Some questions about the philosophy of the (recent) changes

Edit: Warning wall of text ahead.

This might come off as a rant but it's not entirely true, I am trying to be as constructive as possible with these questions, I want to understand the reasoning behind what is happening recently and what will happen with the up coming pre-season.

I played on pbe and noticed that Riot wanted to do a mini rework on Riven with edge changes, while there are a ton of Op QQ threads everywhere I believe she's fine in her current state or at least she sould not be the one to be reworked this soon (to be honest her whole kit is already in line with the higher skillcap and potential outplay/counterplay that they are adding to champions that used to be binary, eg. Fiora), this rework along other small things made me write this post on recent (tentaive included) changes.

First of all I think champions like yorick, Poppy, Taric should get the priority, it feels like procrastination in a sense to try to rework a champion that is in a much better state than others.

The argument is that Riven is frustrating to play, the tentative changes make that worse for the guy that plays against her and the player to boot... If you want a truly frustrating champion that should be reworked, Tryndamere comes to my mind WAY before Riven, Poppy should be obvious as well but you meet her much less atm.

One of the key concepts of the design and balance philosophy according to the website is counterplay and champion mastery, champion mastery for tryndamere sounds a bit contradicoty in my opinion as the core of his kit is RNG based, how do you master RNG if by definition it is random?

Counterplay, poppy has a kayle+olaf ult yet she has not been reworked (or even changed at all) since 1.0.0.96, do you realize how long ago that was? Meanwhile other champions had MULTIPLE reworks, some that made them so broken they came close to 100% banrate.

I understand that these champions exist since back then you did not have the experience in creating/balancing champions you possess right now, why Azir or Riven before them though?

I used to agree (and still do to a certain degree) with a lot of changes when it came to balance/reworks, I thought that reworks and nerfs were centered around three core components of a champion (correct me if I'm wrong):

• Mobility

• Utility

• CC

Where they formed a triangle where roles and kits were balanced around, eg. a champion with lots of mobility and cc cannot have much utility otherwise he would be unbalanced beyond belief.

I would seriously advice you to question some of your concepts a lot more before releasing them, even if the release is on the PBE only.

I would also like to point out that instead of thinking on reworking champions left and right, you should also consider what to do with some champions that you have nerfed in many different aspects with a single change, eg. Talon that has a lot of limitations since the silence removal, not being able to interrupt channel abilities being one of them.

The final point I wanted to remind you of is the concept of tradeoff, giving items and buffs to tanks to be more relevant later into the game is a good idea however, being a tank should also be a sacrifice of damage for soaking up damage, Garen that hits you for over 1.3K true damage with an ultimate when building full tank is not what I would call a tradeoff, tanks with titanic hydra bursting down carries seems a bit odd considering a carry kills a squishy as fast by building full damage... To me it seems like you are removing many tradeoffs for the sake of bringing new things to some roles which in turn creates the mess we saw with WW 4.20 or the recent juggernaut update, some are good (jungle changes) but some are down right questionnable (juggernaut, ryze rework).

On a side note: I read somewhere that you were planning on making a small rework on Azir as he has a high skill floor, I do not understand this as well, why should champions that recquire lots of practice to be able to use them not exist?

I wrote this in one go, if I repeated some points many times or made no sense at some points, I will edit them later for some