Boards›Gameplay

@Riot Mordekaiser needs to be less "Break or get broken"

Ahristocats··13 votes·2,740 views

Before I start to talk about Mordekaiser i want to make something clear: he does not need any buffs

https://i.gyazo.com/70795b552becae2027d0348a74fdea42.png

Mordekaiser is already strong, REALLY strong But lately, his playrate completly disappeared, people stopped playing him completly and now on op.gg his pick rate cannot be rated because of low sample ("rip") So i don't know if riot is going to do a small work on him before his vgu, i actually hope they don't because they will fuck up and make him worse than before (IE: aatrox) , but since i don't want him to be worse i wrote this thread to try to give them a direction IN CASE they work on him

The key thing to understand is: Mordekaiser is too feast or famin Either he breaks the enemies, or he gets broken and this is why players feel like he's weak, because they play him without knowing how to play him and then get broken and quit the champ thinking he's weak.

Riot needs to make him less like that, so people have a good time practicing him and learning him

Now that i explained that i will post the list of changes that need to happen in my opinion:

Base: Range from 175 to 225 Q: Now works on towers with 25% reduced damage Damage reduced from 40/80/120/160/200 to 20/65/110/155/200 W: Damage over time rescaled from 140/180/220/260/300 to 90/130/170/210/250 Reactivation damage rescaled from 50 / 85 / 120 / 155 / 190 to 40/90/140/190/240 No longer heals Mordekaiser+his ally for 100 / 170 / 240 / 310 / 380 (+ 60% AP) Now shields Mordekaiser+his ally for 60/110/160/210/260(+ 40% AP) E: range increased from 525 to 700 is now delayed No longer gives 15/17.5/20/22.5/25% bonus shield per champion hit Now heals Mordekaiser by 20-130(+20% ap) hp per champion hit (scales with levels) R: Clones no longer give stats to Mordekaiser Mordekaiser no longer gives stats to clones Damage increased from 25/30/35% max hp to 30/37.5/45% max hp Dragon Clone removed/heavily nerfed

Explinations:

Let's start with the dragon clone this is the number 1 example of why mordekaiser is "break or get broken", mordekaiser is so so fucked if enemies take the dragon instead of his team the dragon is so much power, it allows him to oppresse enemies under tower at lvl 6, and it allows him to push hard STARTING at lvl 6 (you can take tier 1 +tier 2 tower mid if the enemy team doesn't respond and group mid) Now if you don't have the dragon (either because of enemies, or because you already killed it) you sit for 5 min being useless for your team because you can't push, so if your entire team didn't take champions that can siege you're essentially stuck for 5 min because Mordekaiser's splitpushing ability is also bad That's why i suggest to nerf/remove it, people i crossed refused to remove it "because it's cool" then nerf the dragon damage+hp to make the dragon as easily killable as a normal champion clone at lvl 6. And to make Mordekaiser more reliable, make his Q able to work on towers with like 25% less damage This will make him able to push with his team without needing the dragon, now you may think "morde is melee and melees can't push towers" but actually dealing damage (even to towers) with spells gives mordekaiser passive shield (dragon clone or champion clone) so mordekaiser using Q against towers, combined with W shield that we give to him, he might actually take a tower with two or three rotations of Q/W.

Next is his laning phase Now his laning phase right now is (botlane i'm talking about) give up all cs until lvl 3 then kill non stop the enemy laner (or at least engage non stop) And you can't even think about laning if you don't do that because you will get poked to oblivion This is again the definition of break or get broken, Mordekaiser is forced to fight and if his engage (with the support) fails then he dies and lose the game, if the engage successes there is a 90% chance the enemy adc/support dies even if it's a tank because mordekaiser deals way too much damage. Solution: increase his base range to help him to farm against ranged oppenents, now you may think "225won't matter" but it actually will matter when released Mordekaiser had 200 range which got nerfed to 175 range because it made his laning phase too safe I propose to make it 225 because people who want to play Morde need to be helped to pick him up, additionally E range is increased to 700 to help him to farm from range (compensated by a delay to not make him obnoxious to lane against) but this safety is exchanged by less lane bulliness by making E telegraphed, W dealing less damage (because right now it deals 190+120% ap AT RANK1!!!!)

