Is it just me or is this season's balance just horrendous

'COUNTERPLAY'

I could be wrong, but I believe Diversity is an old, old wooden ship used during the Civil War Era

You forgot Flash. The fact that there's too many outs built in to basic good aggressive gameplay to prevent the game from ending in 15 minutes or less is what contributed heavily to the rest of what you mentioned.

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Balance has never really been this game's strong suit. I don't know if it's worse than before because it has always been bad. It's definitely not trending to be better. If anything it's flatlined.

A lot of design decisions like not allowing hard counters, devaluing point and click, mana vs manaless, range vs melee are coming home to roost, and riot seems to have no answers.

The original mistake goes back to 2009. Riot decided to make a Dota-like game, but based on micro and plays instead of macro level strategy. Fine so far. And then they went and added 124 champions. The end result is like guns in CoD or Counter-Strike: there is no strategic reason to pick one over the other, so you just pick whatever is best and it is almost impossible to balance this.

What the new direction of the game needs is not 124 champions with 4 skills each, but 30 champions with 10 skills each. There's a reason Blizzard is intentionally limiting the hero pool in HotS.

There is little Riot can do at this point. They have two options:

• Make LoL2 with a greatly reduced champion pool but more abilities per champion.
• Make LoL2 with more emphasis on actual strategy (counterpicking, multiple metas, being okay with people getting owned with no counterplay due to decisions they made earlier).

They cannot solve the balance problem in LoL1 and it will haunt them, making them look worse and worse, until someone else does either of the above and steals their lunch.

All valid points. But what gets me the most is the "jungle rework".

They spent most of season 4 trying different jungle items (over all a good idea). Elder Lizard and Ancient Golem bounced back and forth as being the stronger every time they had their numbers tweaked. That's fine. The problem was that it was the same jungle champions that would just switch items. So Lee/Vi/Rengar/ect... would pick what ever one was stronger at the moment.

This CLEARLY showed that the issue was not the items or the jungle its self. It showed that jungle kits with assassin damage, sustain, and high mobility were the problem.

Fast forward to season 5 jungle. It's the same champions that are dominating (not counting NEW junglers or characters that are given a jungle boost like Nid).

Let's be honest, we on the boards are not as well trained in game balance. But if WE can see the issues then either:

1. Riot is dumber than those on the boards/reddit/ect...
2. Riot doesn't care about balance, they want flashy for the viewers.
3. Riot would rather waste time and energy working around the issues instead of just tackling them (over loaded champions) head on.

Truthfully I don't know what one I wish it to be out of the 3.

Tencent bought out Riot 4 years ago. So you're saying that for the 2 and a half years before Tencent got involved, balance was perfect? Pfft

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I think the balance has been, "okay." However, with the introduction of Kalista it's really opened up an interesting dialog about mobility creep. Should dashes be capable of traveling through walls, should they be affected by slows, what does x champion sacrifice for mobility (nothing btw)?

More generally I feel like Riot has been trying to introduce/change too many things at once and has left the community confused with the direction League is going. I mean what's up with these Kassadin and Veigar changes? What's up with the DFG removal? What's up with the removal of point and click abilities on long standing champs? So many questions, so few answers.

Hopefully the smoke will clear and we'll have a more exciting environment to kill each other in then before.

Champions often do give up something for mobility. Kalista doesn't have Graves burst, Ashe utility, deathball contribution like MF, etc. Comparing her to other ADCs there are certainly things they have that she doesn't. She could still be overpowered, mind you, let's just not feed this idea that mobility is simply tacked on - Kalista would be nothing without her passive.

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I think the balance has been, "okay." However, with the introduction of Kalista it's really opened up an interesting dialog about mobility creep. Should dashes be capable of traveling through walls, should they be affected by slows, what does x champion sacrifice for mobility (nothing btw)?

More generally I feel like Riot has been trying to introduce/change too many things at once and has left the community confused with the direction League is going. I mean what's up with these Kassadin and Veigar changes? What's up with the DFG removal? What's up with the removal of point and click abilities on long standing champs? So many questions, so few answers.

Hopefully the smoke will clear and we'll have a more exciting environment to kill each other in then before.

i said back in season 1 they needed to remove flash from going over walls but now with the direction they have taken this games its way past the point of it not being able to go through walls. What riot needs to do now is remove flash from being used by champions with already mobility moves in their kit. Lock the summoner spells out from those champions and force them to have to play safer like the none mobile champions that are forced into the only escape being a 300 second c/d and not 20 seconds. 2 types of dashes on a champion creates to much safe play for that champion with no risk factor involved besides getting cc'd from 100%-0.

Well, in S3 it was almost always a whole class of champions at any one time that were dominating, so you at least had some choice

Now it's just about 10 individual broken champions Choose one or die

Someone makes this thread every patch.

The difference is, every single time they have a point. That's the sad part.

There are numerous players who are relatively immune to the balance churn but there are way more players who are extremely sensitive to it in the middle MMR's.

So it'd be a better balancing decision to make an entire class type not viable for play? lol

You're not gonna see pick diversity with how Riot are introducing and balancing champions according to roles instead of balancing them as individual characters and focusing on what each of them can do uniquely that nobody else can.

What's the point of releasing Vel'Koz that's just another backline control mage for example? What exactly does he bring that no one else in his role does that is actually a meaningful and unique mechanic only to him? No having a knockup instead of a straight up stun is not "unique" it's hard cc like many others in his role already have it's just a slightly different take on it. Literally everything he has someone else has but just in slight differentials to how damage instances from spells work or how the cc stuff procs. The whole thing seemed more about introducing a tentacle monster to the league than actually trying to introduce something unique gameplay wise.