Error in Taliyah's design.

Grimwohl·May 27, 2016·2 votes·902 views

My brother, Jurojin Wuji, has been playing Taliyah a lot recently. He thinks the champ is absolutely wonderful.

I on the other hand, have trouble grasping why Taliyah doesn't do physical damage with her skills. why isn't her abi/phys ratio split 3:1, or something to that effect, to accommodate any armor pen items she may have to build?

If the excuse is Malphite, or her rocks are magical, or anything to that effect, cool.

but could someone please explain why her AA (which is slinging rocks that I assume are from the same place all her other rocks are from) not enhanced by the same magic? shouldn't her passive, q or ult give her some kind or ap ratio on her AA's?

I appreciate any discussion to help me better understand why no opportunities were taken with this (it wasn't even mentioned in the Q&A).

I looked up to see if there was any discussion about this here, and there wasn't. Please redirect me if I'm wrong.

Thanks.

11 Comments

Hiroki49May 28, 20162 votes

This can be said about Annie / throwing fire aa, or Anivia / Lissandra throwing ice aa. It isn't their aa that are meant to shine, but what they can do with the elemental power they have. If you want Taliyah's aa to deal magic damage, then build a item 3091 on her.

GrimwohlMay 28, 20161 votes

That is a fair assessment. I don't know why I came to this realization with only Taliyah.

Thinking about it, I think there is something to be said about general mag dmg from AA's only generating on towers as opposed to all targets.

That aside, does riot have any intention of exploring a physical damage mage if not with a mage that manipulates earth? It would be fresh ground (no pun intended) to work with.

Hiroki49May 28, 20161 votes

I doubt it, it would be a good concept, but it would be OP if they went through with this. Think about it, a mage is someone with mid to long ranged abilities that do AOE and provide 1+ hard CC (knock up/back, snare, stun, etc.) to the enemy that scale high with AP, if the abilities scaled off of AD then not only will this mage's aa hurt but also the spells. The mage will be able to take out towers very well since their aa are huge from the AD items they build to buff their AD scaling abilities. Take Varus for example, he has poke and his CC is in his ult. Now imagine if he had a nonULT skill that gave hard CC to make him a "mage" by definition. He would be a monster in game because of how well AD scales. All in all this would be VERY hard to balance.

In a sense Azir is a champion who's AA are AP based because of the soldiers.

GrimwohlMay 28, 20161 votes

Sorry for my lack of clarity. I meant physical damage that scaled with ap to all targets. Similar to what mages used to do to towers.

Hiroki49May 28, 20161 votes

Jeremy at Gaming Curios did a video talking about this I think

BornAgainVirginMay 28, 20161 votes

I think they have a habit of directly designing the kit based on the champion's mini-story for "thematic cohesion". They dont typically look at artwork designs and just come up with a kit (occasionally happens though) and say oh this will be cool, lets add this, this and this then toss in a half baked story later. Like if you read her story, you will see she never "magically" picks up a single rock, and just uses that one rock to kill something. Instead she has trouble controlling it and when she uses it, its a pretty big deal. Thats probably why she has that warped ground thing and skills focused on aoe control. They may re-do the kit a couple times until they get something really fun and that actually works without breaking the game, and nerf or buff it from there. Like Jinx had around +1000 movespeed passive at first lol, but was so fun they decided to work with it. Taliyah doesnt thematically use basic/single target attacks like Ekko Gnar Diana Teemo Kalista Akali Jhin , so there is no reason to just throw that type of scaling in there.

GrimwohlMay 28, 20161 votes

So limiting design space BECAUSE of theme? isn't that kind of strange?

i wouldn't expect any advertisement to grasp the fullness of a character to the point where the character cannot be fleshed out any more than from what is presented. That's very limiting in my opinion.

BornAgainVirginMay 28, 20163 votes

A champion's lore is not an advertisement lol, it is something to make sure champs stand out from each other and help you connect with the character and want to play as that ice witch (Lissandra), time shifter (Ekko), or wandering samurai (Yasuo). Trying to translate whats on the storyboard into a kit with a clear theme has worked VERY well. When a champ doesnt have clear strengths and weaknesses and a clear type of damage to build against, we run into the OLD Irelia/Jax/hybrid nidalee problem. Who simply did EVERYTHING. High sustain/buffed armor/debuffed armor/cc/gapclosers/mixed damage/evasion/1v1/5v5/1v5 etc. Irelia was a huge thorn in leagues side for a while until they nerfed her the first time. A melee hyper carry tank with low cost+low cooldown mobility with a ranged stun/slow that also has a ranged ult that heals and clears waves with a low cd and also walks through cc and does true/physical/magic dmg? This is why morello made jokes about nerfing it more lol. It has no clear theme whatsoever, the kit itself a hot mess. I'm glad thats no longer a constant problem, but people are free to their own opinions.

btw I think liss had one of the coolest releases, no pun intended.

GrimwohlMay 28, 20161 votes

I think Riot has come a long way from releasing champions mindlessly. Agreed.

looking at spotlights and reading some discussion, i see that They (Riot) use the fact that Taliyah is inexperienced in her craft to excuse her from being any stronger outright. Meh.

Jurojin WujiMay 28, 20161 votes

Hey, thanks for your response. the aforementioned Taliyah player here.

I didn't see anything from Jeremy, but couldn't Varus have been effectively gated by not giving him any aspd steroids? Even better would have been making his attack speed Darius abysmal (or as mentioned earlier, make the ad scaling on skills significantly lower).

There are honestly a number of ways to effectively balance out a physical damage mage (especially if it is meant to be one). Varus's kit on a mage is no where near as healthy as, for example, Taliyah's would be (Taliyah is far more telegraphed, q damage isn't all up front and is blocked by minions).

And If it isn't clear, we were referencing scaling that is more similar to Ezreal, Evelynn, or Corki (both scaling ratios with ap being the higher) but dealing phys damage on all/most skills.

My thought on it is that it would initially be weaker than either ezreal, Evelynn, or corki because champs gain way more armor than mr in a game, hence mages needing to build items (last whisper or cleaver after a morellos or rylais on Taliyah) to be effective.

wish there was a comment from someone familiar with riot's R&D (most preferably a Rioter) to just explain what problems outweigh the consideration of doing this. If riot really wanted to, they could have done it with Taliyah.

Side Note: every mage dealing enhanced AA dmg to all targets (based on their ap) would require a nerf in dmg to their kits. ignore Grim's comment on it. It's stupid.

GrimwohlMay 28, 20161 votes

Nothing I say is stupid.

Before the conversation of ability power to towers to deal magic damage, they did physical damage that scaled with ap.

I was saying that this physical damage enhancement should be applied to Taliyah's AA (and now, considerably, a few other Champions).