So, let's talk Gangplank and Kleptomancy.
Hey folks, I'm Tidal Tyrant.
I'm a plat 2 Gangplank main with 890k+ mastery points. I decided to make this post because GP is pretty overtuned atm. And when I say overtuned I mean he's sitting at 51-52% winrate with a ~16% pickrate in NA and EUW, while in Korea his winrate goes as high as 53%.
In this post I'd like to have a look at what makes GP so strong and what I think would be a good direction to take this champion.
#1, Kleptomancy
This really is the elephant in the Room, ain't it? The ability to reliably proc Kleptomancy for some gold or sustain on a 5 seconds cooldown is immensly valuable.
Kleptomancy on GP has a winrate of about 51 to 52%, depending on where you look, which puts it only 1 or 2% ahead of Gangplank's second most common keystone, which is Grasp of the Undying for EUW and NA, and Summon Aery in Korea. BUT it's also the Keystone Gangplank takes in** 80 to 90% of his games**
#2, the Inspiration Tree overall.
Outside of the Kleptomancy Keystone, Inspiration synergises with GP incredibly well. Gangplank takes Resolve secondary, which gives him 145 more health. This is really significant because Gangplank is a fragile champion, he has a rough time against towerdives and champions that can get on top of him (remember this one, I'll come back to it later.) On top of that, he also gets a Stopwatch, which helps him deal with being towerdove.
#3, Matchups.
Gangplank traditionally has a rough time against champions that can get on top of him and outrade him there. Riven, Irelia etc have allways been considered rough lanes to deal with for GP, aswell as champions that can poke GP from range and all in him. Champions like Jayce, Pantheon,
Now note how most of the champions he struggles against did not benefit from the Preseason update Nearly as much as he did.
The combination of the issues I listed above are making GP far more safe and hard to punish than he is supposed to be.
#Indirect changes that are happening/could be done. GP will naturally lose power once the nerfs to Stopwatch hit live, and the ''Fighter Keystone'' hopefully gives some fighters a better time.
Preferably, I'd like to see some more changes to Kleptomancy to bring the regular users and extremely synergetic users like GP closer together, that should make the keystone as a whole a lot easier to balance. I think this would be the best way to go for a start, as I'm having a hard time comming up with ways to nerf him that wouldn't impact his other builds just as much if not more than the Kleptomancy one.
I'm not sure if there's anything to be done about his synergy with Inspiration + resolve, so let's move on to direct approaches.
#Direct nerfs.
I'd like to ask you guys not to start yelling for mechanics to be removed. There's always a group of people who seem to think every issue is solved by cutting parts of a champion's kit away, let's not be those people, shall we?
I've actually been talking to a bunch of people what would be a good approach. Personally, I don't think just breaking his legs early game is a good approach, as this would result in him being even more encouraged to sit back, hug a barrel and farm with Plunder or Kleptomancy. Most people I've asked would rather see GP get encouraged to actually interact in lane, walk up to proc Trial by Fire in a good situation etc.
One direction I think could work is hitting his Plunder passive, if not flat out removing it. While this would make his gold income less inflated, it wouldn't stop him from hitting his early spikes too early because of Kleptomancy. It'll just slow down his other core items in the mid to lategame.
Another suggestion some people came up with is the duration that Powder kegs stay alive in the early game, so there's an actual downtime if the kegs get used. While this would impact his safety, It might impact the grasp/aery build more than it would the Kleptomancy build, because the Kleptomancy build still has Resolve's base health to work with.
#Tl;Dr
The current, Most effective rune set up for Gangplank makes it too hard to make use of his weaknesses.
While there are ways to nerf him directly (Even if he got indirectly nerfed, he might need a direct one aswell), I think it would be best to look at Kleptomancy first, to reduce the difference between it's best users and it's regular users, because just a direct nerf might impact his other playstyles just as much, if not more than the Kleptomancy one.
If any of you have any ideas for a good direction to take this in, feel free to leave them in the comments below.