Now the shield/healing change has 2 purposes: First the huge damage nerf on W reduces Mordekaiser's ability to counter poke because if his damage is reduced his shielding against minions is reduced. So IMO he should gain a shield from casting W Second the heal on ally mechanic is really hard to pull off when you're not used to play Morde alone without any premade with random people shielding them is really easier and make mordekaiser feels better to play, i say this because this is what i experienced ever since aery got introduced into morde's gameplay And to compensate the lack of healing, his E would heal now instead of shielding

Finally, the last part of "break or get broken" is mordekaiser's ultimate Morde's ult is just TOO feast or famin If you get the clone, you get someone who's stronger than the original champion, this is wrong and so wrong because if you don't get the clone you just lose too much power Remove the clone/morde stat interaction increase morde's ult damage

And here i finished Fin

23 Comments

Illâoi Evê Siôn9 votes

Break or get Broken. Sounds metal af.

Ðucky4 votes

Morde's playrate dropped because they removed SRS and replaced it with something he couldn't use nearly as well. I know, I know, DFT was better, but in top lane SRS was pretty much the only thing making him a viable pick there. (which is why almost all the high diamond-challenger top lane morde players in korea run phase, even though it sucks compared to SRS) The vast majority of mordekaiser players play him top lane, and aside from the Q damaging towers I don't think these changes help him too much there. I agree that he needs to be less about dragon though, people like the dragon but ultimately it makes the champion extremely unhealthy, especially in a meta where bot lane is so volatile and it's basically a coinflip as to whether you can even go near bot lane or not.

But regardless I highly doubt they will do anything to him until he's reworked, and even then the keystones need to be fixed as well.

Ahristocats3 votes

yea i didn't think about Mordekaiser top, I only play botlane mordekaiser and really think this is the place where he belongs because he gets so much power down there

but i admit: -that most morde players play him top -that my changes are not good for top

But to be honnest, part of why my changes are not good for top is because it makes mordekaiser even easier to gank, i just wish jungle presence wasn't as high as right now

and one last thing: if what you say is true then the simple fixe to toplane morde would be to buff phase rush/revert it to stormraider

Ðucky1 votes

and one last thing: if what you say is true then the simple fixe to toplane morde would be to buff phase rush/revert it to stormraider

YES. But they won't. Giving back SRS would mostly fix morde top lane, there would still be some wonky stuff because of how screwy the meta is with klepto, spellbook, aftershock, stopwatch, etc. but it would improve his QOL by about 200% because he would be able to go in on a klepto abuser if they tried to stack off of him, instead of having to bide his time with aery E poke or wait until phase actually does something. Why would they give morde his proper SRS back so he could be fun to play top lane when asol and cassio can use it better than they could pre-rework? Darius can use it pretty effectively due to how tanky he is, how much stick he has, and how high his base MS is compared to morde (although i think the highest ranked darius main uses fleet footwork, so not as good on darius as it should be), nasus can abuse klepto, and almost all the other SRS users have figured something out with keystones, why would they change it for the 0.5% playrate champion when they're probably gearing up to just completely rework him anyway? (although probably not anytime soon sadly)

And yeah I agree that jungle is a pretty large reason for morde being bad, SRS would help with that quite a bit, but the state that jungle is in in general is just not good right now. Thank you for acknowledging that though, so many morde mains think that top lane morde is impossible to gank because they can just turn it and get a double kill (I genuinely can't tell you how many times people have told me this), but in reality at higher elos when players have brains that almost never happens since morde has 0 escapes and is always shoving due to his W and E being his most reliable damage source in lane.

Edit - Another thing, glacial is the closest you can really get to the SRS playstyle, but the way the slow ramps up makes it pretty terrible compared to SRS, and it forces you to build gunblade, which IMO is a terrible item for top lane morde. It's extremely espensive on a champion that gets outscaled extremely hard by his lane opponent 80% of the time, the spellvamp only works on your R since Q is STILL coded as an aoe ability for some reason (maybe there is an actual reason for it being coded as AOE, but idk, seems BS to me), and while the active is nice, it isn't nearly as impactful as a ludens, rylais, or liandries most of the time. Maybe this will change when twin shadows is out, but for right now i'm not a fan of it.

Zedex4 votes

He's still not up for a VGU any time soon.

I feel like you're a Malicious Metal smurf.

Sauronkaiser3 votes

Q: Now works on towers with 20% reduced damage Damage reduced from 40/80/120/160/200 to 20/65/110/155/200

I dont understand this one. Mordekaisers Q deals +2k magic damage with the 3 hits in any ap build, including penetration. He would nearly oneshot a tower wasting only an ability with no cost and 3 seconds cd (and gaining shield). Yorick already exists. Also the dragon thing, although its true thats a controversial mechanic because of its snowball/map control dependency, i have a different opinion. Lets come from the fact morde is a necromancer conqueror metal warrior. This can be resumed by the fact he gets specially rewarded by getting an objetive wich is not in the enemy base, and that reward being a tool to get objetives from the enemy base. The drake is a neutral objetive, gives you a ghost (necromancy) of a drake (so fucking metal lol) to "conquer" the enemy base with it. I preffer that before just destroy towers with the Q, wich other champions already do and is not what comes to my mind when i thing about morde. Anyway, i dont think theyre doing anything with morde with the ap items that are comming and the posibility he gets too strong this patch (dont think so but who knows) Good post tho.

