Morde's pick rate is nearly as abysmal as his win rate

{quoted}

I phrased my initial post too strongly.

It's no problem. People tend to get very heated and emotional on internet posts, even I am guilty of this from time to time.

Of course it would bring more variance, etc. And I'd love that. Of course, it is theoretically possible to balance champs such as Jana or Soraka to be fair in both solo and duo lanes. But... it will be pretty hard to do so, it will cost lots of resources, for a rather small benefit, and these resources would be better spent on some other more urgent topics. (Because let's be honest, even if they are viable, they'll stay niche/situational picks.)

Certain champs are heavily locked into a role: Azir mid, Draven adc, Soraka sup, Amumu jungle... It's true for every position, it's not only a separation between solo/duo. And that's not a problem as long as some champs are not locked the same way. Tahm or Kennen can be played viably on 3 different lanes, and that's cool. But the game LoL doesn't need that to be true for every one of the 125+ champs, for it being a good game.

This is a fair rationale; if champions are usable in a single role, the cost/benefit ratio may not be worth changing them just to solofy them.

But it is very different and frustrating when they take a champion that can do multiple roles and pigeonhole them into a single role.

Much like the Soraka rework.

And you don't see a thread about how Soraka should be viable top every other day.

As a general rule I've noticed that most people really seem to hate reliable champions. I have no good reason for why that is other than this weird sense of unfairness that people have when they can't "outplay" something. Everyone seems to want to be able to dodge and counter everything in the game and kill everyone, yet they're also frustrated by champions who have a strong amount of outplay potential themselves.

Soraka pre-rework had all targeted abilities: because of this, people have bad memories of Soraka pre-rework and in general will associate any solo lane power on her as a reversion to that state and knee jerk downvote/bash it right out of hand.

What set Mordekaiser apart is that, he is an archetype of a category that is played in solo lane and, at the same time, he is the only one of this category that cannot (efficiently) be played in solo lane. And he was a solo-laner pre-rework. And (from where I stand), there seem to be easy ways to push his viability for solo-lane without breaking him for duo-lane. That's a lot of reasons for Mordekaiser to join Tahm and Kennen.

But don't say that every one of the 125+ champs should join Tahm and Kennen. I strongly disagree with that.

Well, I'm someone who is very attracted to champions based on there theme more so than their individual mechanics, and as a general rule I don't like being dependent on other people to do things that need to be done; so I can definitely be accused of having a preferential bias towards champs I just want to play because I think they are cool.

Like Leona, I just wanna be able to play a sword n board warrior and fight guys in a lane - but much of her power is locked away for duo lane (in her passive).