some feedback for riot

greetings fellow humans who happen to work at riot,

ill try to keep this brief, heh...

shyvana: she is in a not so awesome place right now, i think i dont have to elaborate on that, but my concern isnt about balancing the numbers and the whole "melee bruisers are problematic because: balls of stats and no unique gameplaymechanic"-thing its more about some other design-flaws. the problem is basically: her main strength is running away. when you have this fighter who can go all "roar, i am a dragon!" everybody else should be running away when she does that. but in a real in-game-situation this nearly never happens. what is the ratio of ult-used-to-escape to ult-used-to-engage(and not immedeatly die)? maybe someone can pull up some numbers, maybe just for pro games? im sure it wont be much in favour of the engage. on top of that nowadays basically every team has several displacements, which makes using the ult to engage totally pointless because it will be canceled anyways, even if not intentionally and just by some stray aoe-knockup thats meant for someone else. next, her w gives her a ms-steroid. yes, its duration is extended by hitting things which encourages using it in-fight. but the speed falls off over the duration, so you dont extend it for the speed, but the damage. in general movement speed doesnt really help much when close to ennemies where its basically nearly unavoidable to get slowed(in a real game) and slows are stronger than speed-ups(when a 10% speedbuff and a 10% slow stack, overall the target will be slower than its base) while when running away, its far easier to avoid slows since youre tendentially further away from slow-sources, which makes pure ms-steroids much better for running away than closing in. then in dragon form it gives the burning trail, yes its awesome-nice-cool when used with dragons descend, but its basically singeds poison-trail: the best-use-case is running away. also, her flame breath in dragon form looks atrocius, how could something like that ever be released in this day and age?

so, i dont want to just be negative here, so ill try to give some ideas that may help with the issues i pointed out, but take them with a grain of salt, im no game designer, i just dont want to be just another whining kid:

remove the dash from the ultimate, maybe replace it with a large burning explosion which leaves burning ground on which moving towards the centre speeds everyone up and moving away from the centre slows down(should probably only slow ennemies): think of a firestorm. also, make shyv lose rage faaar faster but also let her gain it faster when fighting in dragon-form(more when dealing damage, but also some when receiving damage) maybe some more buffs to combat stats in dragon form(not sure)? the idea behind that is to have a true ultimate ability, not just some gapcloser and to have some more impact on the decisions the enemy team makes: keep fighting (maybe because we were winning the fight before) or "run away, its a *$§% dragon!!1". change w to a targeted gapcloser, very short-range in human form, longer and passing through the target and carrying it with you in dragon form(much like the current ult, just without the "best for running away", but probably not quite as long-distance, think more of fizz). now before anyone starts with the whole mobility-creep-story, a melee champ without cc cannot work without some form of mobility. also this gets rid of this strange "im whirling fire around me, because.... yeah... just because i can"-thing that was going on before which was kind of silly, really. after all, dragons breathe fire, theyre not pouring it out like sweat and they dont use it like a hula-hoop. move the burning ground mechanic to the flame-breath and ult, because it fits better thematically, does not encourage running away and the power has to go somewhere.

rek'sai/elise

so actually i think the champ will be really cool and ill buy her the moment shes released but the problem i see is that the gameplay she has is basically what elise would have needed to become a propper champ who is not a nightmare to balance/have in the game at a compettitive level. the whole tunnel and seismic-sense thing would have been a perfect fit for a spider-champion with a web-mechanic: make tunnel = make thread/part of web sense movement = sense touching web burrow underground to use tunnels = switch to spider form and skitter along webbing so i think now that rek-sai took all that away for her own unique mechanics i see a problem for an eventual rework of elise because there might be potential overlap. but maybe you can succed by making the one some sort of offensive/aggressive territory-maker and the other a defensive "this is my territory/lair" thing, dunno. i guess whoever is tasked with fixing elises problems has to figure that one out.

jayce/gragas/xerath/probably some others

this part is really about what i call pseudo-skillshots: abilities that have the advantages of skillshots, like being usable into the fog-o-war but dont have the drawback of skillshots: dodging them. take jayce for example: if jayce does his blast-gate-combo you can sidestep the projectile, yes, but it will explode at the maximal range of the ability. now if you are at the max range of the ability and jayce just aims at your current position, no matter where youre moving right now, you will be hit unless you flash or something like that. it is simply impossible to walk from the center of the explosion out of its radius in the time the projectile is in the air. so its guaranteed damage, like a point-n-click ability, that has high range, can be used into the fog of war and most importantly has its damage balanced around being a skillshot, which means its very powerfull because the difference between hit and miss needs to be meaningful. while the range and instant-use-damage is lower, the same goes for gragas barrel-roll(not to mention the ult): gragas doesnt need to predict the movement of the enemy if the target is within the range of the roll, just aim at the current position and instantly detonate, impossible to walk out of. so with gragas its mainly a gameplay-clarity-issue because his range isnt that big, but people have a hard time realising that they need to stay much further away from him.

now people will probably go and check my profile and be like "hah youre just a scrub who cant dodge!" but if youre actually trying to judge someone based on like 20 ranked games only made to get end-of-season-rewards, then you are a fool: that amount is not a significant statistical sample. i tested this for the pre-rework xerath(not sure his q actually changed) in a custom game with a friend. we even went like "ok, i will q you in 3..2..1..": vayne couldnt(possibly still cant) even tumble out of the q if the xerath just clicks on vaynes feet, no need to predict the movement of the target, no skill involved in the "skillshot", just unavoidable damage(and slow in the case of gragas) every x seconds. if you actually meet a lane opponent in-game who abuses this then you can only watch 9 other people play a 4v5 since you have to back out of lane every 30 seconds or so... not what i would call good design.

there are of course other things like the whole "one champ who has everything+high numbers"-thing like rengar and other bruisers, but riot seems to be aware of those problems so i dont want to talk about that here.

now moving away from champions: the negative attitude in the community is like some terrible cancer, people flame for not building only flat-stat-items or playing a champ differently, everybody blames others all the time instead of looking at their own mistakes and when someone lost his lane the whole team starts spamming surrender-votes the moment they are available. while i realise that riot can hardly do anything about most of that i would at least like to suggest a toggle-option for no-surrender-queue which puts you in queue just like normal but if there are 20 or 40 people of equal mmr in queue at once and half of them have the option enabled then please put those who have the option on into the same game or at least the same team and the others in their game.

on another note: please place the "hide spoilers" button on lolesports.com at the top of the page and/or make the default setting for it "on"

ok, i think im done, maybe i forgot something but whatever and im too lazy to spellcheck everything and dear reader, if you do not work at riot, i personally dont really care about your opinions on the topic, even if you agree with me, so dont expect any answers from me. however if you work at riot i would be very interested on your opinions on what i wrote and i would really appreciate it if you could maybe talk to some people in the appropriate departments about any/all of the things above.

have a nice day