Ahristocats2 votes

allow me to explain Towers have nearly 60 mr that cannot be penetrated I put a 20-25% damage debuff on mordekaiser Q when attacking towers If you combine all of that, Mordekaiser Q ends up dealing 1k damage on towers, and it's balanced because he has a low attack speed and it needs 3 attacks and has a higher cd than those kind of tower taking spells.

compare this to nasus Q for instance

I gave him that because i want his pushing power to be independant from gimicked dragon

Sauronkaiser3 votes

[{quoted}](name=Je suis Rubick,realm=EUW,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=Ew8RhjxL,comment-id=00070000,timestamp=2018-02-12T14:25:42.469+0000)

allow me to explain Towers have nearly 60 mr that cannot be penetrated I put a 20-25% damage debuff on mordekaiser Q when attacking towers If you combine all of that, Mordekaiser Q ends up dealing 1k damage on towers, and it's balanced because he has a low attack speed and it needs 3 attacks and has a higher cd than those kind of tower taking spells.

compare this to nasus Q for instance

I gave him that because i want his pushing power to be independant from gimicked dragon

Riot is very scared about empowered autos that can damage towers. It took a year and a half to them to give it to yoricks Q, wich was originially designed for that, and he is already the juggernaut meant to throw towers, being ziggs the demolisher. I dont think they are making mordes Q do that cause they want him to be a conqueror who gets secondary objetives and uses them to go for towers, not just get near to a tower and use a wrecking ball to throw them down (the concept is cool tho). Before that change, i would search for another mechanic like the dragon but being more healthy in the game, probably getting other normal monsters ghosts in the jungle to command them to assault, for example.

Ahristocats2 votes

yorick Q is not something special Nasus and trundle Q also work on it Darius W almost all melees have something to take towers in order to siege/splitpush

Mordekaiser having Q against towers does not take yorick's niche, which is simply being able to splitpush and 1v1 well with mistwalkers

enslaving other jungle monsters is an other idea

A treespook nest1 votes

It might be a good amount of damage but it really only does even (at best) with some other ADCs if you give them the same time frame of attacking turret uncontested. The calculations I did only used the time frame when Morde's Q was being used too, so if you are arguing that Morde would be too OP of a tower pusher with this then we'd have to say the same of ADCs.

Plus ADCs are going to be in a much safer position while pushing so really the suggestion isn't that bad.

That said Morde still has lots of other strength and more push potential when he gets ghost. This may actually make him snowball top too hard if he manages to get a kill. I think allowing Q to proc on towers is a good idea, but maybe raise the reduction from 25% to something a bit more substantial.

greekvandaL2 votes

That's all good and fun but we are too busy buffing Adc's to do that for poor Morde who has been a mess of a champion for seasons now. Try again once the balance team gets fired and we have actualy inteligent people patching the game.

Ahristocats4 votes

if he doesn't get changed i would be happy lol, i'm fine with morde being like this

i just wrote this thread in case they would be like "oh morde's play rate went to inexistent, like aatrox in the past. let's give him a mini rework to make him stand by until his vgu"

ModKnightsKemplar2 votes

I have always hated the dragon ghost.

It was a really neat idea, but as soon as I saw it I thought "that's the biggest feast or famine mechanic in this game." There's either not enough power in it to be interesting, or it's got enough power that Morde has a very hard time winning without it. This is on top of a neutral objective that already dictates the game quite a bit.

I will say, though, that I think Riot has learned a lot about big mini-games like that since that time period. My two most hated mechanics in the game are Dragon Ghost and Gangplank barrels (close third is Shen sword, then Skarner pilons); at low elo, they simply put too much onus on the opponent to play around you (at high elo, that happens no matter what champ you pick, I think, simply because people just pay more attention to counterplay and such).

They seem to have trended away from that sort of thing, though. I think that's a big part of the reason that newer reworks have landed better (Warwick in particular). You can make a champion interesting without giving them such game-breaking interactions. At least WW's trademark mechanic is well telegraphed and intuitive. Playing around GP's barrels is the opposite of intuitive.

A treespook nest1 votes

item 3170 I largely approve. I am not totally sold on his ult damage being increased as compensation, although I do think that he would need something to make up for the loss in scaling with ghosts.

