About Diana

I absolutely love Diana. She's one of my personal favorite champions. I love beefy mages ( ) and AP assassins ( ). It shouldn't be a surprise that Diana is one of my favorite champs. She fits both roles well. That being said, I understand the difficulty in balancing a hybrid kit, especially a good one like hers. She has a lot of strengths. She has burst. She has consistent damage. She has survivability (more so than other assassins but less so than most fighters). She has stickiness and mobility. Her kit is good. Really good. I applaud Riot for making a champion so fun to play and so versatile. That unfortunately, is the issue. Her standard builds give her all of her strengths when she is strong, which can make her unrelenting to play against. She has a kit like Kayle's or Lee Sin's: it's useful enough that it is never really all that bad, despite whatever meta they're in. These types of kits, when strong, tend to cloud out other picks. We saw this in season 4's jungle. Riot has done an excellent job addressing this in season 5 and an excellent job trying to communicate with players about it.

I digress.

The point is: Diana has a good kit. A really good kit. A kit that, thanks to its versatility, tends to be an underwhelming sleeper pick or an unstoppable monster. I think the central problem is that her itemization increases her consistent damage and burst damage at the same time, her mobility and stickiness at the same time, and her survivability along with her damage. It gives her a lot in one core build. It is hard to balance because nerfing one thing and keeping everything else the same makes her lose her core identity as a middle-ground between the beefy mage-fighters and the AP assassins. Nerfing her whole kit makes her seem lackluster. Letting her stay strong lets her drown out other champions. I think that if Riot were to find a way to maintain that identity - the aforementioned middle-ground - by splitting her strengths into two sets which need to be itemized differently (Her burst no longer associated with her survivability and consistent damage, her mobility uncoupled from her stickiness), it would allow them proper levers to tweak Diana if she is too weak or too strong. I would ideally see three equally viable build paths for Diana: one for the fighter role, one for the assassin, and an in-between one for the hybrid.

Again, I realize Diana is a balance nightmare, and it isn't something Riot will be able to magically fix, but I want to see the opinions around here on this. I am a single person with views of game balance that, like everybody's views, are flawed. I hope this post sparks some discussion among you guys, and I hope that if this thread gets seen by Rioters, it will have promoted some thought among them too.

Anyway, a universal GLHF to you all.