Tryndamere, what he actually needs and what LOL needs from him. [Trynd main with 5000 trynd games]
First let me start by saying that champion balance shouldn't exist soley to make that champion feel good to play, it should exist to make the game itself overall more fun to play. The champion should offer something that makes allies happy to play with you, makes you happy to play with it, and makes enemies happy to explore their options and various interesting complexities of fighting against you. That is often a hard bar to meet, but that is the bar that champion balance should aspire towards.
That said, it is okay to make some concessions in balance if it would make the game overall more interesting. For instance, Karthas ultimate doesn't satisfy the golden rule but because it feels so epic and inspires a sense of dread without being overbearing it is worth keeping in the game anyway. It adds value despite breaking the golden rule because the power it has is expressed in a very visible and satisfying way. So the golden rule I like to judge champion balance by isn't absolute, but it is a good starting point.
You have to be careful about letting champions "take fun" away from others like this though, because if every champion has a parasitic design then nobody has fun. It is often much easier to design a parasitic champion than a symbiotic one, and some champions that appear to be symbiotic between allies can unfortunately be parasitic against enemies.
Dota is an example of a game where caution is thrown to the wind in this regard, and nearly every champion is parasitic. I believe this is a big part of the reason it is difficult to "get into" Dota-- you have to memorize how to avoid a thousand different pitfalls instanced by the parasitic nature of each hero's kits. Navigating this nest of complexity is fun for those who already understand it, but is perplexing to those who don't.
With that said, I believe League of Legends has over time started to welcome more and more parasitic designs, but that doesn't mean parasitic designs were absent from League's original roster. For instance, Tryndamere is a parasitic design.
In fact I'd hazard to say that Tryndamere is one of the most parasitic designs in League of Legends, and although comparing him to heroes in Dota in general is difficult, from purely a parasitic rating point of view he is even more parasitic than most champions in Dota.
I say this because his kit revolves around the idea of testing your luck in occasional trades in the enemy champion to reveal if you will win an exchange with a surprise crit, or be relegated to sustaining by temporarily consuming your capacity to win exchanges in such a manner for immediate health-- which translates into the ability to reacquire that capacity.
Theoretically Tryndamere could engage in this pattern and lose every exchange by being unlucky, or he could win every exchange. If he wins every exchange the Tryndamere player will have fun at the enemy's expense parasitically. If he loses, he still has a fallback option with his ultimate, which is there to give him the ability to literally push his luck.
This is basically the original idea, the seed, of Tryndamere's design-- it isn't really a very good one, but this is the way it has always been for him at the very core of his kit, even before his rework from bloodlust stacks to fury in season 2.
Gambling of any kind can be very addictive, and a lot of the allure of playing Tryndamere comes down to not knowing exactly how a trade will play out, and being pleasantly surprised when it plays out far better than you could have hoped-- or exercising your wit to adjust the way you are playing when it plays out far worse than you thought it could have. The issue with this is that semi-rigged gambling doesn't offer a very engaging experience for the enemy.
To engage the enemy is to offer them a way to improve their standing if they outplay you, but Tryndamere's fury doesn't really do this-- it only offers them a way to improve their chances of improving their standing if they outplay you. This isn't the same thing, because the prior offers an immediate reward while the latter only offers a reward that is expressed on the average over many encounters. Tryndamere's entire design allows him to capitalize on any favorable encounter won by chance or otherwise, so often you never get the opportunity to express your skill against him in a meaningful way.
This basically comes down to the crux of the issue: fury represents a random element that could swing the fight one way or the other, and controlling that random element doesn't create any guarantee regardless of how well or poorly you play. In some ways it is a false promise, especially given how easily Tryndamere can capitalize on an opportunity offered by a favorable string of crits.
Nevertheless this kind of gambling is very alluring to Trynd players, and makes combat feel more vital because it is difficult to ascertain how it will unfold-- this is why people who play Tryndamere enough to understand him (and how to adjust when you begin to lose with him) pretty much never get tired of playing him-- every fight with him really does feel like your first fight with him. Likewise, no matter how much you practice against Tryndamere he will still always have an unknown element that makes fighting against him stressful.
I think there is another way to offer this kind of experience to Tryndamere players that is less parasitic though. For instance, skillshots serve a similar role, they offer some unpredictability to fights between two ranged champions that can make it difficult to predict exactly how all the chips will land, but both players can still express themselves by juking and faking to throw the aim of skillshots off. The skillshots manage to make the fights unpredictable and keep things fresh without nullifying the skill factor that should be an important part of any competitive game.
It wouldn't be impossible to leverage this aspect of skillshots to make Tryndamere more engaging to play against, and in fact that is probably what he needs to become a healthier addition to League. One thing should remain though, and that is the fact that playing against Tryndamere should feel stressful (in a good way though, not a bad way). Tryndamere's kit should challenge the opponent to make the correct moves and inputs during a brawl, not **after **the brawl has already occured and Tryndamere is trying to build fury again.
