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Illaoi: Possible Balance Changes

Thanetiore·5/20/2016, 4:11:38 PM·1 votes·819 views

After the changes to her E in 6.9 (great job, btw), I started to pick up Illaoi more and was rewarded with a pretty fun gameplay experience. However, I was deterred from falling in love with her too much because she was always considered garbage tier in high level play and when you play her more, you can definitely feel her weaknesses.

I read a lot of discussions on rebalancing Illaoi and followed Riots efforts to give her more consistency across the board. But lately I personally have been thinking about possible changes as well and with this post I want to collect (together with you guys) the possible changes I have read about or thought about myself.

The idea is to give Riot some additional brainstorming and perhaps also show the wants of the community.

Please be forgiving regarding my phrasing, I am no native speaker.

Alright, let's get started:

Q - Tentacle Smash

In my opinion, this ability is in the best spot right now. It is a pure damage tool that helps with zoning, for instance if the enemy goes up to last hit. It is hard to land but rewarding and helps you push. There are some possibilities, but this ability is in my eyes low priority. As a side note, Riot is thinking about increasing the base damage scaling and reducing the AD scaling - nothing major, but more damage when building tanky.

Stuff I was personally toying with in my head:

  • Q could apply the new "Grounded" debuff. Slamming people into the ground, seems fitting. Would possibly allow to prevent enemies from flashing/dashing out of your ult instantly or makes it generally easier to follow up with a W/E. Once you land this ability, the outplay potential of your opponent is somewhat reduced, which is a key weakness of Illaoi and would allow you to use a small window of opportunity.

  • A minor issue: Because Q is hard to land, especially against good opponents, reducing the mana cost by 10 per rank seems to be a reasonable and nice QoL buff. This will make you able to spam it a little bit more in order to pressure your lane opponent, or at least to safely last hit.

W - Harsh Lesson

I feel like her W is her most frustrating ability right now. While it gives her some sticking potential, especially now that it is on a 4s CD (6.10), jumping after your opponent is mostly useless when there are no tentacles around anyway and also considering the base damage is pretty underwhelming, especially since I don't see it as a high priority for leveling. The worst thing about this ability, however, is that the tentacles nearby will never EVER actually land on an attentive/better player. I have seen Ekko, Wukong and other streamers dodge between the tentacles like nobodies business and killing a full health illaoi basically without losing a sliver of health themselves. While I understand that Illaoi is not supposed to be good against high mobility champs, the fact that everybody can just walk out of all your damage is very frustrating. Especially the W-Tentacle takes extremely long to strike (animation of W plus animation of the Smash). Another note on this ability: On the PBE, W has currently a significant %max health damage, which increases her not-tentacle-related damage quite a bit. While I kinda like it, I dislike that the tentacle theme is given up on, more or less.

Here are some possible changes to her W:

  • My favorite option: Move the 50% slap speed increase from her R to her W. As it stands, her W is only powerful in her ult and perhaps to gap-close a bit. Harsh Lesson needs some standalone power. Instead of buffing her damage, the increased speed would make her zoning around tentacles more reliable, which is her identity anyway. I also think it's fair, since walking up to tentacles when Illaoi is around should hold some reliable damage threat, otherwise the whole kit is useless. The slap speed of Q and E is fine, just W feels so off due to the huge delay.

  • Another core weakness of Illaoi is that she obviously can't spawn tentacles at will. However, a harsh lesson against an enemy champion could invoke the presence of her god, resetting the timer of „Prophet of an Elder God“. What this would mean is that she can now jump somewhere and actually have a tentacle to work with after a 1 or 2 seconds delay. This would counteract her frustrating weakness when going somewhere where no tentacle is and being completely helpless without the ult. She would still be weak in a very short fight, but could build up her zone faster in the mid to late game.

  • An execute ability is also an option. Dealing %missing health would help in killing running enemies, a frustrating aspect where she is terrible at. And also faster speed in executing spirits will help apllying the debuff quickly to set up a good teamfight. Additionally, the "over kill" on low spirits can execute both spirit and champion - before, it was very annoying to grab a very low target but not being able to do anything with it. Thematically it would also make sense: A weak spirit is especially unlikely to survive a "Harsh Lesson".

  • A pretty simple but logical approach is to have Harsh Lesson deal more damage to spirits. This would give her more team utility when pulling out a spirit before a fight and make her able to deal some damage without chasing, which she can't do anyway. Thematically, Harsh Lesson is there to test the spirits in the first place.

