Analyzing the misusage of abilities
Hello, In the following post I am going to make a small analysis of the penalty for misusing an ability. If you don't want to read the whole text, you can look at the matrix I made (at the end of the text). If you don't understand the matrix, I recommend to read the text.
Usually, two are three penalties for misusing an ability: 1st: The ability goes on cooldown without having an impact or only a slight one. 2nd: You wasted your recources for the abilities. In most cases this is Mana, but can also be other secondary recource systems, e.g. Renekton's fury. There are also champs, who don't suffer from this factor (e.g. Katarina), but suffer even more from the cooldown factor. Another factor, which only affects a few champions, is a factor, which is imposed by ability effects. A good example for this is Karma's Gathering Fire. When you miss a damage spell on an enemy champion, you will not gain the cooldown reduction on Mantra. The benefit of an ability like Gathering Fire takes over some place in the power budget in the kit, so power has to be cut in other parts of the kit, which usually affect the same parts of the kit, which is the Mantra cooldown in this case. So to balanceit out, the cooldown on Mantra was increased. This leads to missing your damage abilities having a higher penalty when missed. I think the best example for a change Riot already made is the change on Sivir's E at the last rework (2014). Before the rework you had to pay mana to cast the spellshield, so you had not only the penalty for the ability to go on cooldown without having an effect, but also the mana cost. With the change of removing the mana cost for casting the spellshield, the penalty of misusing has been greatly reduced. The question now is how a change on a penalty factor influences the gameplay. The influence it has on the gameplay depends on how good the player is. If we take Sivir's Spellshield for example, a rather unskilled player will maybe only be able to make use of 60% of the spellshield usages. So in 50% of the cases he is influenced by the penalties of misusage. A pro-player will probably always (100%) be able to make use of the spellshield. The penalties don't affect his gameplay, since they don't exist for him. This means that bad players are much, much more affected by penalty changes than good players. The result: Reducing the penalties means the champion is more accessable for bad players, whereas good players are unaffected; Increasing the penalties means the champion is less accessable for bad players, whereas good players remain unaffected. However in most cases a penalty change also causes a seperate change, which is made as a buff to the champ when the penalties are increased and made as a nerf when the penalties are reduced. When a seperate change like this happens, the meaning of the difference of the impact on good/bad players changes as well. Let's take Sivir as an example again: When her cost for casting the spellshield was removed, the penalty factor was removed thereby. Keep in mind that a bad player misuses the shield in maybe 60% of all cases. By the removal of the penalty factor of mana cost, a bad player saves about 60% of the mana cost he used to pay in average, so it's a huge buff for the bad player. Remember that is not a buff for good players, since they never had a disadvantage of the mana cost, because they always used the spellshield correctly. This means if the buff for the bad players is compensated by a nerf somewhere else in the kit, the bad players receive a balancing buff + nerf, whereas the good players only received a nerf, because the buff has no effect on them. If it's the other way around and the penalty was increased, it's a nerf for bad players (average of 60% of the cases), but no nerf for good players, since they don't receive the penalty by always using the ability correctly. If this nerf for bad players is now compensated by a buff in another part of the kit, the bad players receive a balancing nerf + buff, whereas the good players only received a buff, because the nerf has no influence on them.
Conclusion: There are four cases of ability misusage penalty changes:
-The penalty was reduced and there is no balancing change ->Bad players profit, good players are unaffected
-The penalty was increased and there is no balancing change ->Bad players have a disadvantage, good players are unaffected
-The penalty was reduced and there is a balancing change ->Bad players are unaffected, disadvantage for good players
-The penalty was increased and there is a balancing change ->Bad players are unaffected, advantage for good players