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Improvements: Build/ Role Diversity.

Killroywuzhere·6/23/2016, 9:17:42 AM·1 votes·399 views

So I have been playing league of legends a very very long time. During this time the roster of hero's has grown and grown. With every new champion that comes out, Riot attempts to bring new interesting concepts to the game. However, what I have noticed is for every new release, the older characters I love seem to fall further and further back to the recesses of thought. It is hard to balance all the champions when you have so many to pick from. My beef isn't with balancing. My beef is with the limitations of design and diversity. Below is a brief overview of what I would like to see changed.

Build Diversity It is all to common that when we pick a particular character a veteran player can instantly look at them and say... they are going to build AD or AP. Team comps become predictable and easily countered not only by character pick's but by itemization against a selection. This to me over time becomes extremely boring. Fizz is an example of this... AP burst Assassin sure! What if though I built his sea stone trident with BOTRK and an AD shred build? Akali is my biggest frustration. She was built to be a Hybrid champion... yet she is only ever built AP? She needs to be able to build on either front that give her two different "personalities". AP burst assassin, or AD melee assassin.

Role Diversity One thing I hate after being a jungle main for so long is having to use the same junglers all the time. Some of them I don't like, which makes me select only a few that I actually do. Being a veteran to the jungle I have always had the question... what if? What if I took a champion who is made to Mid lane or Top lane and tried to jungle with them? Take Katarina as an example. She has a kit design that has almost everything you want out of a jungler. She has an amazing gap closer, a high burst damage potential, and with no mana consumption, she could stay in the jungle forever health permitting. However, because of her stats she can barely even make a dent in the jungle. Clearing camps is something she can barely do in AD and absolutely has problems doing in AP. Yet she is absolutely a roaming assassin so what better role than having her a jungler? Sadly she is stuck in mid lane, roaming only when able to secure kills.

Conclusion I just don't see off builds, roles, etc. as prominent as it should be with a towering roster as League has. I don't like always walking into a match with or against a particular champion and knowing exactly what I have to do to counter them. While certain champs have a required damage build either AD or AP. I want to have to guess with some... are they going AD? are they going AP? Will we see them in lane? Or will we see them in the jungle? I would like to see the mystery unfold not during champion selection all the time but after as well. I want to make people guess who and where certain players will be going. Pro players have been known to use champions that are usually slated for a certain role, and completely changing the meta of that character by taking them somewhere else. Though this is effective in pro leagues... this is a one trick pony type idea. Once it is used it fades away. I want to see more diversity not just in character designs... but role and build designs as well.

2 Comments

TehNACHO6/23/2016, 10:06:17 AM1 votes

Build Diversity It is all to common that when we pick a particular character a veteran player can instantly look at them and say... they are going to build AD or AP. Team comps become predictable and easily countered not only by character pick's but by itemization against a selection. This to me over time becomes extremely boring. Fizz is an example of this... AP burst Assassin sure! What if though I built his sea stone trident with BOTRK and an AD shred build? Akali is my biggest frustration. She was built to be a Hybrid champion... yet she is only ever built AP? She needs to be able to build on either front that give her two different "personalities". AP burst assassin, or AD melee assassin.

Okay here's the issue.

How do you react to these champions? One of the biggest recurring problems of off build champions, especially the ones that get popular, is that nobody knows how to defend from them properly. Were you around when AD Fizz was actually his most viable option? Do you remember how frustrating he was for the vast majority of the population simply based on his at first mixed, and then Physical Damage heavy numbers despite the years he spent as an AP Champion? This issue is especially problematic for Assassins who a) gain their power mostly linearly, and thus don't get as much diminishing returns from mixing up their builds if it's a viable option and b) are often balanced off the counter building strategy of raw defense to mitigate their Burst potential, something you can't do properly if c) Assassins, having both AD and AP have its linear benefits, are able to constantly build around your defense

This is essentially the issue. If an assassin really did have the potential to go AP or AD equally viably and have either build variant do as much damage as the other build can, there's not many ways to stop them from a defensive itemization standpoint. That really sucks because mechanically and mathematically speaking, defensive itemization is your primary defense to burst damage.

Role Diversity One thing I hate after being a jungle main for so long is having to use the same junglers all the time. Some of them I don't like, which makes me select only a few that I actually do. Being a veteran to the jungle I have always had the question... what if? What if I took a champion who is made to Mid lane or Top lane and tried to jungle with them? Take Katarina as an example. She has a kit design that has almost everything you want out of a jungler. She has an amazing gap closer, a high burst damage potential, and with no mana consumption, she could stay in the jungle forever health permitting. However, because of her stats she can barely even make a dent in the jungle. Clearing camps is something she can barely do in AD and absolutely has problems doing in AP. Yet she is absolutely a roaming assassin so what better role than having her a jungler? Sadly she is stuck in mid lane, roaming only when able to secure kills.

The Jungle is supposed to be a hyper specialized role. In fact, all roles are specialized in some form. Mid Lane is geographically designed to be the safest (it's the shortest lane) and gives the most roaming options; champions that best perform there would be those that take advantage of the safety and/or can roam most effectively, such as the secondary carries like Mages and Assassins, for example. It would make no sense to just force a typical top laner; one who doesn't take advantage of Mid Lane's added safety (or even suffers from it in being unable to kill the enemy carry due to them more easily hiding under tower), and/or who would generate way more gold for themselves just sitting in lane power farming than trying to roam all the time, into the role. "Role diversity" my ass, some champions just specialize better than others in different scenarios, and all 5 roles present different scenarios. The vast majority of champions naturally tend towards a role, it's not all the time that we force them into particular ones.

Conclusion

You're nearsighted. You have what you think are good ideas without realizing the consequences of them or the causes of the "problem" you're trying to tackle. Spend waaaaaaay more time analyzing the subject than you do high fiving yourself over what you think is good game design, and maybe you'll find the actual solutions to these problems instead of this half-baked mess that my half awake self can already tell can't fly.