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My Solution(s) to Power Creep

Blades of Navori·4/8/2018, 6:15:39 PM·7 votes·877 views

Hey everyone

These may not be the best solutions, but everyone likes to bring up power creep and rarely address it with some sort of solution. Each one is listed in order of favorites. Please take the time to read every one, thank you!

  1. Shift Power from Laning to Mid and Late Game

This is perhaps my favorite one since it also fixes the issue of shorter games. By adjusting the majority of champions' damage from the early game to the mid to late game without making early game champions scale too hard while also ensuring late game champions don't dominate the game by not adjusting them too much, if at all this pretty much ensures that you'll have games focused more around mid-late game team fights, epic battles and less on someone~~ ganking top at 2:45~~ snowballing and carrying the game off of the mistakes of a single player. This actually creates a safety net overall and I believe this concept should be the foundation and all succeeding suggestions should be built off of this. It eliminates snowballing, creates a more team fight oriented game, it makes it longer, everything the community has been pretty much asking for.

Late game champions don't get dumpstered for having lower base stats and damage because other champions simply have higher stats and they also don't have super power scaling because early game champions have their power shifted just a bit more toward later stages of the game so they have a chance to compete. One issue I can see is the incentive to not make too many engagements in laning but at the same time is that something we need when we'll be having more skirmishes later on anyway? It also prevents too much of hard snowballing.

  1. Increase Base Armor and Magic Resist

Most champions received sizable increasing to Armor and MR with the introduction of the new season. Perhaps increasing all base armor and MR (except on minions, but including turrets) by an additional 5-10 points and maybe growth by 0.1 - 0.25 with no compensation buffs or changes for damage will mitigate some of the power creep. With no changes to damage this will remedy the problem by a small amount and some new steps looking forward can help fix the problem it even more. This is just a minor step, but a potentially good one.

  1. Increase Base Health

This would have to go hand in hand with armor and magic resist so it would be fair, but increasing base health by a little bit, again with no changes to damage or compensations, will help fix the power creep. I believe combined with an increase to base armor and magic resist the first few really good steps to fixing the power creep will be underway, but you can't really do this without number 2, then the problem wouldn't really be on its way to being fixed.

  1. Reduce Base AD

A more "iffy" solution in my opinion. Base AD isn't a big issue for many champions and even still robbing early game bruisers of too much of their base AD makes them less of a bully and more of a mean kid who gives you spiteful glances once in a while. Not only that, but this only fixes a marginal amount of a growing problem. Maybe they could tone a few champions and leave others alone.

Anyway these are just a few of my thoughts. I personally believe the majority of the power creep comes from early engagements that are just too reliable and too safe a strategy to not abuse. You have incredibly high damage so you roll over turrets and carry the game off of that. Part of the turret problem comes from the fact there is just too much damage in the game, a lot of it being early. Ever hear the joke "Back once, lose turret"?

[poppy-wink]

Good luck on the Fields of Justice and look for a brighter tomorrow!

6 Comments

Geauxx4/8/2018, 7:05:44 PM3 votes

I agree with increase base armor/magic resist and maybeeee health? maybe.

Everything else, eh not really.

  1. even though you say what you say, it will still end up being who has more late game champs while everyone safe plays until late. incoming GP/ryze every game... while at the same time early game champs will suffer hard for the extreme safe play that will emerge.

  2. reducing base AD, might (depending how much of a nerf happens) result in some unfortunate stuff like AP mages returning to the top lane and (prob unlikely, but still possible) adc role again

All they really needed to do was compensate for the mass loss of armor/magic resist loss from runes, which they really didn't do.

stone the blacks4/8/2018, 10:22:02 PM1 votes

what it is is some class(es) have way to effect item for way to little gold, along with a stat and item that makes their main source of damage which was balanced not to do extra damage 150% more effective, along with the ambient gold being increased by ~30% with added ways to earn extra gold such as first tower and klepto

MaxControl4/9/2018, 5:08:11 AM1 votes

I would honestly say therse are good ideas, but not something that will fix the issue without causing more.

I would say instead of reducing ad and increasing hp of champions they need to make runes feel like they are rock-paper-scissors. Like if i take this rune it beats this champion, not spam x rune because its stronk and meta. Make reasoning/rationale be important when picking your runes. The runes feel like you pick fleet footwork because its better than lethal tempo and press the attack. The runes should fit the champion like a glove that was made for their hand only. What I would do is split each role into what kind of champions play in that role. It would go something like this...

well you have poke, heal, and engage supports. So for healing supports we should have a rune that give a boost to shields and heals and that be the keystone. Then because engage is supposed to counter healers with all in engage and tankiness we should give them a rune that helps them beat healers. Maybe we make them bind to an ally once only like kalista does at the beginning of the game. Then that ally does more dmg throughtout the entire game. Then we have poke champions which beat engage champions. So maybe we make their poke do more every 20 seconds kind of like scorch but a bit stronger to where regen doesn't undo the poke damage.

^^ you see by understanding common elements of game design you can easily make meaningful keystone design easy. Then you design the rest of the keystones around things that role has difficult. We think about engage champions and the issues the have like being poked down, but the thing is we dont want to make a rune like crysalis because crysalis makes poke champions shit. So we need to incentivize tanks to bide their time and wait for that juice engage. So we can make it to where the next cc ability will cc for up to 50% long based on how long its been since you attacked an enemy champion. We are not breaking poke supports, but we are also not breaking tank/engage. So we continually do this until the support ru nes are finished and then since adc's have to rely on supports we design adcs around the support runes.

Another thing I would say is that controlling game length is being done completely wrong. Instead of changing champion stats or forcing people to fight over cannon minions we should look at towers. One design issue i have is that the first towers you can attack in all lanes scale from 0:00 to the 15:00 minute mark and that is fine, but the next tower in lane (the inner tower i think) starts off with way too little hp. at 15 min the outter tower has like 75 armor and mr while the inner has 55 armor and mr. We shouljd use towers as a way to control the length of games. Since they are the objective that controls the length of lane phase. What this does is it allows late game champs to farm up safely and scale (you know, be viable) while also rewarding players who dumpster all over they enemy laner greatly. This is great for both passive players who need the tower there to do something in the game as well as the players who are very skilled and can just thrash all over the enemy. We can achieve this by changing armor and mr of the tower. This would also fix the 4 - 5 people in bot lane ganking at 10 minutes issue. (I hate this with a passion).

There are more intelligent ways to design this, you just need the right people to do so. I am actually a software engineer too. js riot lol.

Spoofghoul4/9/2018, 6:41:46 PM1 votes

I think one of the issues is that armor doesn't seem to cut it

it is really weak to repetitive damage especially when armorpen comes into play

Perhaps we can tweak armor penetration to not be as strong mostly % pen though and make cleaver more of a juggernaut centric item and a little less appealing as a generalist item

lethality should then be applied before % pen

I feel like mr is doing it's job mostly fine

Most magic damage is burst oriented or applied in aoe and generally 1 mr item in rare cases 2 usually does the job because the hp alone helps vs burst

But armor only seems to do well on your first item buy then falls off really hard to the point where you might as well just stack warmogs instead