The Real "Problem" Which Exists In League of Legends.

The Long-Standing Dilemma

Essentially all the complaints from Season 8 and even much of Season 7 is related to "too much damage", "damage creep", "dying too fast", etc. These complaints might be at least slightly truthful, as Keystones added scaling damage into League which never existed previously. At first glance, it might feel like the best solution is to reduce how much damage champions can deal, but that in itself doesn't fix snowballing. Riot being able to see this, realizes that snowballing is the problem as that's what allows massive levels of damage to be obtained so quickly and aims to reduce the effects of snowballing with additional shutdown bonuses. This still won't solve the key problem, which has actually always existed in League of Legends as long as the game has been released.

Champions that have been capable of quickly bursting down an enemy's health have always been considered broken. Way back in Season 2 and 3, we had Nidalee capable of 1 hitting champions with her spear. There was Riven, when she had huge base damage on her Q, capable of being a dominating lane bully. Obviously, from there the list goes on and on of examples where champions have been super strong and capable of quickly bursting down enemies. Riot has tried many things over the years, from making Bruisers and Tanks more durable, creating new items for durability, increasing the strength of existing defense items, to flat out removing items from the game (Deathfire Grasp).

During all of these stages, there has been one outstanding point which can easily be noticed: Some champions burst too quickly ( i.e. most assassins), and others are capable of surviving for far too long (i.e. old Maokai). Regardless of how much balancing Riot does, this issue has always existed in League of Legends. There's a few factors which have contributed to this long standing problem. The primary reason for this issue comes from the openness of the systems in place. All champions are capable of using all of the Runes, and almost all champions have all of the items available to them. There are a couple exceptions in relation to the items, but it's a very minimal effect since there are only two range gated items. When all the pool of champions has access to the same things, this in turn creates outliers where certain champions can become much more relevant than others.

Understanding What Champion's Do:

Take a look at the Wiki. We'll use Aatrox, since he's the first champion alphabetically.

• http://leagueoflegends.wikia.com/wiki/Aatrox

The first thing that should stand out right away is a big circle which indicates how resourceful the champion is in several ares.

We have:

• Damage
• Defense
• Mobility
• Utility
• Crowd Control

In addition to this, I'm also going to toss on another one:

• Range

From here, we have a bunch of different categories of things, and most champions have several of these within their kit.

1. Displacement
2. Knock-up
3. Stun
4. Knock-back
5. Slow
6. Silence
7. Shield
8. Speed boost
9. Dash
10. Heal
11. Immunity
12. Buff

So once again, we'll use Aatrox as our example. Looking at each one of his abilities, we can see he has the following things from our list.

Passive:

• Range Buff [50 bonus range]
• Damage Buff [8-16% max health bonus damage]
• Cooldown Reduction Buff [2 second reduction per attack]
• Heal Reduction Buff

First Ability

• Damage Buff (25%) [Second Cast]
• Damage Buff (50%) [Third Cast]
• Damage Buff (50%) [Special Zone]
• Knock-up

Second Ability

• Slow [15-35%]
• Displacement [Chained]
• Displacement [Pull]

Third Ability

• Heal [20 - 30% Damage]
• Dash [up to 2 times]
• Damage Buff [15-55 damage]
• Auto Attack Reset (Buff)
• No Animation Lock (Immune)

Fourth Ability

• Displacement [Fear]
• Speed Boost [+120-240]
• Size Buff
• Damage Buff [20-30% AD]
• Heal [15-50% maximum health]
• Cannot Die (Immunity)
• Untargetable (Immunity)

That was really long! Here we can clearly see, Aatrox does A LOT of things. When you break down each champion with a similar list to this one, you can start to understand the major problem behind allowing unrestricted access to all of the items and runes. With each one of these that exists (on a champion), there's more and more chance that there's some aspect that can be abused with the right combination. For most players, including myself, the thing we want the least is the to die before we can blink. The unfortunate reality is that there's much more contributing to these issues than meets the eye.

Reducing all damage in League of Legends might sound like an easy solution but even if that was done, the next champion down the list with an abuse-able trait or damage number will be the next thing down the line waiting. Since not all champions have the same components or amount of components in their kits, even if every champion was given equal damage, some champions would still be too strong. The differing strengths of each champion is what makes them unique and defines who they are, so it would ruin the game to attempt to make them all equal. To point out an example, in Final Fantasy 14 online all of the classes have different skills but they essentially all do the same basic functions. To me, that makes for a really boring game! What exactly can be done to ease some of the problem? Well there is most likely one thing which would help certainly.

Slowing Matches Down

Many of us as human beings have our own agendas. It's difficult at times, to be glued to the computer for anywhere up to an hour, and I believe this is in part why the decision would be made to take a stab at reducing game length if you're in charge of development in League of Legends. Shorter matches mean less AFK'ing players, more matches that can be played, and hopefully more activity in-game to help keep players from feeling bored. The thought behind what Riot has been doing makes sense from a logical standpoint, but perhaps not as perfected on the execution. Naturally, since decreasing match lengths caused many of the problems to begin with, one might think reversing and slowing matches back down would be the obvious solution. There is one other way however where I believe damaged can be seemingly "reduced" without actually increasing how long matches last.

The basic idea is to implement a hard cap on damage, which would be set based on maximum health. There are already quite a few of these caps in place in the game, but all of them are related to Jungle monsters. If this were added to all sources of damage (keystones, abilities, and basic attacks), it would help once more develop meaningful game play and reduce the effects of snowballing slightly. The exact method of implementation would likely take me far too long to realistically think about and design, but logically limiting overkill damage (or just excessive damage) would be easily accomplished through this method. This is a mechanic which I believe to be under utilized, and would be a good median to help keep matches at a lower length without forcing players to deal with extreme snowballing.

In Case You Fell Asleep

In conclusion:

1. Champion damage is too high because of snowballing.
2. Damage cannot be directly reduced due to not all champion's being created equal and the shared aspects of the game.
3. Hard caps should be implemented on all damage sources instead of only exclusively on Jungle monsters, to reduce excessive and over kill damage from snowballing.

Sorry for the insanely long read, and thank you for viewing my post.

Take care. :)