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How Kalista Shows the Degrading Quality of League of Legends

iTams·11/21/2014, 8:36:56 PM·6 votes·1,824 views

(Kind of) TL;DR The power spike of new champions are being noticed more and more with every hero created. Kalista is on the top of that, with the extremely overloaded kit (made by CertainlyT, who knew!) -- more details in actual post. Older champions like Cho, Morde, etc cannot compare to these new champs, so Riot either has to do another "rework" on ALL of the older champions, or keep an unhealthily unbalanced game where only just over 50% of the champs are used in Worlds. The fact that the concept of "new" or "fun" creates an excuse for being overpowered and having an overloaded kit is not right, because it is not fun for everyone else on the other team (or eve the same team). This causes people to be sick of the game and eventually start playing it less and watch streams instead of play. Eventually, veterans of the game will start quitting (a lot have already) due to the unbalanced state of new champions, and slowly, this will reduce the population in which plays the game. Don't get me wrong, the game will not die in a long time, but the quality is for sure deteriorating as compared to before by seeing the same champions over and over, and new releases being overpowered.

(Warning: wall of text)

I know I will receive a ton of people disagreeing with me, but at least read my post.

I feel that Riot is caring less about balance, mobility creep, power creep, and CC creep with every consecutive champion that they release.

Kalista (and suprisingly not Yasuo) is the tipping point for this.

Why Kalista has an Overloaded Kit (can skip this, not the important part) Kalista is already an absolute permaban not because she is stupidly strong in bot lane, if you have played against her top lane as any single melee champion, you will realize that it is just ridiculous how mobile and STRONG she is. (Don't say "just ban her", because we play normals as well, and every game it has Kalista now, and she is ruining the games).

  • Combined with her slow from her E and her leaps, you cannot do anything to her.
  • She has a long range poke that actually does a ton of damage (1.0 scaling, which is rare on an ADC).
  • Stupidly low patented CertainlyT mana costs she has.
  • With her leaps, skillshots are near impossible to hit as well if she has the reaction time of my dead great grandma.
  • The fact that she has an average range of an ADC is also absurd.
  • Combined with an ENGAGE by an ADC (which is rare, only 3 come off of the top of my head which are Varus, Sivir, and Ashe, and guess what, they have no dashes/gap closers) and a % health damage poke (which is a shockingly large 20% with MAGIC DAMAGE on an ADC -> rare again), she is just stupidly strong.
  • With her E, she is probably the absolute best baron or dragon taker in the game apart from Nunu because of the stupidly high damage she has with it onto a single target with 0 limit at all.

Show her to a person who played LoL 2-3 years ago and they would not believe what this monstrosity is. Hell, let's be even more honest here, showing any CertainlyT champion to a person 2-3 years ago and they would not believe how strong the champion is. The fact that the older champions (like Malzahar, Cho, Morde, Garen, etc) cannot compare in terms of their kit against these newer heroes from the past 1 to 2 years is no good.

How this Shows the Degrading Status of LoL CertainlyT with his heroes have a stupidly large backlog of nerfs and reworks to make them weaker, the fact that Riot still lets him design champions that are for sure stronger than other heroes and then slowly nerfing them and taking away mechanics is not healthy for a game.

If you have played in season 1 or 2, you would remember that no heroes came out shockingly overpowered (other than Vlad and Xin) that have had a mechanic that made them overpowered, rather it was the numbers that just had to be toned down a bit and it as all fine. CertainlyT with his "revolutionary" ideas for kits may be fun, but at what cost is "fun" ----> an unbalanced game.

Let's take this and apply it to the real world:

  • A supermarket: Say there is a new store in your town that has everything you ever wanted at 2/3 the Wal-Mart price. However, the workers in the store are extremely rude to the customers and whenever you walk into the store you get water thrown at you.
  • How this applies: People would love the even lower prices, but they will eventually stop shopping at the store due to the frustration that going there may cause. This relates by the new heroes may be extremely fun to play, but it is frustrating for people to play against.
  • The fashion industry: Maybe there may be one new item out in stores that looks extremely nice and makes you the most handsome man/pretty woman in the world. But there is one catch, it makes you itchy. The business that made this clothing decides to send out a new shirt that is less fashionable, but it has no more itchiness. The new product totally fails because people do not want to deal with the itchiness anymore and do not trust the business.
    • How this applies: If you want to look fashionable, you should wear this piece of clothing, but the catch is that you will be extremely uncomfortable wearing it. Will people buy this? Maybe, for awhile, but after wearing it for a couple of weeks, people will get sick of being itchy and stop wearing the clothing altogether, ruining the business that presented the piece of clothing. This relates because shows that although they "fixed" the problems, the business has already been hit by people deciding to not buy the product because it was uncomfortable to wear in the first place, how can they trust the business to put a new product out?
  • This correlates by people (mainly the veterans of the game like myself) quitting the game because they are sick of champions being so strong compared to all of the others, they just do not want to deal with it anymore and are striving for a more balanced game.

All in all, the degrading status of the game is shown by the new champions for the past year or two being way too strong in their kits (main one is Thresh) and with this is slowly reducing the game's enjoy-ability, making it less fun to play.

For example, awhile back one would not say "ahh he is playing X champion, that is why he beat me", but now people would say something along the lines of "goddamn Thresh/Yasuo/Kalista/Lucian/X champion, how can a champion like Varus compare to these guys?"

This is why the game is increasingly becoming a spectator sport rather than people actually playing it.

I do not fear this game dying by any means, I fear for the balancing and the actual quality of the game.

9 Comments

Main Was Nerfed11/21/2014, 8:42:12 PM4 votes

Stop getting so salty over the new champ. She's new. You are wasting your time. She requires teamwork to be decent. There are so many things she doesn't have and people keep going on and on about the shit she does have. I'm sure you've seen Urgot's kit on paper, its OP as hell. Guess what? Urgot isn't OP.

I'm not saying Kalista is good or bad.. but I've been around long enough to know new champions are hardly ever "balanced" from the beginning. Just wait it out. Chill out. Life is good :)

d Kylo Ren b11/21/2014, 8:38:55 PM2 votes

I am pretty sure less than 50% of champions were used in worlds. more like 20 of em.

Raithofhel11/21/2014, 8:49:07 PM2 votes

would be willing to bet the "stfu game is better" stlye comments are from people who don't fall into that "was playing 2 years ago" category. There's really no doubt the last several months have had ridiculous power creep and general balance fail.

Worgslarg11/21/2014, 8:46:30 PM1 votes

You could also argue that league design has improved, and they just havn't updated every older champ yet. The game is evolving, the only reason players would leave is because they felt that they didn't like the change; there's nothing wrong with that.

But claiming that means the game is degrading is a far cry from reality.

kyocrisis11/22/2014, 3:27:38 AM1 votes

"every game has Kalista in it now." She literally just came out. Every time a new champ comes out you see them in nearly every game. Lissandra top messes up melee champs just as well as Kalista or more because she's got tons of CC, better damage, and isn't as squishy. She's not as OP as you think at all, she has plenty of weaknesses and counters, figure them out.

JakeTheSancho11/21/2014, 8:49:02 PM1 votes

Well putAshe

Pengrin11/21/2014, 9:51:41 PM1 votes

As a player who has played this game since early season 1 (or even before), I totally agree with you. My playtime on this game has went down dramatically after Season 3. I just don't find this game as fun as when it had all the Philo Stones and Heart of Golds, I had became a shell of itself in the fact that we see the same champions over and over again, and of most of them are the newer ones. He'll even in this season I only have around 60 ranked games because I was plainly sick of seeing Thresh, Yasuo, Lucian, and the 4 other champions every game. I only play around 2 to 3 games a WEEK now, the rest of the time I either watch streams or play some other game. I am sad to see this game has turned out how it has, I would even say the game started to become this way ever since Darius was released. CertainlyT has shifted the balance of power into the wrong and bad direction.

d Kylo Ren b11/21/2014, 8:41:17 PM1 votes

Also your allusion to fashion and supermarkets are flawed. There is "Target" the nice non ghetto walmart but no one goes there because cheep is good and addicting. Fashion, look at what people wear. Do they ever stop wearing their ridiculous skinny jeens? No. Will people really quit league? Maybe a few but not many.