Balancing based on pros: what makes sense?
Several aspects of the game are intended to reward higher skill and awareness. And as such, it makes sense to balance them around the players who are the top of the line in both aspects. Champions that are high skill cap mechanically who perform poorly at the bottom but well for professionals are one. Lee Sin has usually been the shining example of this. Vision items are another, as it's the players who remember to use them who are actually effected.
However, we've seen one trend among a specific pool of champions that pertains only to professional play and greatly hinders their use for the other 99.97% of players. That'd be the long-range movement champions (Twisted Fate, Pantheon, Nocturne, Shen, Taliyah, and most importantly Ryze). While TF, Panth, and Noc all had their ranges nerfed many years ago, and that worked to nerf them at the highest level of play without hurting them too much for essentially the entire actual playerbase. However, just recently we've seen Taliyah get hit with unfair nerfs simply because she was doing well roaming in professional play. Shen has scalings he can't build for effectively.
But the worst of all, and perhaps the worst example of any champions' balance (while being bad, not overpowered) is Ryze. He's been sitting at a 41-45 winrate for every rank below the professional level for quite some time now, because his ultimate is extremely overpowered-- when you have a full team of people playing this game together, day in and day out.
Contrary to champions who are more mechanically difficult, Ryze's difficulty revolves around the entire team's coordination. And as such, it makes very little sense to be balancing him around the teams with more coordination than is possible for the vast majority of players.
Aside from that glaring example, a similar one would be champions who are too strong for the majority because the pros have the coordination to shut them down easily. Nasus is who comes to mind first, and of course in games that are generally shorter than average and snowball even harder he'd be unable to exploit his main strength. But for the at-home players, he can easily overwhelm a team for lacking the coordination to capitalize on small leads.
I get it. Ryze doesn't have good skins. So there's no incentive to make him usable for the masses, because the masses won't bother to buy his skins. And making more is a gamble, since it's much more difficult to make a skin good enough for people to play a champion they're not used to than it is to make a new sub-par skin for a champion people like and still sell it (more skins for Lux despite the Ultimate).
But it's still not good for balance when even a champion with a less than 2% playrate (basically just mains) can't perform well.
