Champion Directions and Balance

I believe I posted this in the wrong board at first (Skins/champ Concepts) when I meant here. So I just C&P it here instead. If a red reads this there is a thread in there that is the same and may be deleted.

I just replied to a thread about Kha and changes to him and it got me thinking that when Riot balances these champions do they really have an idea of what they want a champion to be? I'm going to briefly point to a couple champs that seem to have no real direction and is causing a number of problems. I want to say formost that I personally don't have a vendetta against these champs or Riot, but these champions are a few that no matter numbers/items they seem to be relevant regardless of what riot wants to do with them.

1. . When I think of Kha I think of the rival to Rengar. I think of an alien that has increased in power to become a very formidable assassin. This is where the first issue comes. When I started to really get into the game Kha had the smaller isolation zone and had increase Q damage (so i think 2 major changes ago). This was season 3. Kha was the assassin that I envisioned. Where his numbers off or was he to strong.....debatable. I wasn't into the game and not really a kha player enough to really make a comment now or then. This was the time when you evolved Q>E>R typically. Then they nerfed him and W>E>R was the thing. Its changed quite a few times since, but this is the first problem I believe his W is actually relatively troublesome to balancing him. With the way it works it makes him a bit too versatile. While of course versatility is good in some cases he has to much. He can be built into a strong assassin or a strong poke champ. Until you tackle exactly what you want kha to be (assassin/poke) you can't really "balance" him without making him really strong or nerfing him to nonexistance.

While I'll say that W evolve is thematically practical I believe it to be bad for gameplay. I'm not saying the poke itself is bad, but the evolved W is. I say this because it is the fact that makes him very powerful at 2 very different roles and he can accomplish both to a very high degree. So if you nerf Q his W is the best and vise verse. What I believe needs to be done is to first pick a main focus, assassin or poke and balance for that. If its assassin you need to make W more relevant to an assassin. Either increase the heal factor a bit or make the spikes do something an assassin would use not a poke champ. I'm really not at liberty to propose a viable replacement with me not being an avid kha player, but I'm open to discussing something that both thematically works and allows his role as an assassin to grow.

Now if you want him to be a poke champ then honestly you have a whole kit to redesign. His E and R don't really go with the poke champ mentality. So i'm going to say that assassin is the only way to go.

2. . The champion that I personally don't like for the exact reason above. I really like Nid thematically and both forms are really good until you get into function and balancing which has become a nightmare. If you buff human form to much she becomes and annoying AP poke champ, but if you buff cougar form to much she becomes an equally annoying brawler/assassin. There needs to be an overall direction for nid as a champ. Personally I feel like if she were made a brawler overall she would be a much better overall champion to balance, but to generate more discussion I'm going to take both sides.

Both: Regardless of which is favored or if neither I'm fully against her increased pounce range when you are mark. I believe it to be extremely overcompensating on what is already a huge lane bully.

Brawler: If you make her a brawler I feel like her Human form should be changed to AD scaling. With this you would take away a portion of the strength of her human form to compensate and focus rather heavily in the mark from human form to optimize damage. I personally really like the marked aspect and think its a great way to force action and gameplay between players except for 1 thing that is currently my biggest problem with her, the massive increase to pounce range when marked is just a massively OP aspect of her cougar form and this would need to be removed or severely cripple her human form of which I'm not for crippling the human form. Make her Spear do flat damage regardless of distance OR what may be a better way is to allow her to deal extra damage when landing a spear on a marked enemy causing most of her damage to come through the marked passive. I would increase the overall time of being marked a bit to compensate for this. She could still be focused as a pseudo-poke champ, but the emphasis on her damage would be from cougar form. I would also make it so she would have a slightly increased CD (talking maybe .8-1.5 sec) on her pounce for the increase in damage in cougar form.

A quick note on Human form as well. I would remove the heal on her E in human form in a trade to increase the overall AS and putting a heal on her takedown for a similar percent that is available for only 1 duration per mark or at most 2 within 1 mark. Again promoting the brawler aspect of these changes.

The goal here is to focus mainly on her being a lane bully and pushing the lane for her to roam to other lanes. While the AD scaling all around (except for her heal) may be a bit to far it wouldn't be inconceivable to make it AP, but the split scaling makes it really hard to balance her forms.

Poke: If you wish to make her a more poke heavy champ i think you first need to make her spear the main focus obviously. She needs to be able to poke like crazy, but I still think the old spear was way to strong and needs to be toned back. I'm not going to call for a full mechanic champ, but to tone back the maximum damage in exchange for a mechanic to overall increase the damage. Since I still like the idea of having her spear do increased damage based on if the enemy is marked or not, but ofc with her now being a poke champ we need to change her to allow her more ways to mark. So her cougar form would now mark the enemy when you swipe(E) or takedown(Q). Now when she lands a spear she can do an increase amount of damage in human form. I believe overall this would keep her poke style in tacked, but make her more focused on 1v1 dueling as well as just simple poking without making her 1v1 immensely powerful. This would make getting that golden max range spear with a marked enemy EXTREMELY difficult, but I think would make it viable to let her hit as hard as she did before when a spear could 50% you at max range. This would make it difficult to achieve and all the more rewarding. Now the next part would help her out a little, but may be a bit much. I believe that if this change happens I would like to make it so that if a marked enemy walks over her trap they are stunned/rooted for a brief .5 secs. I'm not sure to the overall gameplay advantage and you would probably have to add a max trap limit or make their duration shorter to trade.