Ahristocats1 votes

any idea what he could get as a compensation?

i'm open to any suggestions to improve my list of changes

Mordepool1 votes

For the E here's a thought. Half the damage have the ability cast twice. (Second cast is locked in and casts itself after 1 second kinda deal) Locked in at the same cast direction. On a delay but allows Morde to move and repostion.

So sniping someone just with the edge of E isn't rewarded the same as trying to stick to them with the slowest champ

Ahri Baka1 votes

Morde isn't being played a lot because he is bad against tanks because people will only love taking tanks to complain about ad carried being too high and melting them in seconds to keep the circlejerking on boards you know I don't know how to play Morde but he is really strong and I know I'm gonna get rekt when he is against me , had a match when I was support and the enemy morde counter jungle us in blue side twice and I had wards so followed my jungler twice and killed him and Morde was like " Fu** you Taric" he died twice in early , then at level 6 he took the dragon and suddenly came bot as a gank , I was like what the heck is he doing , he stayed in bot like for a whole minute taking the farm with his teammates with the Dragon and suddenly the dragon reached us and started slowly damaging us , and then dived us and took the first tower , knowing the fact that our bot lane was 5 kills ahead

as for an idea for Morde to be played I'd suggest to buff him , even if his win rate jumps to 55% , he shouldn't get nerfed if his playrate still didn't reach 3% Quinn feels weak right now too and she is the R.I.P list too

Ahristocats2 votes

[{quoted}](name=Hikari Sakata,realm=EUNE,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=Ew8RhjxL,comment-id=0003,timestamp=2018-02-12T13:12:02.665+0000)

Morde isn't being played a lot because he is bad against tanks

Morde is one of the strongest juggernaut/mage against tanks lmao

https://youtu.be/OP3zl7VebAY?t=102

Just an example of casually killing an alistar under ult, without even using the full duration of his ult (which deals nearly 45% max hp damage with some ap)

he deals just way too much damage until late game how is he not able to kill a tank?

Ahri Baka1 votes

[{quoted}](name=Je suis Rubick,realm=EUW,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=Ew8RhjxL,comment-id=00030000,timestamp=2018-02-12T13:27:49.245+0000)

Morde is one of the strongest juggernaut/mage against tanks lmao

https://youtu.be/OP3zl7VebAY?t=102

Just an example of casually killing an alistar under ult, without even using the full duration of his ult (which deals nearly 45% max hp damage with some ap)

he deals just way too much damage until late game how is he not able to kill a tank?

That's for 1 vs 1 duels .. he can do it but I mean in general he isn't tanky as much as other tanks , so he can die faster than tanks Tristana can perma kite him while he can't even reach her so he dies and you would wish if you got a tank , his abilities makes him tank only by hitting, or that's what I thought , I rarely see him anyway

Mordepool1 votes

I agree with the Range increase mainly since his AA's are so slow and weak (compared to other Juggernauts)

Salson1 votes

Hm, have you thought how this effects lane Morde?

If you just flat out remove the Drake, he might actually end up broken in Top.

Ahristocats2 votes

Not at all, the XP passive is still here, and it's an important part of his power to be fair

I thought about top and i was afraid of making it unviable, and i'm afraid it's a weakness of my changes, it nerfs him too much toplane Toplane Morde laning pathern: -shield on minion -heal a minion against a melee champion to deny minions -spam E to poke melee champions

But now, E is delayed so you can't use it to non stop poke melee champions, He gained some power because shielding an ally is more reliable than healing an ally, but toplane morde can't shield an ally, and now he can't heal minions anymore

Censible2 votes

He still won't be broken. He doesn't have any engage, disengage, or crowd control. Also, he doesn't have insane scaling like nasus.

More from Gameplay

3 Refunds per season, upvote if you want 3 refunds per season.
Gameplay764 comments
7,167
votes
3 Refunds per season, upvote if you want 3 refunds per season.
Gameplay156 comments
3,510
votes
UPVOTE FOR URF
Gameplay606 comments
2,440
votes
Yes plz.
Gameplay456 comments
1,721
votes
3 Refunds per season, up vote if you want 3 refunds per season.
Gameplay114 comments
1,716
votes
When is ANYONE at riot going to address the awful new player experience?
Gameplay634 comments
1,383
votes

More by Ahristocats

I just can't play League anymore....
Gameplay334 comments
306
votes
So this is the Future
Gameplay222 comments
205
votes
Okay, you want to know what is wrong with the kog buff in next patch?
Gameplay168 comments
186
votes
Riot, I DON'T want to play with premades
Gameplay120 comments
179
votes
i'm fucking tired of jayce seriously
Gameplay149 comments
177
votes
Counterplay to a champion should not be "destroy them before X minutes"
Gameplay262 comments
162
votes