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@Riot, Your Analysis of Fiddlesticks is Right on the Money

The Yetii Rider··40 votes·2,093 views

The change to Fiddlesticks's Terrify range negatively impacted the player's usability, as you discussed in the patch notes. I don't need to personally understand that as a player, Riot's got the data to prove it for me. The question then is, if you knew this, why did it take you so long to follow up on it? The change was made in 6.9, if you were really following the MYMU then you should have realized this pattern was occurring no later than 6.11...and yet we waited nearly an entire year for you to even mention this interaction again.

I think the main issue I have with Riot's balance team is that they simply choose not to include small changes to champions that they know are needed until they can pair them with more relevant balance changes or until the champion is in the spotlight for being good or bad. This was mentioned with specific regards to Talon's Cutthroat a while back (the change to LeBlanc's Sigil of Malice brought about questions of Talon's Cutthroat and Riot came out and said 'We see Talon's silence as problematic but if we remove it people will ask why are you nerfing Talon he's not even a problem right now'.")

Just balance the game, please. Especially all the little QOL things that would just make the game less frustrating for players like the Terrify range. They may not have a big impact on balance but they definitely have an impact on fun.

13 Comments

Derfel13 votes

The only problem with Fiddle is he is a season 1 champion. What do I mean by this? I mean that if he was released today his ult would do %missing HP damage on top of his bases and fiddle himself would probably get a shield that reduced all income damage by 50% to force the impact of the ult into every game regardless of fiddles item situation in any individual game, his W would heal him based on his missing HP so he could always heal more when low for those "stories" that you can put in a montage. Fiddles fall from grace is just a symptom of Riot's powercreeping.

Supreme Senpai694 votes

The sad part is they can't stop. If they release a new champ that isn't stronger or as strong as the current ones nobody will play it and it'd be a waste of time

Honestly every champ should have a niche and that should be the reason to choose them, not their level of power. You want surprise over the wall ganks? Fiddle or Zac, depending on if you want tanky or damaging. Then balance around their identity.

It's way too late for that though, but that's probably the only thing that would stop power creep. Giving us a reason to play a champion that isn't attributed to its strength in the meta.

The Sword Saint1 votes

Meanwhile plenty of old champions are regularly strong or overbearing in the meta, but we just ignore that when we want to accuse riot of power creeping the new champs to push out the old ones and force people to keep buying champions.

Bootlessly8 votes

Thank You! Balance is important but balancing fun is more important. IN the end we are all just playing a game. Games are supposed to be fun! I Remember Caitlyns auto attacks for almost two years would deal damage before the animation hit. It wasn't game breaking but it was weird and kinda made for more auto attack canceling and weird farming times and just... ehh. And they knew about it! INFACT they didn't change it until her rework (the thingy they did) and stated in the notes that they knew it was a thing but never fixed it.

As a very squishy hearted rock solid man who ran a chipper chipmunk group once said, keep the focus on fun!

Hyrum Graff2 votes

I'd guess it's somewhat about efficiency.

If you're going to spend the effort to make sure you really understand how the champ's abilities are coded, so you can make changes with a minimal chance of adding new bugs, then you should take the chance to fix everything at that point instead of waiting and having to familiarize yourself with it again in 6 months.

Celeste Benal1 votes

Coding and game balance are not even the same team. The only time they are ever remotely related is if code is preventing a game balance decision from being made. Usually this happens when working with old code.

Maximum Morde2 votes

This is just what happens when you have more work than you can actually do. You have to prioritize.

ForeverLaxx1 votes

Because Riot thinks that every change they make has to be "impactful" and that means they're going to gather up a bunch of tiny things and dump them all out at once on a champion a year after the problems were first discovered, thereby insuring that if something goes wrong there's no single change to blame for it and the champion can sit for another year before getting attention again.

hhaavviikk1 votes

wonder if he will be played as support again because his Q range was nerfed because he was going bot and instantly fearing the ADC but now it's back to what it was before it's 2nd nerf.

THE RlVER KlNG1 votes

they'll let fiddle sit on a nerf he should never have recieved but arbitrarily buff Jinx

I love Riot logic

ModKnightsKemplar1 votes

I guess I hear that, but they did also recently amp up their data collection ability a lot. It may just be that they took awhile to realize that fiddle needed that specific kind of help.

I think this is case where player feedback would have been helpful sooner. Their analysis made perfect sense, but I didn't see a single boards thread that mentioned that specific problem. If Fiddle enthusiasts were able to identify it, they may have changed it sooner.

Riot is just made up of individual employees, and all of them have a specific job to do. No one's job is "monitor fiddle and make sure he is balanced." They need those sorts of things pointed out, and that's perfectly reasonable.

TL;DR. You ask,

if you knew this, why did it take you so long to follow up on it?

This statement totally begs the question; it's obvious they DIDN'T know about it. They do now, so it's getting changed.

The Yetii Rider1 votes

You're right, I didn't see a single board post on it, but this is the kind of thing I would expect more to come out on /R Fiddlesticksmains.

ModKnightsKemplar1 votes

That's fair. And if it's there, then that's another thing.

Either way, the community could do a better job of discussing and upvoting really easy, relevant changes to champs.

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