Her cougar form would take an overall nerf with the above described hated aspect of her because I really don't think a poke champ should have a decent range dash on such a short CD in the league of today. I intend for Nidalee to use her W to get in range of a long spear after she marks in cougar form. I think this has the Xerath passive risk/reward aspect to it in forcing her close to get the most out of her kit and to achieve the most damage.

This overall is how I would view my Nidalee in both forms to make her a bit easier to balance overall with a clear direction. Neither is by any means perfect or what needs to be right, but I believe that if one role is aimed at it would be easier to balance her overall since there wouldn't be the 2 viable options that both can wreck you either way even if the other is at a severe disadvantage. I Think nidalee should use both forms to maximize her damage and not have AP nid use cougar mainly for a quick getaway and cougar form to use human for simple marks and a small heal mainly.

3) . yea i know seeing a new champ here is kinda weird, but I think he kind of follows the same overall pattern at the moment bugs aside. He is this odd middle ground of an ADC and a mage so I guess an APC in a different way. While I'm going to give a plus to the difference in azir's kit with his focus on AS I think this is also where it gets a little weird. You start throwing him in a weird area that needs some clearification overall. Since ofc he is a new champ we can't really point to him being to strong or to weak (with bugs included). Yet we can start to see a confusion overall in direction of his goal.

First we know his main goal is a zone control mage. That is very simply the overall goal and I think at its peak and simplest form that azir is well executed (again ignoring bugs that plague him). Where I think he goes wrong is the focus on AS. yes his uniqueness is also his weakness. This analysis will be quite short compared to the others, but here we go.

I believe you need to focus on 1 of 2 areas for azir and both would still embody his zone control role, but it a slightly different way. One being Soldier (W) focused and the other being ability focused (sounds weird, but wait for the explanation).

Soldier: With soldier focus it turns into exactly what it sounds like where his damage is focused on his soldiers. This iteration would be heavily focusing on dealing damage with his soldiers and making sure their positions are used to increase their damage mainly. This would turn AP into AS for the soldiers and leave Azir with an item based AS. With Azir's theme as being an Emperor I think he needs to fit the part and have very little to do with the overall damage. This iteration would have increased uptime for soldiers and give them a bit more mobility, but would take the slow away or lower its effectiveness through either taking the stacking effect off or lowering it to a smaller debuff. This would make it so that Soldiers, who take up the fight for Azir, would be able to deal on hit effects Making things like red buff a good thing. This would make his E be much more of a saftey measure than before and could turn it to being instead of him being pulled to a soldier it would do just the opposite, but yielding the same results. While the effectiveness is questionable I think this would again promote Azir as the Emperor and still keep his zone control. His passive would also receive a slight buff in increasing Soldiers uptime/damage/AS (unsure on which is more functional and better) when they are within the firing range of the tower. Again focusing on using the soldiers to zone.

One of the more difficult changes, but interesting would be a buff to his ult where he could have those soldiers attack as well. This would have a set number of soldiers that would only be able to "stab" directly in front of them Virtually they are changed in functionality, but now when a unit walks a certain distance (very short melee range) from them they "stab" the enemy. It would do damage similar to a Sunfire cape in essence, but more damage and in exchange remove a portion of the initial damage to compensate.

The goal here is to focus the overall damage through the AA of the soldiers, but keep Azir as a zone control mage overall. Making it a minigame of protect the emperor.

Abilities: Now again sounds weird right? Well the focus here is much less on the soldiers damage. While they would stay relatively the same as they are now much of what azir would focus on is being in the fight himself. This would be achieved through increasing the damage done through his Q and have an increase effectiveness with multiple soldiers hitting the same target. This would emphasize the CD on him in order to deal the most damage through his Abilities outside of the soldiers AA. This would make his abilities stronger overall and emphasize a bit more on building AP instead of AS to increase damage.

The goal here is to have the soldiers work more as simple poke and do much less damage overall, but have it based on his overall AP + AD (possibly capping). I'm thinking of 20% roughly on the scaling to be in essence the Arm of the Emperor. This again would still keep the zone control in his kit, but change it to focus in different areas.

Overall: I'm actually thinking that Azir would be a very good example for a mid hypercarry with his focus on AA through his soldiers or abilities. So being a hypercarry with immense zone control would probably be rather OP, but I do think that azir's kit allows him to set up for a pseudo-hypercarry at the very least. A mage rival for tristana if I want to be bold in the claim.

The Conclusion: I want Riot to pick an overall goal for champions to have. The first 2 I discussed i think fit this mold very well in that Riot hasn't decided or established a clear goal that they want them to have. Their ners/buffs to these champions are rather random if they do have an overall goal. Azir doesn't directly fit this mold, but I think he loosely fits the overall design view even though I'll admit to him being a possible good champ once the bugs get fixed. My goal with this thread isn't to try and bash any champs or players who love these champs but stir up discussion on the overall importance of having a goal for a champion when deciding on buffs/nerfs so you know the direction to take and knowing where problems can arise. If we can balance champions with a clear role in mind it becomes a bit easier to nerf when needed without nerfing them into the dust or buffing them to God mode. I want each buff/nerf be more than a change and hoping for the best.

I want to start discussion of how to change champions to fit their overall mold and idea of how they should play without making them stale of leaving them with 1 viable path and increasing overall fun while playing against them. I'm by no means perfect in any of these analyses or how I changed these champs. I'm hoping for constructive feedback and other ideas of how you think things should be with either a mentality from Riot when approaching these nerfs/buffs or how you would change champions that would make them better fit their position in league including the multitude of others that I didn't discuss.