Right-Click to Win vs. Orb-Walking: AA Design Philosophy

A lot of attention has been brought to auto-attack reliant champions in LoL recently, and more specifically, how well they can perform with right-clicking. Ziggs has been tearing up bot lane for a while now and Riot seems perfectly content to let him continue. Marksmen are feeling disenfranchised, constantly getting shutdown by assassins. I recently played a game against a Sivir mid and she did better than she probably would have bot. If the meta is bound to shift even further in this direction, I think it's fair to say this would be the biggest meta shift League has seen so far.

I'm all for shifting the meta, but I think the community should be a part of the discussion and I believe Riot feels the same. So let's start by breaking down the issue logically. The argument for shifting the meta is two-fold: 1) The game becomes stale when every game has a tank top, mage mid, and a marksmen-enchanter combo bot. 2) Auto-attack reliant champs are frustrating to play against when they can just farm up and spam right click to win without requiring mana or skill-shots to do damage. Additionally, they're a lot harder for Riot to balance. I know when I first started playing League I was surprised to find out that basic-attack behavior was fully scripted by the game, unlike Team Fortress, Overwatch, or many other PvP games.

The argument for not shifting the meta so drastically is a little more nuanced: a large percentage of the player base plays these AA-reliant champions and could soon find the game in such a state that the legitimate skill of orb-walking may become obsolete as power is shifted to QWER abilities. Additionally, the game is very fun and popular already. Too many changes could upset the balance to the point that many more problems are created than exist already.

Now, is there a way to make appropriate tweaks to these areas without upsetting the apple-cart? I'd like to think so. Let's look at Yi as a case-study. The left half of his kit (passive, Q & W) feel perfectly unique, balanced, and fun while the right half (E & R) feel pretty busted as even a first-time Yi player can get a penta with those two alone assuming they're full build. What defines a good Yi player is timing. When do you use Q to go untargetable? When do you tank with your W and for how long? When do you commit all-in with your E & R? If the answer is 100% of the time, something's wrong. One option is to shift Yi back to more of the AP caster build that was reworked away from him in 2013. However, this would essentially neuter his ability to split-push and solo objectives, which is the only way that Yi contributes to his team other than simply "securing" every kill on the rift. But what if he lost his right-click _champions _ to win playstyle without losing his objective-taking power. Think Ziggs: no right-click to win, and yet his ability to take towers is currently unparalleled.

Bringing the discussion back to League in general, I think it's time to take a look at why AA champs are required for taking towers. Currently no abilities other than Ziggs' W damage turrets. This certainly creates a strong dynamic around focusing AA champs before mages since mages can't capitalize on an ace nearly as well. Is that dynamic essential to League in any way? I don't think so. Would it feel good for any non-support champ to be able to equally capitalize on an ace? Well, yeah, it sure does to me! So maybe AP could scale better against towers, or at least there could be an item that amplifies magic damage against turrets. This would allow mages more say-so on the Rift, and a better presence bot-lane (first-blood towers being easier there), but still leaves marksmen without a home and doesn't do anything to fix the case of champs like Yi being annoying to play against. For that, I recommend a marksmen class update with a few surrounding updates (Yi, Yas, Trynd, Riven, etc.) accompanying it. If I get started on what those could look like this wall of text would turn into a skyscraper so I'll just cut it here.

Hopefully someone reads this and responds, what I'm really trying to do is start a discussion around this topic, not give a lecture. :P