale with tAD rather than bAD, a Yorick can sit back, get 0 farm and build full tank, and still have his ghouls hurt as long as he gets the XP he needs.

Riot's proposed nerfs do not address either of these points, instead applying a flat nerf across all elos, without addressing the fact that the ghouls are simply difficult to deal with in low elo where attack move is less used. If anything, the particular timing of these nerfs within Yorick's level and item spikes cuts into 2 of the most deterministic parts of his gameplay: His level 6 all in, and his attaining of Trinity Force. These two events will happen without fail in basically every game, across all elos, but the changes even out as games go later, meaning this change disproportionately targets HIGH elo, by indirectly damaging their ability to end fast before Yorick begins to fall off.

As such, a better way to apply a global nerf, but to have it impact higher elo to a lesser degree, is to allow the higher farm-income of high elo players to buy their way out of the nerf, at least to some degree. This is done by changing the 30% tAD to a 50% bAD ratio on the ghouls, and by tacking on an extra 15 damage to compensate for the lost tAD at level 1. This still results in a nerf at level 1, and nerfs the Triforce-Sterak's-Tank build all the way through to level 18. This however more strongly and appropriately targets low elo, and doesn't cut into Yorick's fantasy to the same extent.

Please let me go into some of the maths that Ninetales and I explored concerning this, excluded from the Reddit posts so as not to flood less theorycraft-oriented minds with waffle. I hope this interests you, however.

My proposed rebalance changes the ghoul formulal from the present of 2-100 + 30%tAD, to 17-115 +50%bAD.

Consider the damage values of a ghoul at different parts of the game that are important to Yorick. The level 2 all-in, the level 3 all-in, the level 6 all-in, the buying of Triforce, the buying of Sterak's, and full build level 18. These assume the current standard of Precision+Resolve

Level 2 current: 25, 27 with conq Level 2 theoretical: 20, 24 with conq

Level 3 current: 29, 31 with conq. Level 3 theoretical: 23, 27 with conq

Level 6 current: 41, 45 with conq. Level 6 theoretical: 32, 39 with conq.

^ These early game values are all nerfs akin to what is currently proposed on the PBE.

Level 11 Tri (c): 79 Level 11 Tri (t): 67.5

Level 14 Str (c): 122.5 Level 14 Str (t): 103

^ This is both the early-mid game and the core build nerfed.

Level 18 Tank (c): 174 Level 18 Tank (t): 149

^ And so it can be seen that it is a nerf throughout the game for those who would go Tri-Sterak's-Tank. To be fair, the latter values excluded an active conquerer for ease, it but should be noted that level 18 conq currently adds 12 damage to a ghoul, whereas the theoretical value adds 18 - still an overall nerf.

On the other hand, would this break a more damage oriented Yorick? Should you invest into 14 AD runes, at the cost of your early health, AS and conquerer, your ghouls gain a flat 7 damage at every level. However, say you absolutely abuse Transcendence and Gathering storm, and end up with a total of 100 AD from runes alone. This grants ghouls just 20 AD over what they currently do, at the cost of all the health and utility in the other trees. If you were to go an extremely high AD build (Sterak's, BC, GA, DD, Youmuu's) as well as abusing AD runes? Say you end up on 500 AD, 147 of which is your base AD.

Full damage (c): 250 Full damage (t): 292

Even at 500 AD, the ghouls gain just 42 AD each, and this is a build that can never be viable in the top lane due to how easy it is to bully down, and how squishy it is.

A more realistic bruiser build, where one attempts to buy their way out of their nerf somewhat without going glass cannon, may be damage runes granting +40 AD, Sterak's, Black Cleaver, Guardian angel, and 2 tank items.

Bruiser (c): 204 Bruiser (t): 214

And so this becomes a slight buff, at the cost of have 3 AD items, with no triforce and with pure damage runes; this seems fair.

Add to this ghoul rebalance an increase in their model size and clickbox of 15% to make them more visible and targetable, and this addresses the QOL issue that makes Yorick frustrating to play against.

The proposed changes on Riot's part:

Flat ghoul damage nerf.

This hits every elo, but most affects high elo due to the lessened ability to close out before being offscaled. This cuts hard into Yorick's fantasy, and doesn't disincentivise people playing overly safe as Yorick in lane. It also doesn't address the glaring issue of the ghouls being too hard to attack without using attack move, and further damages Yorick's teamfight potential, forcing him further into a one-style splitpush mentality.

The proposed changes on my part:

Rebalanced ghoul scalings, scale up ghoul model.

This still nerfs the laning phase overall, but specifically targets passive play, and poor farming that are found in low elo, whilst allowing higher elo players to buy their way out of the nerf at least in part. This stops Yorick from being railroaded quite so much into the Triforce-only splitpusher Riot's changes force him toward. Ghoul damage is lessened across the game unless you specifically itemise for that ghoul damage, and even then it comes at the tradeoff of survivability. The QOL change of the ghoul size makes Yorick less frustrating to deal with for lower elo where attack moving is rarer and click-accuracy may be less, and this also targets low elo moreso than high.

I understand that these changes are somewhat harder to implement than a flat number drop, but I urge you to consider them all the same; there's a very dedicated playerbase when it comes to Yorick due to his unique playstyle, and as a community we feel that that playstyle is being damaged more and more with the way Riot has been changing him since his release. We don't believe that the summoner playstyle is irreconcilable with a champ who is both fun to play as and against.

Thanks for the consideration,

Baron.

