I don't understand the balance team sometimes

JIDF Operative·9/26/2017, 10:45:54 PM·2 votes·285 views

When was reworked (well... most recently) he was doing horrendously with a 40% win rate, yet the balance team waited to buff him. While waiting people got really good with new ryze and he actually had to receive a series of nerfs.

But when got reworked they quickly buffed him up to unbearably strong the next patch. And took quite a while to nerf him.

The balance team is obviously not inept if they can have foresight for as well as keeping other champs balanced but overlook things like when they are consistently strong for the span of many patches.

I don't understand how it is so easy for them to keep some things in this game well balanced but not others.

2 Comments

Sasogwa9/26/2017, 11:05:01 PM1 votes

Well it took them 728 reworks to see that low winrate on ryze does not mean ryze is weak :D Jokes aside idk. Some champions are notable favourites that almost always stay viable, like Gragas, Nidalee (maybe not recently but oh boy has she been a problem), Lee Sin. Some get dumpstered as soon as they get to competitive (old ww, old seju). It's also because of riot's policy to not balance around proplay that much so that some champs don't become overbearing in lower elos, but it's hard to do that and not take skilled champions and say that once mastered, they're just outright better than the rest and there's no reason to pick anyone else. Sometimes Riot got too annoyed with unbalancable champions and just dumpster them until they find a good rework (azir,Kalista). And I must agree with them on that tbh, some champions have just gamebreaking kits that can't exist without making half or more of the champion pool unviable. ~~that's why you shouldn't give certainlyt the right to rework or make champions. ok i'm out~~

Tempist9/27/2017, 2:34:13 AM1 votes

I think incompetence is the answer you're looking for.

It's not that the balance team messes up everything, nothing so extreme. But they make multiple mistakes that should be obvious, and do so over and over. That and taking an almost arbitrary length of time to correct those same mistakes- for instance when Fiddle was too strong he was nerfed within a patch or two, while Twitch and Ardent Censor continue to dominate for months.

I mean, look at the upcoming patch and the Janna changes. Riot states they want to give Janna more weaknesses, but somehow end up buffing her in lane without drastically affecting her lategame scaling.

So maybe selective incompetence? Thankfully the balance team is at least better than the player behavior team, who were apparently perfectly content to let trolling and inting run rampant for years. shrug