An odd terminology nitpick

This is a post about the differences between three similar terms: Broken, Overpowered, and Overtuned.

Broken: something is broken when its design is inherently flawed and difficult to balance. 's human form Q is a great example. It is itself all of her human form damage, and is the primary way to activate her cougar damage. This sole ability completely defines the champion, overshadows her W completely, and contorts the game around it completely. Broken skills also tend to be binary: Nid's Q either hits, or misses. If it hits, it either deals enough damage to burst them, or doesn't. There are usually few meaningful choices for both parties involving broken/flawed skills.

Overtuned: the least commonly used of the three, this merely means that the numbers/stats on a given "thing" are too high. Undertuned means the opposite. Again, 's human Q is a good example. Because Nid lacks an ulti, and all of her human form damage is locked up in the Q, it delas absurd amounts of damage. This is added onto the fact that you need to land it to burst with cougar, meanign that essentaly ALL of her burst damage is in a single ability, and that ability MUST be overtuned to compensate. Imagine if Brand's Q of Veigar's Q did that much damage, on top of their other abilities chunking in their own right. It would be ridiculous.

Overpowered: This term closely relates to both of the above terms. My way of defining overpowered is this: Oppressive. Overbearing. Things like that. So abilities that leave little to no counter play or have too much versatility/usability are overpowered. The simply empower the champion to do too much of ignore too much. This "empowerment" can come in the form of obscensly high numbers or an inherint lack of counterplay, but Overpowered is a more umbrella term.

For instance, let's look at . His W, both old and new, is broken. It offers no counterplay, as it is a point-and-click CC that prevents movement. That is inherently binary and flat. Either the duration/cooldown is good enough to dominate, or it isn't long enough to impact his combo. It is hard to strike a balance between the two. On rework release, Ryze was very Overtuned. He could quickly perma-root and burst even tanky top laners as soon as he popped his passive. The level of damage and CC present all at once was way to high, and had to be scaled back. Both of these factors contributed to Ryze being Overpowered. He was oppressive in lane and could easily get kills and/or force backs to free farm and shove wave after wave into tower, all while gearing up for late game with a .

TL;DR: Broken menas hard to balance, overtuned means the numbers are too high, Overpowered means one or the other, or both.

P.S. sorry for the bash on mages, didn't mean for that, especially with the heavy mage nerfs this preseason.