  • There are also the more traditional approaches: Buffing her flat damage, giving her a slow, increasing the jump range. I think these ideas are so so. Especially giving her basically a free permaslow seems to be a pretty hefty change that is, at least to me, not in her identity.

E – Test of Spirit

Considering the ability has recently been reworked, I don't want to dwell on this too long. The rework was in my opinion very healthy (finally a reliable way to create tentacles without tilting the enemy) and opened up other areas to be buffed. So, as i said, good job.

However, some aspects are still a little awkward, especially.

  • The slow when the tether breaks (i.e. when they already got away). I don't even know why it's there, you have no way of catching up to them at all. The only situation where it is mildly useful is when multiple team members chase one lone enemy across half of the map. Giving Illaoi the slow when she pulls the spirit out (makes more logical sense as well, probably disorienting to lose your soul) would give her all the cc she needs in her kit: A hard to land ability to cripple one opponent before a teamfight starts. Since she is terrible at engaging, this would give her a meaningful way to make a quick catch on an opponent when sieging and giving her team at least something in this regard. This would fit her identiy perfectly, and also give her more outplay potential and depth to the combos she can do, without making her a permaslow/engaging/cc-bot champ at all. I would really love to see that.

  • Another thing is the travel speed of the tentacle. But this would be no issue if the before mentioned problem would be addressed.

  • And a last thing is that the hit box of minions seems to be quite large, but perhaps this is only me.

R – Leap of Faith

This is probably the most iconic move of Illaoi and the source of love and hate at the same time. It can be ridiculous how she shreds whole teams and equally ridiculous when the enemy team just disengages, leaving her with no chase potential whatsoever. Every Illaoi player seems to be wanting an AoE slow, but Riot is still unwilling to move her in that direction. And even though I would delight in being even more powerful in my ult, I can understand that that is not supposed to be her role. However, there are still some changes I always keep thinking about:

  • First of all, I think ulting should reset the W timer. Since she has extremely low engage potential, even stealing this little gap closer from her seems overly unreasonable. Sure, it is on a rather low cooldown nowadays, but I don't want to wait for 2 seconds or more after I ulted to use my first Harsh Lesson. Especially the first seconds in her ult are crucial, because enemies will disengage very quickly.

  • Now comes a big one and this would possibly lead to even more rebalancing, I can't be sure. But I keep thinking about this, and reducing her numbers somewhat in order to have this effect would be totally worth it. Here goes: Getting hit by the ult makes them a vessel (perhaps for a reduced duration). Okay, hear me out. While standing in the ult, this should not have a big effect. The tentacles swing anyway and no additional tentacles can be spawned because of the tentacle density. When this becomes relevant, however, is when they start to run away: This will significantly increase your influence zone, since tentacles will spawn where they are trying to disengage to. What this basically guarantees is that you will be rather strong for a few seconds when you get a good ult off, regardless of where the fight goes. This would keep the stationary aspect of her kit, but make her ult much more useful against mobile champs and skilled players because it will not be as easy to simply run away. But enough of that for now.

  • There are a lot of more simplistic approaches, I'll talk briefly about two: First, increasing the base damage would give her more burst which in turn makes her less kitable since the majority of her damage would be dealt earlier instead of later. Second: Adding some burst healing to her ult (like 5%max health per champ and spirit) would make her walking into a whole team more forgiving and giving her some more artificial tankiness, while also increasing her outplay and baiting potential. Normally, healing is pretty delayed, which is why every Illaoi is forced to build Sterak's Gage asap, which in turn is kind of boring and one dimensional.

To wrap it up, if Riot would just implement the W-Slap Speed increase and the shift of the E-Slow to the beginning, this would already be huge and much more fun to play with in my opinion. Numbers are all well and good, but it seem to be her mechanics that are somewhat unbalanced.

That's it from my side for now. If you want to add some great ideas, feel free. If you want to criticize or support some stuff I wrote, I would love to hear it.

I would really like Illaoi to be in a more stable spot where she can be balanced more easily and players don't have to feel like they are playing a bronze champ (not that I'm saying I'm a great playeer, but you always want to feel like you can improve to a higher level with your main champ).

Good look to the developers to accomplish that. I hope the solutions are not going to be overly simplistic.

Take care! :)

2 Comments

Regulas5/21/2016, 4:13:44 AM1 votes

First option on W is probably the favorite. Since really speed is the entirety of the reason she's so feast or famine and inconsistent: at around .8 seconds for all her animations it's simply to easy to evade her abilities making it difficult to land (and making it rely a bit too much on your opponents skill). Furthermore since all her abilities are slow it means a full rotation takes an obscenely large amount of time.

