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Klepto Sucks

dæmonetta··1 votes·994 views

I’m super excited for season ten, between presence of mind deltas and Klepto’s rework — never thought it played like a real keystone anyway, and I truly pity champions whose kits are heavily reliant on its season nine iteration because it doesn’t do what a keystone should, which is augment your champion’s identity and synergies with your play style in a fight to give you more outplay potential, at every stage of the game

basically, sure, money is nice. but you know what else is worth just as much money as your klepto? taking a real keystone and piling up your body count (go contribute to the actual fight and the gold will follow.. you little meta-slave plebeian). Farming by poking takes away from opportunities to actually play the game, and totally ruins the risk/reward calculus that is normally used to determine whether you all-in during the laning phase and that makes learning effective laning micro compelling. Why take it over literally anything that actually helps you take a trade? It isn’t only non-optimal for the early game and for interpolating over basically any engagement with hostiles but simply not as fun, because it only rewards you for not playing!!

I always felt like champs who need Klepto to itemize properly were handicapped, and not really pilotable in the laning phase (e.g., s8 Kayle, and to some extent, current season Ezreal, whose itemization doesn’t even really allow him to scale that hard, so his runes remain one of the only avenues he has in order to augment his late game performance with raw damage stats). It’s just a horrible loss whenever someone is forced into taking it because it’s the “best,” because it removes an entire facet of gameplay which is huge for other champs, like a Kai’Sa or a Kha’Zix playing around press TA or dark harvest for burst, respectively — and to a lesser extent I’m also opposed to Inspiration’s other sub trees because of course free boots would never be passed up in a high elo bot lane given that they aren’t needed early. Anyone who doesn’t take Footwear secondary and then fails to secure a kill’s worth of gold in leads on their opponent is immediately set behind if their second tree doesn’t make for at least that much better kill potential in the first nine to twelve minutes, which I think makes them objectively very unhealthy for the meta, badly designed and sucky because they actually in themselves strip away the sense of agency that runes are supposed to add by virtue of being in the video game.

Anyone else feel that way about the state of balancing? Thoughts on my little “footwear parity” critique? How happy are people with the direction things are moving balancing wise?

2 Comments

Xavanic2 votes

klepto was never a healthy keystone, champs who used it typically already had overloaded kits and used it to outscale their opponent

dæmonetta1 votes

{quoted}

klepto was never a healthy keystone, champs who used it typically already had overloaded kits and used it to outscale their opponent

right, exactly

I feel like if you already have proactive junglers in the game, then incremental poking can already be rewarded on champions that take a long time to scale by using wave dynamics to ensure effective ganks by default — it’s the responsibility of the laner to advocate for themselves and then to make sure they capitalize on those ganks like normal

this is maybe another symptom of the top lane isolation problem in that SoloQ junglers don’t always understand the merits of vertical jungling or trying to control the top lane, and even if your jungler is playing Xin Zhao or Rengar, if they’re boosted enough, they’re not always going to try to gank top lane to control the Herald or enlist the help of their top laner and their choice of keystone in order to capitalize on their early game kill potential and snowball the lane

as much as one might gripe about junglers and how they can in a sense detract from a “win lane, win game” contingency, they’re just another way in which league ultimately reduces to the ability to effectively play as a team, which is its own set of unique skills and isn’t intrinsically a bad thing, and I think personally is a lot less of a silly way to design the game than around developing champions who can’t farm more than half their creeps until level six for their sheer weakness and lack of utility, and so have to rely on poking for gold while also starving for lack of external interventions in order to avoid feeding, and then scale into monstrous unkillable stat-sticks as a result, no matter what — that isn’t fun to play, or to play against

the fact that anyone ever found this keystone compelling just reveals a lot of cracks in the design of the game, and how people are effectively using it as a loophole to skirt around participating in aspects of it that can feel disproportionately punishing

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