Yorick : 1,85% pick rate 52,13% winrate. Nobody plays this champion, he is a niche pick and he only works in low mmrs. Gets nerfed Ahri: 6.78% pick rate 52.65% winrate. Fairly popular champion with higher winrate. Nothing planned. Stats from championhttps://champion.gg/champion/Ahri/Middle?league= https://champion.gg/champion/Yorick/Top?league= Let's be clear i am not complaning about Ahri, i am just genuinely wondering where rioters left their chromosomes, because this is too much for me, i can't handle this. Akali can dive people at lvl 2 without taking any damage from towers, Zoe oneshots people across the map, Jhin runs at 600 mspeed with 1 item, Alistar has 3 seconds of point and click ccs, AP champions push faster than AD ones, Ingite 100-0 people, creep block is the dumbest shit ever, in early game assassins overkill everything to the point where they don't have to hit a single ability to kill a tank, but you are too busy nerfing yorick, garen and tryndamere to fix the real issues of the game. Ban me for talking shit if you want,i don't care, this is my main, just don't ban my ip because my brother still plays the game fairly often.

Thought is that that would be a pretty big nerf overall though, and be fairly minimal toward smoothing out his success across MMRs.

I'm not really sure about this as a justification for not pulling that trigger. If it is a big nerf then Yorick would just need a "big" buff. Then he'd be in another balanced state only with cleaner counter play. At the end of the day that sounds "win win" for yorick and his opponents.

I guess I'll piggyback off this question, because I'm really interested to hear your perspective on it. I'm not trying to call the balance team (or you) out for anything, but I want to talk about the argument of nerfing strong champions vs. buffing the things that do well against them. It's a topic I'm genuinely interested in.

I feel Garen and Yorick share at least one characteristic with Quinn, a champion I'm much more familiar with: all three of them are, generally, below average in popularity. Of course, we've seen all three of them performing very highly at different points this season - but I guess I'm curious as to why those champions are nerfed (in Quinn's case, multiple times) instead of trying to make changes in other areas of the game, like buffing champions that normally serve as a counterpick that may be weak.

I'm not trying to protest the nerfs. In particular, (again, because I'm more familiar with her), Quinn did need a nerf. And, I understand that if something changes and a champion's too strong with it, then nerfs are the way to go. (The addition of Stormrazor is a perfect example of this for Quinn.) But if she needed it, then she's been needing it since 8.6, when her last set of changes came. Since that patch, the game has drastically shifted around her. Many of the inhibitors that previously kept Quinn from being so successful became weaker as a result of huge changes in midseason. Her counters began to fall out of favor in top lane, burst damage was more and more frequent (much of which was due to her abusing Stormrazor so well), tanks were a rare sight outside of maybe Dr. Mundo, and crit marksmen were just bad. And as a result, she shot up from her post-8.6 state of "really good, but flying under the radar" to "best in the game and must be banned" status.

And I think the same general concept applies to Garen and Yorick as well - Wukong's another one that's had attention recently. They're all four champions who generally don't have huge player bases, and if they're dominating the game, I feel it's likely less due to the champion's individual power and more due to the things that are good against the champion not being very good.

Last patch (again, going back to Quinn specifically because I know her better) Quinn got her second nerf in a row. Her nerf in 8.15 was expected and quite fair honestly. But her nerf in 8.16, while appropriate when you look at a snapshot of her state and the state of the game right now, was also compounded by nerfs to many of her most common runes and buffs to tanks and other marksmen that build crit. While she's taken a significant hit in the winrate department, she's still doing okay for now. But I'd be lying if didn't say I was worried that when the meta shifts, when tanks become a staple of top lane again, and now that crit marksmen are finally beginning to return to form, Quinn will be left weak and unable to compete as a result of all the stacked nerfs she received, and will be forgotten for months as it historically seems that she often is.

So I guess a TL;DR is I'm asking what you think about buffing things that counter strong, but generally unpopular-when-balanced champions like Quinn and Wukong, instead of nerfing them when they're largely strong because of the current game state?

{quoted}

If either of them ends up absolutely terrible in high MMR we'll look at them for potential follow up buffs. Having said that both have been performing really well even in high MMR recently, so even there we've got some room to cut.

Garen needs a more in-depth rework imho. When the base kit doesn't offer much, there's not much you can do about balance either, so he ends up either too strong or too weak.

I remember Reav3 saying that he talked with live gameplay team and that Garen is "definitely up for a Rek'sai-scope of rework"

https://nexus.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/2018/06/ask-riot-executes-and-ssg-skins/ Here it was already said that the likes of Garen and Darius don't get because they feel they are part of their skillset, while wasn't deemed as such and thats why his indicator was promised.

One form of data I'd be really interested in seeing is how a champion's winrate changes as their opponent has played more games against the champion.

My thinking is that 1. Some champions have some really punishing mechanics/abilities that you very quickly learn about but maybe not quite quickly enough to play around them the first few times you see them (Morg Q, bliztcrank Q, basically Ilaoi's entire kit) and then 2. some other champions have unconventional play patterns that take some experience to play against (Singed, Shaco, Fiddlesticks), and I'd be very interested to see how the learning curve differs when playing against those champions as opposed to someone a little more straightforward to play against.

Why is The Dark Seal allowed to remain so cheap when the support items were bumped up in price?

Yes, the support items were noticeably allowing for more healing than might otherwise be good, but the champions using them have to take poke from two characters rather than one. If too much sustain is an issue you want to address in the early game, The Dark Seal and 3 pots as a start shouldn't exist for solo laners, right?

: Na that combo is fine, you worry too much. How about a drink instead :^)