Reworking Poppy With Respect to League's Design Values

With the recent spotlight on Poppy, I thought now would be a good time to voice my opinions on her, in terms of design. Firstly, I want to say that I don't think I have all the answers to Poppy's numerous problems, and this post is going to be filled with my own opinions. Lastly I want to say that the perspective I used to come up with these changes come from the game's Design Values, which have recently been nailed down for all to see. Without further ado, here are my thoughts:

Poppy is a champion that has had a number of problems for a while, but without being played much has been overlooked/ignored a bit. The major problems are her abilities and how they create an unhealthy game environment. Poppy, right now, is being largely played as an Assassin. And she's good at it! But let's break down what it really means to be an Assassin. Assassins are champions that get onto a target quickly, and with an equally speedy combo, eliminate an enemy (assuming the assassination is successful). The current state of the game allows us to combat most Assassins with some form of Counterplay.

Some examples of this include exhaust, crowd control, and situational things like dropping a Vision Ward in the enemy Akali's Shroud (Peekaboo!). When Poppy jumps onto your teammate, she's going to use Diplomatic Immunity (her ult), which renders all of your spells and damage to her useless. This spell alone has so many problems with it. It has no Counterplay, it obstructs Teamplay, and it also has a certain lack of Clarity to it. Looking at the animations, it's not quite clear what's going on. You can see that Poppy has some shield of some kind, which is decent, though it doesn't account for what KIND of shield it is (spell shield, damage shield, Armor buff, Magic Resist buff, etc.) but her target gets a sort of cage around them, which actually sends off the wrong visual cues: being trapped, immobility, some sort of reduction of power, etc., rather than the damage increase debuff it actually gives (which is admittedly hard to come up with). Her other abilities share these Clarity deficits as well, especially in Paragon of Demacia (her W ability). This ability passively grants her stacks for each auto attack up to 10. If you activate it, Poppy immediately gains all 10 stacks and a movement speed increase. The stacks give her bonuses to Armor and Attack Damage multiplied by the number of stacks. In this case, Poppy's hammer turns red when she is at max stacks, which visually tells you shes stronger, in terms of attacking. It does not account for the armor bonus at all however. These Clarity issues might best be solved by universal particle effects for buffs and debuffs such as invulnerability, spell shield, damage increases, etc. In Poppy's case this results in her abilities generally being very hard to read, and hinders every other player in the game because of this.

Next, I'd like to address something more on the lore side of Poppy's design. She was the daughter of a world renowned blacksmith, whom she assisted instead of playing with dolls or skipping rope or whatever it is little yordle girls do. So she's a tomboy tough girl. On her way to deliver a masterpiece helm to Demacia with her father, they were intercepted by Noxian Assassins that kill her father. She watches helplessly from the brush and eventually makes it to Demacia where they bestow upon her the title of Bandle City Ambassador to Demacia etc. Firstly, it makes sense for her to be tanky or damage resilient, since she's a tough girl and a blacksmith (she can make herself the best armor). She wants to never be in a position of helplessness again, like when her father was killed in front of her. She would be driven to protect the ones she loves, throwing herself in front of the enemy if need be (tank). She would most likely DETEST assassins because of the atrocity that happened to her father! She should NOT be played like an assassin in my opinion, and she would be much better suited as a full tank/fighter instead. She is a protector, not a killer! (What assassin runs around in heavy armor with a big hammer anyway?)

That being said, here are some changes, aside from numbers, since I can't test any of them (T_T), that would fix many of her current problems:

E: Heroic Charge - instead of being a single-target ability, change so that it's a skillshot and can hit multiple targets. Damage increase with more targets hit, when hit against terrain, etc. Change numbers accordingly. This adds more Counterplay since you can now dodge her ability. It adds an element of Mastery and Meaningful Choices as well, as you choose when to use it, who to use it on, what to combo it with, etc. Basically, making this a skillshot opens up a lot of plays, and is overall a healthy change for Poppy and the game.

R: Diplomatic Immunity - This one can go a bunch of different ways. Maybe just throw it out completely and start from scratch. Otherwise, options include: remove the immunity to spells from other champions (but keep the damage immunity from them), keep the rest the same, perhaps with some number changes, OR remove the immunity altogether, give extra resistances and target is still debuffed, OR combined with either of the aforementioned options, Poppy can only deal damage and cast spells on the targeted champion. Without testing it's hard to say which of the first two is better, however I do think that the last option is the best one, as it is rather counter-intuitive to target one champion and attack another, as is popular to do.

So there you have it, those are my thoughts on how to rework Poppy in light of the available Design Values of League of Legends. Hopefully other people can share their thoughts as well. I'd be interested in listening to what other people think and finding different ideas on the subject!

EDIT: Just to clarify, I left out changes to things like raw numbers because the scope of these changes is more the overall design than the details of numbers. I also decided against making changes to Poppy's other abilities because they work fine in conjunction with the outlined Design Values that these ideas are based around. If I had the opportunity to make the number tweaks and test them myself, I would jump at the chance, but I just don't see a point in throwing numbers around when I have no way of knowing whether or not they will adequately represent the power I would like. I should add however, that there probably should be some sort of Clarity in Poppy's passive when it procs. As it is right now, damage toward her is inconsistent and hard to read. Perhaps a sort of particle animation could be added (I'm thinking like when laser beams hit the invisible shields of starships in Star Wars).