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Azir Q/W Casting Quality-of-Life change

Kiharon·9/29/2014, 11:54:53 PM·6 votes·3,766 views

During a few games with Azir, I found the way his Q and W respond to being cast "out of range" to be inconsistent with the casting mechanics of other apparently similar skills. When either of these abilities is cast with the cursor outside of the casting range, it immediately triggers in what appears to be the farthest it can in the direction of the cursor. This can, of course, lead to undesirable results. As shown in the attached screenshot, casting Q can result in soldiers moving very little or even the opposite direction of the casting arrow.

The change I would like to see is to have Azir move into range and then cast the skill to get the desired result.

This would make them similar to other skills of this kind, such as Orianna's Command: Attack. When you place the targeting indicator outside the circle, she moves towards the target point until it is in range, then launches the skill. There are some skills, most (all?) of which are blinks or dashes, that have the "farthest possible in the direction" kind of behavior, but neither Azir's Q nor W have this feel to me.

One potential question that comes to mind with this change is: What happens if all active soldiers time out during Azir's travel time to execute a Q? I propose that Azir stops movement immediately when the last soldier times out. This seems the most consistent with what happens when you right-click to auto-attack a minion that dies during your travel time. (This is not an issue for W since you are creating the soldier, not using it.)

8 Comments

Hullabaloo9079/30/2014, 12:49:06 AM1 votes

Not a bad idea, but we really need to see azir after the next patch.

sfts9/30/2014, 8:55:27 AM1 votes

I think W should have this kind of behavior because when you're trying to escape over a wall (with W-E) you have to hold back your W for longer than actually needed just to make sure the soldier actually spawns behind the wall instead of making you look like an idiot.

For his Q however, I think the path indicator for the soldiers should show the actual paths the soldiers will take. It is nothing less then confusing and clunky right now. Also, the indicator suggests the soldiers would go to the tip of the indicator whereas only one is going to do so and the other one will be placed on the first soldier's left.

One last thing, the range of his Q is slightly higher than the circle indicator.

Zushakon9/30/2014, 4:18:51 PM1 votes

Here's a reddit thread about just this.

And here's the relevant post:

DanielZKlein We've gone back and forth on what we call "cast outside of range" on both W and Q a hundred times, it feels like, in production. I even had a version in where /joke would swap between the two so you could try which one you liked better. I think we dedicated something like two weeks to this question.

Let me try to explain why we landed on this cast paradigm (cast outside of range, always cast to farthest point possible). There are two competing desires for the Azir player, both with the Q and the W (it's much harder for the W, because the W is so very range constrained).

I want to position my soldiers precisely; I want to place a soldier between the minion wave and my enemy to zone the enemy more effectively, or I want to position a soldier inside a brush to check the brush.
I want my soldiers to do a thing now; I want a soldier to appear as far ahead of me as possible, so I can Q it into the enemy or E to it, or I want to just move my soldiers as far ahead of me as possible to cut through the enemy, cut off their escape and slow them.
demands no cast outside of range; it wants the usual "if I click outside of range, my character walks up to range and places the spell (W or Q) precisely where I clicked."
demands cast outside of range; if you want 2), you want your spell to do a thing the instance you press the button, no matter the range. You want the game to find the FARTHEST POSSIBLE POSITION and place the spell there.

(There are hybrid versions, some of which we tried; one was "if you cast only X units outside of range, cast to farthest possible; if you cast more than that out of range, walk up and place". This was probably the worst version)

Our decision came down to what was the less frustrating version. It turns out, players want 1) usually during low intensity situations--checking a brush, farming the lane, etc. Players want 2) during high intensity situations--teamfights or setting up for teamfights, following up on ganks, etc. The cost of a skill failing to do what you want it to do scales with the intensity of the situation. What I mean by that is that when your Q/W don't do what you want them to do in a low intensity situation it's what we technically call an "ear flick". When a skill fails in a high intensity situation, it's what I technically call a "groin punch".

So in the end this came down to which version was less painful. After weeks of deliberation we found that this version is the less painful one.

As for comparable skills, I personally think that the argument of "skill XY has a similar targeting paradigm and works like this so your skill should also work like this" has limited usefulness. Yes, consistency is good all else being equal, but you always have to ask yourself WHY does a skill work a certain way. What is the player trying to do, and how can we help them do it?

Mage Lord Nelber10/1/2014, 7:44:03 AM1 votes

Idk... sometimes my soldiers dash entire screen lengths away when I command them to, sometimes they go do odd things, but usually the odd things is because of my fault and not understanding how the ability works with the terrain, such as going up/down hill or not through certain walls.