Thanetiore5/23/2016, 1:24:11 PM1 votes

Hi Guys!

First of all: Sorry if you disliked the wall of text and/or think she doesn't need these kind of changes, however: She is still at 46% win rate at plat and above, even after the CD buff to her W, and is worse and worse the higher you go.

  • @Regulas:

I completely agree that the speed of her tentacle slaps, especially on her W, is the main reason she is okay or even oppressive in lower elo and horrible at higher elo. Making her hits more consistent and possibly even downgrading her damage would make her way easier to balance around. I can only guess RIOT purposefully gives her huge outplay potential to balance the high damage numbers, but if that leads to that much inconsistency, the issue has to be revisited again. As I said, movement type abilities should always work to counter her slaps, but to be able to easily walk out of her damage just feels stupid for all sides.

  • PBE changes to Q:

Don't know if I overlooked this when opening the thread, but right now there is a 30/35/40/45/50% slow on her Q for - I think - 1.5 s. While I'm glad to see a usable slow in her kit, I'm not sure yet about this change. Problem is, the slow is tied to a pretty easy to dodge skillshot that doesn't even profit from your proximity to the target. And ofc, whoever can dodge this initial slap can outplay Illaoi as usual - which is especially pronounced in high divisions... Again.

My main concern is that this gives her yet another layer of binary success patterns: Land the Q > land the E, land the W or get an extra hit from your Ult. Don't land the Q: Get kited and outplayed as usual. Tying even more strength to a hard to land skillshot seems to be a strange way to go about balancing her across all divisions.

Now this doesn't mean I'm not grateful for the time RIOT spends in making this champ viable, I'm just trying to give my thoughts on the topic. I still think a strong decaying slow on the initial cast of her E would be a good way if one really wants to implement a slow. E is hard to land in general, but can be applied quickly if engaging with a W. Besides I generally think that E is a much fairer skill shot to play with and against (solely projectile-wise). + other reasons I stated earlier.

  • TriForce changes:

Don't know if you guys saw it, but TriForce is probably going to be changed and will be built from Stinger instead of Zeal. This will get rid of the useless crit and will give Tri 20% CDR and 40% AS now. Can this perhaps be considered an indirect buff for illaoi? I always thought the Spellblade of Triforce was crazy strong with steraks, her high base AD and the 2-3s W, but the item just never felt optimal. Now however, some things changed:

  1. Her scaling with AD will be worse with patch 6.11 // she doesn't really need to build that much AD anymore to deal damage with tentacles.
  2. Crit chance was a completely random stat on her and not particularly useful.
  3. CDR is very valuable on her and spending nearly 4k gold for 10% CDR was not very efficient.

The only downside is that 40% AS is a lot to build on illaoi, who has low base AS. However, her AS per level scaling is decent and perhaps it's not too bad in the later stages of the game at all. The fact that she can jump quite frequently with W now and will get rewarded for it with 400+ spellblade damage, being able to get some additional hits in could be quite nice. Additionally, this damage can't really be evaded (unlike her tentacles) and the flat W damage is receiving buffs as well. This will make her quite strong, even aside from tentacles.

Do you think Triforce will be a viable item on Illaoi soon?

  • General Stuff:

Since I started this thread to talk about rebalancing, I will state some new ideas and possibilites. I know this sounds as if I just wanted to have as many buffs as possible, but I actually intent to mainly look at changes that would make her more consistent, if possible not much stronger at low elo.

  1. Giving her some free Tenacity on her Ult would be a good way to don't make her ult so much hit and miss and open up her item and mastery paths a bit. First of all, she is basically forced to build Merc Boots alongside the Swiftness mastery to not get completely shut down randomly when ulting. This is a problem especially pronounced - again - against higher level players. Secondly, I think that the outplay potential of moving out of her zone and not grouping up extremely tightly is sufficient for an ult that has so many consistency issues already.

  2. I know it's repetitive and in the vein of what Regulas said as well, but her animations are just too slow, which is easily abused if you know how to counter her. If a slap speed increase isn't tied to her W, she either has to get a reliable slow or slightly faster animations in general - to a point where you can dash out of her damage easily but cannot walk out of it anymore. And if this should be too strong, then her damage is too high, not her tentacles too fast. I have no idea why this isn't done, since this evidently is one of the main reason for her inconsistent performance.

Take care! Would love to see some participation in this discussion. :)