my thoughts on the most recent patch

Rift herald rift herald is too oppressive. top is a lane where advantages as small as an extra 10 armor or another 20 damage on an ability can shift a matchup from skill-based to lopsided. It's also a lane where one or two deaths in many matchups means you can't lane anymore. The fact that the buff sticks around after they die means that even if you manage to outplay or get a good gank on them after they take herald, you still probably can't fight them. A single dragon never had nearly the impact that herald has on a lane. Even if it's balanced, i find it absolutely anti-fun as a mechanic and i don't like the fact that it's in the game. If anything, there should be some way to ensure that the buff can be removed via the other team's actions.

Malzahar's passive The /only/ change malzahar needs is a complete rework to his passive. It's a massive outlier in terms of power and just really poorly designed altogether. Late-game, the passive is up every seven seconds. Malzahar can cast his Q, his W, and his E and all his other abilities without popping the passive; whereas the opponent needs access to a low cooldown poke ability in order to remove it - and they need to wait another full second before malzahar can be punished for being out of position. Assuming malzahar makes no attempts to dodge any CC or abilities, he still has a whole second's window of time where he can make up for his misplay by flash-ulting or falling back in to position. Assuming he is able to dodge skillshots, he might be able to start bursting an enemy without anyone being able to pop his passive - making it even harder for his opponents to answer him. Here are some anecdotal situations that i think demonstrate why the passive is poorly designed: -Malzahar is playing up as his team sieges the enemy base. As he moves up to harass with his Q, orianna throws her ball out to pop his passive. However, she does not bother following up with a dissonance, because it will do no damage, nor will it slow him. Instead, Blitzcrank must wait for his passive to fall so that he can punish malzahar for the misplay - but the ensuing second is more than enough time for malzahar to fall back behind one of his team's tanks. After this, orianna's team has only seven seconds to force an engage while malzahar's passive is down. Conversely, all malzahar must do is sit back and wait to do it all again. Even though malzahar took poke and walked completely out of position during a tense late-game situation, he was rewarded for it, because he was able to damage the enemy team with his Q and melt in to the backline with no harm done to his person. -at level 11, Malzahar's passive is up, but he is at 20% health. He is river-ganking varus, who has ~75% health. He walks straight towards varus, who throws his Q out to pop malzahar's passive while he backpedals toward his tower. Rather than dodging the Q, malzahar walks straight through it, taking negligible damage. at this moment, varus knows that he must wait another second before he can kill malzahar or slow his approach with an E or his ult. malzahar presses Q ahead of varus - varus continues backpedaling and then flashes away, dodging the CC - malzahar flashes, W-E-ults, and varus dies. Even though varus had plenty of cc available, and even his flash, and even though he didn't waste it popping malzahar's passive, he could not punish malzahar, because he had to wait another full second in order to do so. Malzahar, who ate varus's skillshot at 20% HP and still got the kill, was rewarded even though he made no attempts to outplay his opponent.

Zyra & Elemental dragons - RNG very early on, we all decided that RNG was not a gameplay element we wanted to heavily feature in League of Legends. dodge was removed, miss chance was removed, whole kits were reworked to remove RNG. RNG is not fun. It takes decision making and the feeling of power and control over the game's outcome away from the players. All sorts of coding has been rewritten over the course of this game's evolution with the sole purpose of making every possible interaction in the game MORE reliable, MORE reproducible, MORE transparent. Many hundreds of hours of work has gone in to this! Looking at these most recent changes from this context, i simply cannot understand why you would turn around now, taking smooth, reliable kits and mechanics and adding RNG. I honestly, truly do not care if zyra is more balanced now as a result of having less control over her own kit. It doesn't feel good to play. It doesn't feel good to play /against/. The change is a failure in my eyes and it totally reneges on one of the most core design elements that separates league of legends - and its consumer base - from games like dota 2 and HoN.