Why it's so hard to come back from rough games, and what I miss about the Old Rift
Riot has gone through and nerfed the experience gains across the board (natural stats). Meanwhile, all items have been powercreeped over time (gold given stats). These two effects work together to make the game, by definition, more snowbally. These changes have also made burst champions very favorable, and 2v1s can be over in less than a second at 10 minutes. These changes have also made ganking rather cancerous, both by the snowball handed to the laner recieiving, and also with how good the early clears are. The overall safety of jungle is too high, thanks to the powercreep on items. Jungling items are INSANELY good for staying healthy on your first back- I want to feel like the enemy jungler is playing with fire when he ganks me, instead of it being a guarunteed bad situation for me every time because he will literally always be full hp thanks to jg items right now.
With all of this snowball crap in mind, let's focus on the meta right now. The meta strategy is simply to match what your opponent does while having more gold than them, or, cramming advantadge down their throats (extreme mobility on a bonus AD ratio champ, old reworked Ryze, invisibility ambushes, hard cc from offscreen/out of vision, etc). Right now, the team with the most gold more or less owns the big objectives on the map.
A blanket nerf to items roughly on the scale of what they did to Rylais but to EVERY item, primarily excluding the base stats on tank items, lifesteal, and maybe movespeed effects, would just make the champions feel like they do their roles more properly more often. When making plays both on the macro and micro is supposed to be about how you play the champion, not how many times you got ganked in the first 15 minutes of this game.
The map is sort of a wasteland right now. It seems like, with the updated rift, there's more unprotected territory. I think, the scuttle bug should give you a turret. And whenever an objective spawns it will be disabled. The old jungle had more thick but consistent walls. Now that the turrets feel so far away. Something more built into the actual parts of the map you play on would be great. Kind of like Skarners passive, but in a more intuitive and natural way, like mini-turrets that spawn outside of the lanes. If there was a strong incentive to keep junglers in their own jungle, like if you get reduced experience from killing enemy jungle camps, thereby increasing the cost of counter jungling, we could return to a sense of sides. When I played this game in season 4, it felt like I had a base. I could depend on my turrets to save me from lots of stuff. With how stupidly fat top lane is on the map, getting to your tower from a gank AND having that tower do anything at all to save you is very rare. Having tri warded used to make me feel fairly safe. This lack of a feeling of "having a base" means that you get a less reliable base line playstyle. Falling back on your "base" should be realistic and base line rewarding. Right now, if you die to a gank, there's a good chance that you will miss an entire wave, and if it resets, you're automatically a free gank or miss CS. If the other guy slow pushes right, you can be SOL when it comes to opporunities to do anything, because right now the safety zone from being ganked is roughly 15% of the availible lane. This is why top lane gets gank kills more than mid for the majority of junglers.
Also, imo, I freaking miss the Hell out of the old-fashioned creeps. Tightly rounding the perimeter of minions, like its a traffic cone, felt like what a Champion would do. Riot, the Lego minions are way too real right now.
