So a person on the Twisted Treeline discord asked a kind of important question, are the gold funnel changes going to affect twisted treeline. We've been doing a meta for a while now, longer then this has been around on rift, where the "Top" laner farms jungle and top while there's a ad/ap carry and support in bottom. My question is, will the changes on the rift nerf our meta into the ground, seeing as there are less monsters on treeline already?
From Quick Gameplay Thoughts
#Gold Funneling Questions
When talking about our changes to address gold funneling earlier in the week I saw quite a few questions that that post didn't cover cropping up. Figured it would be good to cover them today as a result. Apologies for those of you who've read some of this before, likely to be a fair bit of repetition, would rather err on the side of talking too much than too little on this though.
**Why nerf funneling, what's wrong with another strategy being used? **
We're hitting funneling because of what it does to both early game interaction and power curves. It certainly creates some interesting variety of team comps and strategy. It does so by turning mid lane into a low interaction position though, instead of a really active one and by pushing a lot more gold onto champs than they've been balanced around. In some cases that holds up fine, in others it removes too much counterplay from playing against them.
**Why is funneling fine in bot lane then, but not when it's mid/jungle? **
While in both cases there are two champs on one team, with one of them taking all the farm, things are noticeably different. In bot it's one champ getting all of one gold stream, rather than pushing two gold streams onto a single champ. Additionally bot lane still has a lot of interaction going on, with both sides trading/harassing and at least one side generally looking for kill opportunities.
**What about Twisted Treeline, funneling has been going on there for a long time **
It has, and that means changing it's a pretty substantial upheaval, given it's so core to how TT's been played for quite a while. At least in the short term we'll be keeping these changes that nerf gold funneling on SR only.
**Why not nerf support gold instead since they're the problem? ** We're seeing funneling create mid laners (or mid funneled junglers) with 50% more gold than the enemy mid at the 15 minute mark. Even if we reduced the amount of gold supports were getting substantially (e.g. 500 less by 15:00) that doesn't address the core issue here that's making funneling powerful. That's not to say supports necessarily are or aren't in the appropriate place power wise in general, but that for this particular problem we don't think they're the primary cause.
