What the Actual Hell, Meddler?
Meddler. Andrei. Can I call you Andrei? Probably not.
Andrei, we need to have a talk. Man to experienced professional game designer who never responds to any of my threads. I'm not sure how to link my user profile that is featured in-client, but as of writing this thread I have 532,493 Mastery Points on Nunu. And when I saw the update on the PBE I got excited, I admit. Was this the break I was waiting for? Would I finally get to enjoy some return of power after the horrible nerfs to counterjungling that have perpetuated since November 11, 2015?
But then I see this. This little addition to the patch notes: NEW- FEED THE YETI Every large monster consumed feeds Willump, granting him a stack of Well Fed. Each stack of Well Fed grants Nunu 10 movement speed out of combat, 3% maximum health and size (stacking 5 times). Stacks refresh on each cast of Consume, falling off every 50/55/60/65/70 seconds.
So, obviously I have some mixed feelings about this addition, Andrei. Mixed feelings strong enough to create a large gameplay discussion thread with a clickbait title and the use of your real name very inappropriately to make a point about how serious I am.
You see, in the same patch notes, Scarizard admits that Nunu is "a supportive counter-jungler". Ignoring, for a moment, that he doesn't explain what counter-jungling is despite Riot not discussing it in any public form since November 11, 2015, I just find myself trying to wrap my head around the decision here.
You see, here's my problem Andrei. My problem is, this new change doesn't properly incentivize Nunu to counterjungle. And the reason for that, is of course...He can reach the stack cap inside his own jungle!
This boggles my mind. Nunu is not supposed to be a farming jungler and yet I have had to play him that way against pretty much every meta champion since November 11, 2015, and now that you finally address "Oh yeah, we fucked up counter-jungling pretty badly, didn't we?" you give him a buff that just rewards him for farming his own jungle?
Andrei. Why? Why would you do something like this?
Alright, let's grind this out. For anyone who isn't Andrei Meddler van Roon, there's a huge wall of text incoming. If you stopped caring three lines ago then kindly leave the thread. But for you, Andrei, I am absolutely, one hundred percent committed to you reading this. You probably won't reply, but it's important that I say everything that is wrong right here in one thread so you can understand exactly why I am so frustrated.
Number One: Poacher's Knife was Removed I keep alluding to November 11, 2015, which is the date that Patch 5.22 hit the servers. This patch is where Nunu's core item, Poacher's Knife, was removed from the game. I absolutely depended on this item to counterjungle effectively. The extra gold may have been the reason for the item's removal, but the reason I built the item was the speed boost and the reduced CD on Smite. And that was fair. It was fair because everyone else in the game had either an extra combat Summoner with Chilling Smite or Challenging Smite, or...well okay Ranger's Trailblazer was a problem, I'll admit that.
When this happened I was furious. Without the reduced CD on Smite, my clear times in the enemy jungle were significantly extended. And without the speed boost I couldn't even quickly move from camp to camp and get out by the time the revealing jungler's gank was over.
That brings me to my second point.
Number Two: Tracker's Knife is not Helpful
Okay, maybe up in Diamond and Challenger where everyone plays as perfectly as they can, vision in the enemy jungle is worth something. But the overwhelming population of the League community is not professional, and they don't look at the map. I don't have time to ping when I see the enemy jungler with my wards while I am attempting to counterjungle, set up vision around dragon, watch every lane, keep an eye on my gold, and pay attention to buff timers. And my teammates don't watch the map because they actually have to focus in order to CS. More power to them.
Andrei I don't buy Tracker's Knife. I've tried it. I thought it was going to be the most busted item ever when it was announced, and for pro players it really is. But vision around the map in the laning phase doesn't matter when no one watches the map. It's sad, but it's true. And more importantly, it doesn't help Nunu's primary goal. Nunu's primary goal is to make the enemy jungler as useless as he is, as the saying goes. I know it's more complex than that because I do it on a regular basis, but when you removed Poacher's Knife you significantly. Significantly. Significantly nerfed Nunu's ability to do his own job. The point of counterjungling is not to set up vision, to warn my laners about potential ganks, or anything like that. It's to deny gold and experience so that when the enemy does gank, I can punish them for it. And you made it twice as hard.
Number Three: Kindred Fucked Everything Up Kindred was released on October 14, 2015. They are nearly a year old now. And with their introduction came the bane of my existence. The Patience system. In theory, it's a cute idea. Monsters can move farther out of their camps without recovering health or going back, and it's up to a marksman jungle to kite around their movement and avoid damage.
