The death of the visual update

Here we go again on the Forums rant train, except this one will hopefully not split the readers in dead half like my rant on Yasuo. This discussion is more of a concern not for a specific champion and it's not a long list of gripes about a champion that I simply find annoying. This is a concern that we won't get any more visual updates and everything will be overhauls and gameplay updates. I know right off the bat it sounds like im saying full updates are bad and never need to happen, but I'm not. Sion's update was amazing and he's now one of my best champions, Poppy DESPERATELY needed the overhaul, and both Yorick and Taric have needed one for a while, Taric has his and Yorick will have his soon. All this being said, I feel like not every champion that needs updating needs to have their kit touched aside from some minor tweaks.

The last real visual updates we've had are Maokai and Twitch. Twitch has the full package plenty of new quotes completely new model and animations, and some gameplay tweaks he really needed. His kit was largely untouched, except the name of his ultimate (RIP Spray and Pray). Twitch's kit was perfectly fine, it worked well for the assassin type ADC he was designed as. Compare this to old Sion. Sion was designed as a tanky bruiser who can get into combat and disrupt the enemy while keeping his team healthy, however, his design went mad when his sheild got buffed, and his AP scalings were completely ridiculous. This made sion stray away from what he was made to be, causing them to rework him into the tanky danky engine we know today.

So where is all this coming from, we know this already, but what makes you think Riot will ditch the visual update entirely you may ask. Well, aside from the lack of announced VU's, I'm more worried about the power creep in league. Lets give an example, Riot decides to point the rework/VU team at two champion, lets saaaaay Shaco and Nunu. They decide to give Nunu the GU and Shaco the VU. Nunu's new kit makes him one of the dominant champions, complete from rags to riches (just like gangplank who also really needed to GU), Shaco on the other hand can't compete with all these new kits being cranked out so Riot instead of upping his numbers decides to completely relaunch him. This has already happened to other champions. The mage reworks were made because they overbuffed ADC's, they overbuffed ADC's because they let assassins run rampant, they let assassins run rampant to deal with the adc's because the bruiser meta began making them worthless, the bruiser meta happened because they encouraged a tank meta, and on and on and on.

I understand that GU's take priority over VU's because the champions getting their kits reworked need it more than Shaco, Udyr, or Nidalee getting their models updated. Those champions that are in a decent place and they look ok for now can sit and wait, but I'm worried that if they plan to VU a champion then they GU ANOTHER champion it will entice them to change the VU to an overhaul. However, even a Visual update will help a champion's playrate. After his VU the playerbase for twitch exploded, I had never seen so many twitch players before. Pre-VU I had seen... mabye 3. Post VU I say one almost every game until the end of the season.