Top-down Champion Design vs Bottom-up
My friend brought up an issue that may be what plagues the last couple seasons of new champions: Riot is engaging in what seems to be top-down champion design rather than bottom-up. This means Riot is trying to create an interesting character FIRST, and then trying to build a kit and mechanics around that concept. Once that's done, they toss some half-assed, retconnable (and entirely ignorable) lore on top of it and call it day.
Now what's bottom-up design? You start with a kit and mechanics, balance that properly against all the other champs and items in the game, and then you build an interesting character out of that kit. As somebody who went to school for this shit (ie game design), one of the first things I learned was that character design comes wayyyyyy down the pipeline. Core mechanics come first. Balancing comes first. Fun comes second. Design comes third. Execution is what ties it all together. Riot seems to be doing it in the opposite order: design, then fun, then balance. There's even a quote somewhere out there from Morello (head of balancing, as I recall) that said he tried to think about fun before balance, since he thought that balancing with just balance in mind made a boring game.
Don't get me wrong, these are great designs and great characters, for the most part. However, when Riot makes kits based on character design rather than vice versa, it means that they end up creating obnoxiously broken champions with obnoxiously broken kits that don't mesh well with the rest of the game. Then, in order to save face and a bit of PR (not much, but some), instead of just flat-out reworking the new champion's kit, they're forced to simply continuously nerf the numbers on the problematic kit into the ground until they're satisfied that it's barely playable. A good example is Rek'sai. She was blatantly overpowered on release with unparalleled map mobility, tons of damage (sorry Phreak), and a borderline game-breaking sonar ping ability--and all of this cost absolutely nothing, as she's manaless. Riot's response to this was to destroy the numbers on her unburrowed Q, along with (surprise, surprise) eviscerating the AP scaling on her burrowed Q so that AP Rek'sai (read: alternate, for-fun build paths) was no longer viable.
