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Vel Koz: Undo the Q scaling buff, add "Grounded" to W

Kowe The Ewok·8/3/2018, 4:54:57 PM·3 votes·809 views

The meta has 2 issues:

  • Insane burst damage
  • High mobility

Champions like Ahri Ekko Fizz Katarina Leblanc Talon Yasuo Zed Zoe dominate mid with insane damage and mobility. Surviving damage is one thing - one issue that Meddler already announced to be tackled, but that doesn't solve Velkoz's core issues: In response to the damage and as an overall trend champions have gotten more mobility in order to completely avoid damage. Just look at Aatrox with multi short CD dashes. That's without considering that players at diamond+ can easily sidestep a lot of Velkoz 's abilities.

Increasing the scaling on Vel Koz' Q only means that even if Riot fixes the instagib meta - Vel Koz will become overbearing against immobile champions as his damage output already is high, but will see 0 improvements against any of the enemies listed above.

Thus I suggest to undo the Q-scaling buff and add "grounded" to his W - similar to Cassiopeia's W. It disables dashes and forces enemies to actively sidestep his abilities instead of pressing their "out of jail"-cards.

  • This makes counterplay against him more sidestep / movement mechanic / precision (instead of purely reaction) based
  • Grants him an opportunity to punish otherwise nonpunishable champions
  • He might actually see competitive play as a tactical pick for jungle corridor control.

4 Comments

saltran8/3/2018, 6:18:00 PM4 votes

Dear goddes no, Vel'Koz is fine and he even got a buff, take it and say thanks.

Whisper878/3/2018, 5:57:44 PM2 votes

I think your point is lacking a bit in terms of balancing. The thing is, nothing is supposed to be good against everything. One of the major complaints of players over the past couple years has been how generalist rise to the top and things like Orianna are just good into anything and almost always meta.

So HEALTHY balancing, requires very clear & obvious combined with clear and obvious strengths. Vel'Koz just get's a delayed knockup and a slow for CC, and the vast majority of his kit is outplayable with movement/mobility, and he himself is immobile thus leaving himself vulnerable. What is the tradeoff for these 2-3 things? If you leave him alone he does nutty levels of fairly consistent damage output, and he can damage from real far away, has good wave clear. So his most notable strengths are outplayable by exploiting his most notable weaknesses, both of which exist in pretty equal amounts as part of his design.

This makes him actually a really well designed champ in my opinion. Also I think Riot should always keep a few long ranged turret style dps champs in the game like Kog/Vel. Like just super long range dps batteries that don't really do anything except dps. They are cool.