Hyper Counterpick meta top (which truly does extend to all lanes) and how we got here.

As many people know, top lane (and this extends to both mid and not as well honestly) is a hotpot of violent match-ups currently. I hesitate to call it the “counterpick meta” because counterpicking your lane has always been the ideal approach to picking your champion. However, counterpicks right now are so disgustingly one-sided in top lane that being counterpicked usually results in a pretty nasty beat down in your lane without some serious help. Again, counterpicks have always existed - but never like this. Any top laner can attest to this, though I suspect these dynamics are happening in mid and top but with the so-called volume turned down given that these lanes tend to be ranged vs ranged, making farming a bit safer. To put it mildly, it is an unpleasant experience. You often look like you’re totally outclassed and outskilled but in reality you’re just in a match up where your champion gets ran over with little to be done about it. Then you get flamed and everyone goes home upset.

Okay, but how did we get here? People always like to offer up one solution, the tell-all if you will. But anyone with a scientific background - especially in social sciences - will tell you phenomena’s will often have several explanations with varying culpability. And that’s no different here: there are several reasons. Before we do, part of us should applaud Riot for this. They’ve done something they really haven’t had much success doing before: tons of champions are strong and viable. Really, there aren’t many top laners I can think of that are actually weak. This does contribute somewhat to the current dilemma but as you’ll see, that’s just a superficial explanation. Allow me to begin:

Damage is simply out of control.

Champions just do way too much damage. The only thing that makes you good right now is your propensity to blow shit up. If your damage isn’t high in base or strong in scaling, you are going to be weak. If you rely on war of attrition and outlasting your opponent, you can forget about it because you’ll die before you get the chance. The best thing to do in top lane is bumrush damage and blow your opponent up. Needless to say, this creates a really violent outcome that is incredibly snowbally. Now imagine you’re a champion at an advantage because of counter mechanics. Delicious. Terrible for the three guy.

But that’s not just it. You can’t scale with defense. Champions, mainly tanks, used to exist as a medium. You picked them knowing you wouldn’t scale as a duelist but you do as a teamfighter. That doesn’t exist, tanks die so fast now. There’s no use in reply picking them. Their low reward low risk playstyle doesn’t outshine the potential to snowball, because their low-risk low-reward playstyle is pretty similar to a losing countermatch up: starved, worthless, and easily ignored. Needless to say, tank itemization is bad too so you can’t build tanky to be useful when you’re behind - you have to build offense, tool and that won’t go well when you’re getting snowballed on.

I won’t waste time explaining how and why damage is out of control - we all know it’s a combination of overtuned keystones, shit tier defense keystones, shit tier defensive items, %shred and %pen overtuned, and damage being a better stat from the beginning of the game to the end. In short: it’s causing problems ñ.

Next up:

Riot has balanced up too well: they are going with the “if everything is OP nothing is OP” approach.

If you’re like me, you probably found the flaw with the above sentence right away. Certain things are so broken right now while other things are simply strong. This approach logically does not work. Riven, Akali, Renekton, etc. are on such a different playing field in solo queue and the experience of playing against them doesn’t need to be described. Then you have other things like SoS Jax, early-mid Aatrox, Klepto Kennen, etc. that aren’t far off. Then this list of champions and interactions slowly just trickles down with broken aspects that should’ve been gutted a long time ago, but instead Riot has let them be and they interact in really explosive ways. Combine this with damage, and you’ve just made yourself a nuclear bomb. And in solo queue, you already know chemical warfare exists with all that toxicity. Riot really needs to take a bunch of these interactions and strengths down quite a few pegs but it may be too far gone at this point. And this is assuming Riot thinks this is a problem right now.

Next:

Riot has intentionally made counter mechanics that contribute to this as well.

It has existed forever, but probably didn’t really make a noticeable slash until Irelia with shield busting. Riot has introduced this, %hp true damage, healing debuffs, % pen, random CC debuff capacities, etc. into kits. This is almost always in response to some sort of meta. If you recall, irelia shield busting came in the midst of shield metas. These things usually happen in response to something people complain about. It’s actually pretty knee-jerk. The juggernaut rework that gave Fiora and Garen %hp true damage came right at the height of a tank meta - and riot said they’d never make a %hp true damage champion again (regarding vayne). These have contributed to really bad match ups when you combine it with other things, but probably not as significantly. And of all the things, it’s probably the least likely to be changed because it’s just not practical. These are integral parts of these champions kits now.

Keystones....in general.

I mentioned it above a bit, but keystones just make this game unbearable. Most of the champions in this game were made prior to keystones existing so they were never made with the idea in mind that something as powerful as keystones could exist - a great example is klepto kennen top. And keystones have been the most abusive aspect of this game since their introduction. They simply give too much power. Every season, keystones haven’t just seen isolated abuse cases, they’ve defined metas. And they’ve introduced another variable into the game that riot has to account for when balancing and when designing champions, and we’ve seen some overhaul with keystones each season with not one season of keystones really being better than any other. In reality, keystones need to be deleted. Doing this wouldn’t solve any of the games problems, but it would take the edge off of a lot of the problems this game sees because they’re a latent cause to just about every aspect of this game, with far more negative than positive results.

There are other reasons why hyper counterpick top meta exists, but frankly I’ve written enough. And these are probably the most notable contributors to the problems we have. Most of these things can’t really be changed at this point, so the sad thing is that this likely isn’t changing anytime soon.