A Plea to Riot: General reworking & a note on Jayce
I don’t like the idea of reworking a champion as a way of reliably balancing it. Here’s an analogy for reworking a champion. You took and Olympic gold medal away from someone, melt it, turn it into a bracelet, and give it back to them. Sure, they have a shiny new bracelet, but they are never getting that gold medal back. Reworking is like retaking a class because you failed every test/exam/quiz. The approach shouldn’t be “it’s okay if I fail my exams because I can just retake the class.” The approach should be: “I’m going to work hard on my exams so I don’t have to retake the class. But even if I do have to, it’s not the end of the world.”
There have been a lot of reworks in the past year or two. Some of them good, some of them not so much. Here’s an example of why I feel I need to speak out against reworking: Cassiopeia. Now, I’m not saying that she’s a bad champion right now. I’m not saying that the rework ruined her. I’m not saying that the rework was bad. I’m saying that the amount of effort that seemed to go into actually balancing the champion before a 2nd rework, was almost non-existent. After her 1st rework there were 2 patches of fine-tuning, post rework stuff. Then, from between patch 5.2 and 6.9, there were a couple of small nerfs given to her, and that’s about it. Go check out her patch history, you won’t find a lot in between the reworks. It’s not the rework that was bad; it’s the way the rework was approached that I think is bad.
The real reason I’m writing this post: I don’t want to see more of my favorite champions die (not necessarily just to reworks). Back in season 4, I had to completely remake my champion pool because 5 of my champions were nerfed into the ground. The only one who has re-emerged since then is Kassadin. Fizz was good for a while, but he was gutted with the trickster cooldown nerfs.
I’m really writing this post for Jayce. Jayce is one of my longtime favorite champions (ever since release). And the same holds true for kassadin. Now, I’m not a two trick. There are a lot of champions that I play and enjoy playing. Fizz was another one of my top 5 long time favorites, but after long enough I’ve somehow learned to just accept that I’m not allowed to both be good at this game and be a fizz player at the same time anymore. I don’t want Jayce to die. Jayce has recently become very popular in competitive, which means his play rate in solo queue is going to go way up, which means that you guys are probably already brainstorming ways to nerf him. I don’t have a problem with you guys nerfing him. I wrote a post not too long ago on how Jayce didn’t need the buffs you gave him, which surprisingly got over 10k views. I wrote that post because I didn’t want to see Jayce get overnerfed as a result of being given buffs he didn’t need. So if you guys want to revert the last 2 buffs you gave him, then I’m fine with that. But if you’re looking beyond that, I just want to beg you to not kill Jayce.
I had to wait a horrendously long time before Kassadin became good again after his rework. Please, don’t make me wait that long again. Don’t kill Jayce like you killed mid fizz. Don’t kill jayce like you killed ekko mid, as a result of trying to nerf ekko top. Don’t kill jayce like you killed fizz mid with the trickster nerfs. Don’t kill jayce like you killed ahri by replacing her damage amplification with utility and then further nerfing her damage. (There I said it, Ahri is dead. There are reasons she hasn’t been played in high elo or competitive for the longest time now).
My suggestion for nerfing Jayce: Nerf the manaless build. If you want to keep Jayce competitively viable, given a certain level of skill, without having him being a near must-pick or ban, then nerf the mana-less build. Nerf his mana per level, such that he has 100-150 less base mana at level 11, and nerf the mana cost on his hammer Q, so that the mana cost goes up with level. If you touch his damage, cooldowns, or try to take something away from his kit, it’s not going to end well for Jayce. I’ve rewritten this post twice from accidentally clicking create discussion instead of post discussion, so if this all seems a bit fast or like I skipped a small thing or two, that’s probably why. I tried to simplify everything. Please Riot, don’t kill Jayce.