Shyvana: Problem Solving
I am going to talk about different kinds of mechanics and how it relates to improving Shyvana’s gameplay design. In this post I will mostly be talking about micro rather than macro. Macro things, like being on the right side of the map and attacking the right objective, have less to do with the champion you pick and more to do with strategic knowledge that applies to every champion. While some champions do have tools for this, like teleports, I will not be discussing that today.
Introduction League of Legends, like any goal oriented game, presents problem to solve. The problem is “How do you destroy the nexus?” A champion’s power is related to their ability to destroy the nexus or enable its destruction. On the way to destroy the nexus are a bunch of sub-problems. So likewise, a champions ability to solve these sub-problems along the way to destroying the nexus is related to their power. There are towers, there are minions, there are enemy players with the same goal. These things will present countless problems. You will be ganked and have to find a way to survive, you will be getting all-ined by your lane opponent, or you will have to disrupt the battle lines of the enemy. Every champion’s kit, runes, and items are the tools with which they can solve these problems. You know, using what your champion can do to outplay your opponent. The simplest solution to defeating with your opponent is do a lot of damage and kill them. “Death is the best crowd control” as they say. But, when I put two champions within melee range of each other and have them basic attack each other and press their abilities as fast as possible I don’t call that an outplay. We call that a stat check. Obviously there is no problem with one class of champion having inherently more damage than another class of champion. The problem is when that is when champions have no depth to their mechanics beyond that.
Defining the Terms There are champions with very few “hard” mechanics in their kits (although it is more of a spectrum of hardness). What I mean by that are things that make stuff happen. Things that change the properties of a unit, move a unit, or alter the environment. Hard mechanics includes things like utility, mobility, crowd control, and terrain creation/manipulation. When Jax uses his ultimate his armor and magic resist just increase. He does the same things, just with higher numbers. However, when Jax uses his counter strike he now dodges basic attacks and at the end of it, stuns champions in a circle around him. That actually makes things happen, it changes the properties of things in the game other than increasing stats like armor or attack damage. Dodging basic attacks has changed Jax’s properties. He now interacts with basic attacks differently than he normally would. Stunning a champion changes their capabilities by not allowing them to perform most actions. I should note that stat increasing abilities are not inherently bad. When connected to certain conditions and limitations they can be closer to these more interesting property-changing mechanics that make stuff happen. For example, Garen’s W active makes him tankier. This is a pretty shallow mechanic, but it doesn’t last forever. It works within a certain time window. Whenever a fight is longer than the duration of Garen’s W, the player must use their game knowledge and skill to reduce the damage of the most damaging part of an enemy’s attack. It is only a little closer on the spectrum to a hard mechanic, but it is better.
When All You Have is a Hammer Everything Looks Like a Nail Hard mechanics are important because their effectiveness is more related to a player’s skill and knowledge than a champion’s statistics. The answer to “do I want higher stats?” is pretty much always yes unless the champion gains no benefit from the stat. When champions rely too much on the binary situation of “are my stats high enough to kill them?” then they live and die entirely on a combination of base stats, runes, items, and whatever other systems get added. The champions that last, that get played season after season in a variety of metas, that get played at the highest levels are those champions that make things happen. That have hard mechanics. Lee Sin is so mobile and can use his kick to force the enemy to be out of position. Lee Sin’s kit let’s him change the position of himself and enemies so that the circumstances of a teamfight are altered. That was crazy overpowered when he came out. Overpowered, as in, more powerful and effective than other champions at destroying the nexus. He does this because his tools are so versatile that a player can solve problems they wouldn’t even be able to consider solving with other champions. Now Lee Sin’s kit, thinking of it separately from how much damage champions do, is closer to normal, but only because new champions and delete-and-replace level reworked champions have pushed up the average number of hard mechanics. The game has not so much brought the average down or pulled up lower champions to the higher bar. So if we are going to live in this world then we might as well try and pull up the older champions. Note: I am not just talking about mobility creep here, I’m talking about a creep in all hard mechanics.
Adding to the Toolbox Hard mechanics need not be as complicated as Lee Sin’s kit. In fact, a sprinkling of the right kind of mechanics in the right place can go a long way. Warwick, oh what a good rework. Warwick’s whole kit is a pretty solid modernization (bugs aside). He is entirely “what if Warwick was designed today instead of season 1?” His E is a great example of this. His E provides a specific window of improved tankiness and at the end he applies a fear to champions around him. The conditional tankiness is closer on the spectrum to a hard mechanic and the fear is a crowd control. He can even end it early to apply the fear sooner. This versatile ability can solve all kinds of problems. That is what helps to make Warwick a good champion in a variety of metas. The E is always useful, whether it is a tank meta, assassin meta, mage meta, tank items but on assassins meta. Whatever. That is how you make a champion that is good beyond a fad or flavor of the month. Crowd control just works.
When is Shyvana Good? In past posts I went in depth on the patch history of Shyvana, but I will shorten the point here: Shyvana is good when an item or rune is overpowered on some champions and Shyvana happens to be one of those champions. It is practically random. This indicates that she is lacking in tools that help her destroy the nexus separate overpowering everything with her stats. If Shyvana is a juggernaut she’s a squishy juggernaut without a strong survivability active ability in her kit (like Garen, Darius, Illaoi, Urgot, Nasus, Mordekaiser, Mundo, Udyr, Yorick, Trundle, basically the whole juggernaut roster) with a diver’s ultimate. If she’s a diver she’s a squishy diver that has a slow kill combo (AP Shyvana has burst,but doesn’t dive) and does not have crowd control that disrupts the enemy team like Hecarim or Vi. If she’s a slayer-skrimisher she still doesn’t have the survivability active ability for it. Juggernaut’s usually have straightforward survivability actives that simply increase a stat in a window. For example, Darius Q heals, Garen W adds damage reduction. Slayers normally change their interaction with damage sources, like Fiora parry or Jax counterstrike. Of all of these I think Shyvana should fall on the diver-slayer side. She has more in common with champions like Jax and Hecarim than champions like Garen and Nasus.
She is so lacking in hard mechanics in her kit that she doesn’t work when an overpowered item or rune isn’t related to attack speed, attack damage, or tank stats. She has nothing to do when she can’t just stat check the opponent, and it is really difficult to get an enemy that is weaker than you to agree to stand next to you so we can basic attack each other to death. No strong CC, no utility, no active ability survivability, and medium-low mobility. Shyvana’s only solution to a problem is to kill it faster than it kills you with no tricks or steps in-between. If that solution doesn’t apply to the problem or they escape you with all of their hard mechanics, well too bad. As a longtime Shyvana main since season 4 and a Shyvana one-trick for Season 7, 8 and 9, I would prefer hard mechanics more in line with the complexity of Warwick’s rather than something like Lee Sin. When a champion has too much agency and versatility they become overpowered and you have to make their stats so low that it feels terrible to play them, even if they are good when played at the highest level. That’s when kits are overloaded. A player going against a kit like that feels like they’re dumb and slow while the enemy dances around them, crowd controls them, kills them and gets away untouched. Then you are feeling like there was no effective way to fight back, they had a perfect answer for every challenge you could present. You should not have the perfect answer to every problem, but having a hard mechanic tool that can help with a variety of problems, act as an okay solution to several situations, does improve a champion’s gameplay. I am not advocating for champions that are good at everything, but I am also not advocating for champions that don’t have any hard mechanics to bring to the team. It is finding the equal ground that weighs these things perfectly. That is why we call it balance.