Doing that would likely involve reworking Tryndamere's basic attacks to be linear area of effects (non-whirlwind yasuo Q in size) with a slow (~0.7 attacks per second) wind up time that is long enough to be avoidable (so enemy isn't overwhelmed with the number of necessary inputs per second) unless you are moving into it and some sort of way for Tryndamere to issue an attack whenever he wants (like shift right click or something) on the ground in front of him, and likely would need to hit hard enough to make it so that even tanks can't withstand too many mistakes.
#But I'm going to assume RIOT isn't interested in making such drastic changes to Tryndamere.
In that case buffing Tryndamere is dangerous because of how sensitive his kit is to any disturbance. Any mistake in the way he is adjusted may result in his default rigged-gambling pattern becoming rigged so far as to be broken or so fair that he has no agency at all.
I'd like for the live balance team to make three observations when working on Tryndamere.
For one, the variance on the gambling pattern is lower the higher his crit chance is because of how chance works, but Tryndamere's kit actually leverages variance, so perhaps surprisingly lowering Tryndamere's maximum crit chance via fury from 35% to 30% and then putting additional power into the rest of his kit (like more bonus attack damage) would actually make him stronger, even with an "equivalent tradeoff in stats". Even keeping his fury unchanged and simply buffing his reward per string of crits via increased attack damage would effectively be an increase in variance. An increase to base attack speed is the only offensive stat buff that wouldn't really affect his variance too much.
Secondly, Tryndamere's ability to capitalize on a favorable condition like a string of crits is heavily tied to his attack range. An additional 50 attack range (from 125 to 175) isn't really enough to make Tryndamere able to harass melee champions, because they can normally cover the tiny 50 distance to retaliate with their own attack before he can wind up the attack animation in the early game. He could use the extra range to take some farm he couldn't otherwise reach in a more contested lane against a tankier opponent when the opponent goes to take CS. The real usage of the extra attack range is in being able attack, cancel the wind-down animation on his attack, move, and then attack again (similar to orb walking or the "kiting" pattern used by ranged champions). A wider attack range basically means he can perform that pattern more times without falling out of range of the enemy champion (assuming they are running away at full speed).
Lastly, the ability for Tryndamere to turn his advantage into carrying power is largely tied to his ability to kill things quickly. The more time he takes to finish a duel or run down a lone champion, the more time the enemy has to respond, the more likely he will have to run off and won't be able to actually make use of all his gold. I believe he kills squishies fast enough (probably too fast actually), but he takes so long to kill tanks (if he can kill them at all) that he basically becomes impractical into the mid game. He only becomes a bit more practical again in the late game once he is able to afford armor penetration or reduction from items to go along with his heavy damage items, but usually games are over before he can reach that point. Armor penetration or true damage somewhere in his kit would very much help him turn his advantage into winning power.
Out of all three of these, I'd say that the first one would lead to a game where Tryndamere snowballs harder, the second one would lead to a game where Tryndamere survives lane against tankier champions a little easier and leverages an advantage against ranged champions a lot better, and the third one leads to a game where Tryndamere can take an advantage and make a win with it.
So with that said its worth considering what Tryndamere actually lacks right now when thinking about how best to buff him.
I think Tryndamere actually snowballs hard enough, and in the lanes where I can get a snowball rolling I perform very well with him unless the enemy is tanky, so I would consider a buff to his variance to be the wrong choice.
Tryndamere is definitely struggling against tankier opponents and ranged opponents that prefer to kite him, so a buff to his attack range could help him better deal with both of those types of lanes-- so I'm definitely in support of any buff to his attack range.
Lastly, Tryndamere has a problem in the mid game making any kind of significant pressure because of his inability to deal with tanks even if he manages to start a snowball against them. I wouldn't want to see Tryndamere receive a buff that would allow him to capitalize on a snowball at the same time as being able to shred through tanks, so I would suggest caution about where it would be given to him in his kit. For instance, if it were put on his spinning slash he would be able to maximize his mobility and shredding power at the same time, which would leave a tank with no options around level 13-- which is too oppressive. If instead the armor penetration / true damage amp / mitigation ignore were on his mocking shout, he would have to make a trade off on chasing power and threatening power until late game, which is exactly what he needs right now.
#So overall I'd say just do these two changes and Tryndamere will be in a better spot without becoming overbearing or permaban status:
- Increased range from 125 to 175
- Mocking shout active (or Undying rage passive) now does something (scaling with rank) that makes Tryndamere do more damage to tankier targets affected by it (regardless of facing, similar to the attack damage debuff which this could replace or accompany).