In practice, what it does is it makes counter-jungling hell. I've made several threads about this already, but I'll never stop saying it. When I am attempting to deny experience to an enemy jungler, and I leave a single raptor in the Razorbeak camp, that single raptor will follow me all the way past red buff, nearly to Krugs, before retreating despite me never damaging it. This has the potential to give so much information to the enemy jungler, and that is information I can no longer play around because I don't have a 15% speed boost for killing jungle monsters anymore. The easiest solution to preventing this stupid system from screwing me up is to make it so that jungle patience only applies to the large monsters. I don't need puppies and birds following me all over the map when I'm just trying to do my job.
Number Four: Pink Wards and the Dynamic Queue System
I've basically stopped playing ranked at this point, but it seems like Dynamic Queue has even increased the number of people playing together in normals, or maybe just increased their coordination. I will admit that the addition of club tags might have just improved my visibility of the number of people playing together in normals, but you have the data, Andrei, so if you know for a fact that people are playing together more in normals and in ranked (which they should, that was the point of the Dynamic Queue system) you know that counter-jungling now has an extra disadvantage to it.
I get it. My strategy's weakness is coordination and people responding, and friends on voice comms are going to react much faster and much more often than people who are in solo queue. But if you're making counter-jungling more dangerous with systematic changes, why are you not offering more rewards for it? Andrei, please. If I have to stick my neck into the enemy jungle when they have bot and top in queue with a jungle, I already have a disadvantage of his ganks being more effective than mine. Why should I have to suffer my strategy being less effective and his strategy being more effective without some sort of compensation?
The other thing is that pink wards are permanent, and because they're permanent people are buying them more often and buying them earlier. That, combined with the increased coordination, is making simply crossing the river riskier and riskier, but the rewards stay the same.
And now we reach the end of this rant. Andrei, I love Nunu. http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/gameplay-balance/JfRvtUo9-5-reasons-why-nunu-is-awesome
I just do. And I understand that he has some game health issues. I am in favor of changing Consume to deal true damage scaling on character level instead of rank so that he doesn't just flatly deny contesting objectives all the time. I mean, past level 7 most junglers won't even bother coming to dragon unless they have their entire five man team ready, because they know they don't even have a snowball's chance to steal. And I understand how frustrating that can be.
But that doesn't mean you should offer me this bit of small assistance. I'm not an idiot, Andrei, I remember Patch 5.8 on April 28, 2015. At that point, Nunu's base health per level was reduced because "For a champion that has two separate avenues of multiplying his health (thanks to Consume and Cinderhulk), it didn't make as much sense for Nunu to have one of the higher health pools in the game without items, so we're toning it down to make up for his gains later."
So "bugfixing" Nunu to allow his Consume bonus health to be increased by Cinderhulk (when Cinderhulk's bonus health multiplier has been lowered to 15% from 25% in Patch 5.16 on August 20, 2015, so Nunu had to suffer with poorer bases and no compensation for over a year) isn't a buff. It's a decision made on your part to try and patch up some of the damage you did to his durability by nerfing him due to an item interaction and then nerfing the item interaction.
There's not going to be a TL:DR here, because I genuinely believe you will read the whole thing, Andrei. I don't know this for a fact but based on your interaction on the boards, based on some of the changes you've made, I believe you care a great deal about your players, and about the Boards community. But I don't play Nunu to try and get a lot of health, or to try and control dragons, or to try and move quickly across the map so I can gank a lane.
I play Nunu because I want to prevent my opponent from getting ahead. Because after the introduction of Chilling Smite, ganks became much more lethal and early junglers more devastating. And I wanted a way to punish this. But time and time again, you make counter-jungling more difficult. More frustrating. More inefficient. And it's gotten to the point where I don't even want to play ranked anymore when Nunu was the champion who got me to gold in the first place. I had over 250 ranked wins on Nunu in Season 5, and that's only wins. I only had about a 55% win rate on him, so I probably played close to 500 ranked games total, and that's not counting the hundreds of normals I've played with him before and since.
If you want me to enjoy playing Nunu more, I think you'll find the solution is not to gives me a bit of extra stats for farming my own jungle.
I can't offer you any more advice than what I have on how to fix this problem, Andrei. It's complicated, it's deep, and it seems like it continuously gets worse as you try and address other issues in the jungle. But I don't need to offer you any direct solutions because finding the solution is your job, and communicating my dissatisfaction is mine.
I'm disappointed, Andrei.
Alec
), their own combat summoner (
), the most gold efficient AD item in the game (
) and the early game clear is based off Life Steal, rewarding armor penetration/AD reds which help you gank.