Balances Issues: A Real Discussion
First and foremost, I'm not someone who believes in a wide pool of champions that are OP. What I deem and characterize as OP are champions who are able to abuse Riot's shortcomings to see how items and metashifts will impact a champion or champion pool. There are champions that are high mechanics and are therefore more rewarding and those that are low mechanics and intentionally low rewarding. Now, saying that, I think there's some key points we need to fully understand.
This is not a slam on Riot but I can't, for the life of me, understand why the balance team seems to ignore so many thread posts. There's champions that are seriously toxic to play against and I understand that. The forums likes to bandwagon on that and cry and complain on their level 30 unranked accounts (because even they don't full believe the notion that their champion that they complain about is really that broken). At the same time, many champions that are complained about, i.e. Yasuo, have clearcut weaknesses and HARD counter picks that seemingly no one wants to talk about. This thread isn't about specifics, just that I think it's important to sometimes throw a little help to the low elo players that don't understand how champions like Malzahar can nullify a Yasuo, or how abusing minion waves can impede Yasuo's mobility.
What this thread is, is for a SERIOUS discussion of champions that need balancing in the right way without flaming. We need people who are willing to put forth SANE ideas that make actual sense. Most of the time, we get those occasional players who would probably find a way to feed Aatrox and then complain that this "controllable cannon minion" is OP (I forgot who said that, but shout out to that hilarious summation of Aatrox). What I would like is if those people who main the champions would be more forthcoming about how to play vs said champion. Obviously, this isn't possible because the number of people who are on these forums probably wouldn't be able to accept that. Still, I can hope :[
Anyways, I think the main problem we have with balance at this current time is that there is a distinct pool of champions that have a tendency, every season, to have spikes in game play and win rate. The reasons for this, I'm not fully aware of. Maybe their mechanics need work on or items are just that hard to balance when you consider that there's over 100 champions you need to try and accommodate. The latter seems to happen more likely.
If we look at examples, let's just throw Hecarim's name out there. Why does he seem to have a small period of every season where he treads very heavily towards pick/ban but then the rest of the year he's quiet. He's supposed to fall off and yes he does, but he has this strange tendency to have such punishing gank potential that once he picks up that sheen, it becomes a flash or die situation. Even with flash, not being enough. The mobility as well as the fear is maybe not necessary to be combined into one kit. But then how do we compensate? As much as we can complain about a champion like Hecarim, he isn't always popular. He's only big in short spurts of the season, but he has a consistency to have those spurts every season.
On the flip side, let's put out Evelynn. I think Evelynn is a good poster child for how balance maybe should be approached. They hit her pre-emptively, knowing that whatever patch may come, she WILL be strong and she WILL be a problem. Balancing around a champion that has theability to ignore vision (unless you were smart and actually warded the jungle lol but let's not talk about sensible counterplay at this moment) early game and can make the enemy lose lane just by playing too safe and scared of ganks. The longer she doesn't show up on the map, the stronger her presence actually is. The greatest thing is that Evelynn doesn't have those same spikes as a champion like Hecarim would. She's hardly a champion that has a tendency to see pick/ban rates every season. Maybe that's not a good thing, but maybe it is.
I also want to talk about itemization and how they really show how unbalanced a champion is. I think Kayle is a really strong case for this. She's weak. Her laning presence is bad because while she can poke you down and slow you, she doesn't have the mobility to really avoid ganks or mobile bruisers. Her damage is also not very noticeable once champions close in on her. Usually, those champions are bruisers like Darius or Olaf that are very sticky and don't care about a high cooldown slow. Then you add on her squishiness and she's just not viable in most metas. But her strength is scaling. She will scale out of control. And it's not like her mechanics are high so she's not overbearingly rewarding when she does reach a point where she can just sit there and AA with her ult and dole out some serious damage.
But what happens when you try and balance an item like Guinsoo's that is niche for a very, very small pool of champions. I haven't seen the effect on the current buff so I'm not speaking on that. But there's a tendency for Kayle to become a problem when that specific item gets buffed. It happens every single time. What I can't understand is, how does Riot not see this coming? I mean I look at patch notes and I can usually call what's gonna happen. Which champions will become either FoTM or so overbearing that they'll become pick/ban. This isn't something that I'm overly confident about, it's something I'm realistic about. History repeats itself and the solution is always we'll wait and see.
Another point I want to put out that has been bothering me since the start of Season 6 is masteries and how that impacted champions. An example of this is Zed and his interaction with Thunderlord's Decree. We saw a lot of people complain about Zed and other champions abusing TLD. You went around and increased the cooldown early game. It was a solid change even though it took awhile. What I want to know is how come Riot didn't go into this situation thinking how Zed would abuse this before he hit his powerspike. He was overbearing pre-6. He was killing champions he normally doesn't kill pre-6. Why was that? Zed's kit had not been different in any way. The big key was TLD proccing to set up a perfect passive execute. I never saw anyone complain about this. Not once did anyone mention that THAT was the actual problem. His combo hits and it would hurt. The added Thunderlord's would be just enough to lower your health pool to let Zed W in and AA for that last hit. Thunderlord's was a problem on a lot of champions that had similar executable champions. Lee Sin comes to mind. His Q R Q combo was already in a good place while Thunderlord's put him over the top. That's actually what we're seeing in Season 7 right now. Forcing Lee Sin players to go from 12/0/18 tree to the 12/18 TLD tree has shown how much of a problem it remains even after a year.
We're seven seasons into this game, and it seems the approach of Riot continues to be we'll wait and see, and fix it in the next patch. Is the game that hard to balance? It's possible that the combination of social media, forums, and websites that statistically will tell you what champions you should play are such a big influence that it basically doesn't even matter what you do. Or maybe the idea to keep circulating certain champions every so patches just to keep the game kind of fresh. I mean we been playing the same map for 7 years, maybe that's how they're getting us. Or maybe they aren't fully adept to really understanding some of the changes they make. Maybe they don't have the resources to explore how every change impacts every single champion. I'm not sure, but I'd love to hear what you guys have to say. I'd love to hear from people that main specific champions and how certain itemization, mastery, etc changes have impacted your champion and how you feel about Riot's shortcomings.
TL;DR: I'm a salty noob or something.
