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There's only one champion design I'd truly call a "failure"

chipndip1·2/14/2020, 4:12:54 PM·3 votes·1,177 views

...and it's Yuumi. Think on it:

  1. Her passive is designed to make her interact with the lane in a vulnerable state, but she gets no bonus damage from using it so she gets the shield and the shield gets eaten up by incoming AAs on her way back to whoever she was on, making the trade to get the shield worthless. Sure it gives mana back, but her mana costs are balanced around her having that feature so who cares?

  2. If her Q's any good, she terrorizes lane while being untargetable. If it isn't any good, she can't do shit while the enemy support makes plays on her carry all game. The move can be actively controlled, too, so the counter-play to this move is kinda hard to nail down when you can actively weave it around body blocks.

  3. E felt useful in its 2 charge iteration. It feels like dog shit now and it's pushed in the usual "enchanter + marksman" direction, but her design on a fundamental level pushes her towards latching onto divers and other front liners. Then you have to worry about if your lane goes well AND if your front liner's lane goes well...assuming your team even picked one.

  4. Her ult is still incredibly lame.

  5. How can I forget W...that ability that locks me out of saving myself just for getting cc'd? Maybe it'd feel a bit more fair without the delay tacked onto the start? All I know is that using her passive feels even worse now when any hard cc means you can't even escape with W anymore.

Even if I want to enjoy the champion, my ability to do anything is so dependent on everyone else's ability to do anything that it's a huge limiter. However, I can't be super mad about that because...well...I'm fucking untargetable. Imagine being significantly more influential to the match while being untargetable?

Any other champion in the game is capable of achieving balance, whether it takes years like Akali and Ryze or just a bit. Yuumi is the one champion that I honestly think it's impossible unless something about her changes. It sucks because I genuinely like the character, but it just feels like another sloppy iteration of the same thing we make all enchanters do: "Passively play lane while focusing on heals/shields with very little play making potential, cowering away from every stiff breeze in the game because you get chunked hard by those, in an attempt to 'kinda scale' to a point where you realize your late game fantasy of healing/shielding A LOT". I had high hopes that this champ, with her ability to synergize with fighters and tanks, would be different, but once again, Nami and Zilean seems to be the only ones that breaks this mold to a significant degree.

9 Comments

myamia2/14/2020, 9:52:43 PM2 votes

you sound like you have a bone to pick with yuumi. so now the failure is you.

Zero Skill Tank2/14/2020, 4:38:43 PM1 votes

Agreed.

The idea of being more or less permemently untargetable is almost impossible to do well to begin with. It makes a champion way less interactive by default.

But it's not only that.

Literally every single ability in Yuumi's kit is extremely uninteractive for her enemies.

She is uninteractive because she is untargetable, she is uninteractive because she is an enchanter (so her abilities are naturally less interactive for enemies then other classes), she is uninteractive because her projectile can be steered, but that's still not everything.

This striking lack of interactivity penetrates even very small details of the kit - e.g.

  • her innate is less interactive then other attacks (it doesn't use a projectile, and has Cait's range)

  • shield from her innate is less interactive then other shields (it never times out)

  • there are pretty much no cast times

  • her ult is extremely wide and can be repositioned, limiting counterplay for all but the most mobile enemies

It's not only the idea of untargetable champion that is wrong to begin with, no matter which angle you look from Riot Maxw3ll did a really, really poor job on that champion.

It also bothers me that even though this complete lack of interactivity is obvious after reading ability descriptions one time, no other designer ever said "stop, we can't let this champion go live".

BenBaxter2/14/2020, 6:23:34 PM1 votes

TIIIMBBEERR! TREE DOWN TREEE DOWN!

CaptainAntiHeroz2/14/2020, 9:24:23 PM1 votes

Akali Ivern Yuumi Kalista

are all fckin nightmares be it because they're unbalancable nightmare fuel, or a stupid design

Kroda132/14/2020, 9:37:35 PM1 votes

Lets not forget the most disgusting thing about her. The fact that she is cat is terrible