Champion abilities are becoming complicated and very multi-faceted - Future of League?

Mr Carbon·11/22/2016, 6:54:37 PM·7 votes·927 views

http://ddragon.leagueoflegends.com/cdn/img/champion/splash/Shyvana_0.jpg Curious on what the board thinks of many of these new champions gaining extremely complex mechanical abilities and play styles.

I love that there is some depth to abilities now, but I'm curious if anybody would say that maybe some abilities are overloaded.

Some of the patch notes take up half a screen talking about one ability and what has changed and what's "New" ( )

Any cause for concern going forward? Trying to maintain 133 and growing champion pool.

I believe we are starting to see "Beginner" champions and "Advanced" champions, which doesn't necessarily seem healthy...

I don't know... What are your thoughts?

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18 Comments

Oglaf11/22/2016, 9:09:03 PM3 votes

Don't make me laugh. There is nothing good about Shyvana now. She's gimmicky trash tier. Whatever good Rito did to her kit they undid by giving her one of the absolute worst Passives I've seen to date.

Need Gold 4 Tent11/22/2016, 9:49:51 PM3 votes

The problem with mechanically intense champs is that the general consensus is "If you play this champ well, your champ is pretty much better than all other champs". This totally screws balance because it's literally Champ X is stronger than Champ Y because it's the reward for playing Champ X well considering his difficulty. Which is totally against what "balance" is supposed to be about, as in all champs are equal.

Sherogarth11/22/2016, 9:04:47 PM1 votes

It almost looks like there is some kind of unhealthy rivalisation between designers at Riot to provide as "unique" solution to problems as possible. It doesn't matter if new ability's tooltip will end up as long as a good book - if it's "unique" it's fine. It doesn't matter if new ability will be fair - if it's fun to play it's fine. It doesn't matter if new ability is not unique at all - if it's stronger than existing version it's fine. Im sick of this kind of design :(.

As for "Beginner" and "Advanced" champions - there is no problem with telling players that champion A requires less mechanical skill to play than champion B. The problem is that tagging champion A as a "Beginner" champion can result in negative behaviour from other players: "OMG, dont pick A. It's a bad champion.", "Wow playing such noobish champion, much skill". It can also lead to awkward situation where true beginner or not so skilled players wont play "Beginner" champions because they tend to think that they are much better players than they truly are. We, as the players, dont like to play on "Beginner level" thats why so many games add modes like "Legendary"/"Permadeath"/"Survival" etc. Thats also why in your games you usually see much more complex champions than simple ones, even in bronze or silver.

As for me, I would love to see some new simple champion but thats mostly because im aware that im weak mechanical player (despite being a plat) and im sick of new overloaded kits.

Sona Ping11/22/2016, 9:22:21 PM1 votes

They aren't becoming more complicated. Yeah, tooltips got longer to detail wonky math as Riot crowbarred their idea into the existing system, but they aren't more multi-faceted.

Jhin is the perfect example of this. His passive has paragraphs explaining it but it makes no additional impact on gameplay. In fact, it's all only a bunch of math designed to make it so that for this high AD no AS ranged champion, no one would even have to put in the effort to learn a different build from any other ADC. You could build the exact same items; no learning or adaptation required.