Are Champions With More Than 4/5 Abilities Good for League?

Forhonor321··4 votes·1,651 views

I mean when it comes down to it they're harder to balance due to everything they have on them and, from what I can tell, a lot of them are just annoying/frustrating to deal with. And before you start saying it, yes I'm aware that the people who play these champions think they're fun and some may require a lot of skill and experience to get a good play and they do have counter play but honestly when I do meet those people who are practically masters or one trick mains of them I will more than likely always have a bad time.

Jayce is just an absolute nightmare for me to deal with when I get top lane, as well as the champion I hate the most in this category of champions. Call me whatever you want but for some reason I just don't know how to beat him or look for when he's going to do his combo at me and chunk me for a shit ton of health. And of course when I try to recall he just gates and Q's at me to either stop/kill me because, you know, he's also a ranged champion and can somewhat harass me when I'm trying to CS.

Idk, I'm just starting to get really salty with these champions lately. Like I said, some people will say that they're fun but also remember that there will be people who will say Yasuo is fun (while many people, if not everyone else, hate playing against and with him).

8 Comments

Tel Saro3 votes

Nerf Lee sin.

Lux HD1 votes

Poppy or Illaoi into Jayce.. I always do well against them with those champs.

Silly Neeko1 votes

What lux said.

With jayces if they are good, the only way you will see the empowered nuke coming at your face is once he uses his...... Q? And then puts down his gate. The shot is slow at first so you need quick reaction time to deal with that. Or just get armor and tank it like a boss. Yes playing against those champiojs is annoying, BUT as you had said you already know, they need to spend a lot of time practicing with them. I personally can not play jayce like most do, same with elise, but give me a zilean and ill go wherever i choose to. Give me Nami and ill do my best to get the adc a double kill early on..... Which happens often if the enemy adc and supp decide to charge in and not just poke. Give me Blitzcrank and ill make you die in 1 second or less with full AP blitzcrank unless you build magic resist and health.

Everyone has their strengths and their weaknesses, yours is keeping track of the multi ability set champion's abilities and when they use them. That is part of what gives those Jayces their strength. Dont think of fighting jayce as "oh god another jayce" but look for things you can take away from each game about jayce. Try to find one thing that you can take away from the game either win or lose.

Requiemsfire1 votes

Obviously all of these champs are healthy

Gnar LeeSin Elise Nidalee who have absolutely no balance issues of course.

kile1471 votes

Gnar is fine.

Lee's ability setup could be fine if they did it differently, he just has so many tools that he's a generalist that stifles diversity. It would actually be really cool if his ability setup forced more resource decisions, but because of his costs and passive he just spams abilities and weaves autos in between.

Elise and Nid have the same issue that Jayce does, which is that they can cover the weaknesses of one form by switching to the other and they can do it at will. This is the issue they fixed in Gnar by taking away active control of the transformation.

Abyssphere1 votes

I think they're good for League in that they're popular and provide something very different to the majority of the roster. Not amazing in terms of balance health but there's more metrics to what's good for the game than that.

Teridax681 votes

They could be, yes, and in practice they often are; the issue is how those kits are implemented. So far, the main issues with champions with over 4 actives have been the following:

  • Kit overload: by far the biggest issue with shapeshifters, also Lee Sin and, to a lesser extent, Rek'Sai. A lot of older kits with >4 abilities have a lot of abilities that feel stuffed there for the sake of filling up a slot, and the end result has often been champion who have access to too many different things on demand, e.g. Jayce with crowd control, DPS, mobility and poke, or Nidalee with burst, mobility, poke and sustain, which leads to kits with poorly defined weaknesses, and often too many diluted strengths. Gnar kind of dodges this by not having on-demand access to all of his kit at once, though he can feel difficult to handle when he switches forms at all the right times, and Kled, while technically a dual-kit champion, doesn't actually want to be dismounted.
  • No high moments or downtimes: An issue with a lot of shapeshifter champions specifically, i.e. Elise, Jayce and Nidalee, is that they have no real big-cooldown ability, since their ult slot is just a transform button. To some extent, this can be really boring for those champions, since they don't really have a big, game-changing active to hold onto for special occasions, but this is also really bad for their power budget, especially coupled with their on-demand access to all of their abilities, because that means they're essentially balanced around being at 100% power all the time, which has often led to them feeling unsatisfying. This is also not great for their opponents, because there isn't really a big cooldown they can exploit to get an advantage over them, and coupled with their overloaded kits, shapeshifter champions often feel like they never really have any downtimes where they're especially vulnerable.

Basically, what this means is that you can't expect a champion to have a dual kit, plus on-demand access to every single one of their abilities all the time, and be healthy, yet that's the exact situation champions like Elise, Jayce and Nidalee are in. These champions need to a) lose some of their strengths and pick up a few more weaknesses, and then either b) have some of their power locked into an effect with a long cooldown, or c) no longer have on-demand access to their entire kit in one go (or both). As long as these champions have a huge toolbox of different abilities 24/7, they're never going to feel great to play as and play against at the same time.

ZT Xperimentor1 votes

They're a cool idea . . . but considering riot has had trouble balancing champions with only 4 abilities (no extra passives/double use powers, ext), no it's not healthy. They'll end up mediocre or problematic.

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