In depth Morde Vs. Mobility
The reason that they don't like champions like morde are simple. He has no mobility and no CC. CC is the counter to mobility, so what do you do when a champion has neither? The answer is simple, you have to make them grossly overpowered at what they can do.
When you look at their ever so favored mobility champions like Lee Sin, you have to:
- Be in the right place.
- Use your skills in the right order. It looks something like this. I need to dash to the right location with q or w, kick someone, dash back to them again with q or w,, get my slow off on them, while fighting with second w, slightly use my passive so I can get my second e off, all while keeping in the right location to have the most effect. Seems pretty straight forward right? The straight answer is no, and that is why people consider him a "high skill cap" champion.
Well what happens when you don't have the power to be in the right place at the right time?
- Your skills need to be stronger to compensate while you get to the right place at the right time. It looks something like this, Did I get the skill off because I properly aimed it while someone danced around me by pressing all of my buttons and trying to click on the enemy.
So why is this considered an issue? Well to be flat out honest its because the second makes champions binary and non-interactive, which is something that they regularly have issues with. If your abilities are too easy to hit, then people get frustrated because they don't understand that the difficulty in playing the non-mobility champions are actually aiming and hitting your skills.
Now for the balance issue, make the mobility too easy (historically zed ulti), and the "high skill champion" is too easy to play. Make immobile champions abilities too strong or easy to hit, and it makes mobility champions feel underwhelming. What Riot doesn't seem to understand is that to balance out the paradigm they need to find a happy medium between loving mobility champions and binary champions, which is hard to do, and why they favor mobility champions.
To be honest, morde is actually currently in a pretty good state, and doesn't need another rework to push him further from his identity of always shield, never die. Not all champions should have meaningful choices. There was an old discussion on why vlad Q didn't have meaningful game-play interaction. Riot's original response, was that not everything needed to have a weakness, because they could have the weakness elsewhere in their kit, or in matchup, or even team fight interactions. Flash forward to current day Morde, what is so binary about his kit that Riot, and players hate playing against him? It's that non-nuke level consistent damage WILL NOT kill morde. If the enemy has low enough damage you could even 1v5 (assuming you have the bonus stats from dragon)
That leads to my next part of the discussion, how to currently handle Morde and his identity.
Players across all parts of MMRs have (mostly) full access to his full power, similar to Garen, the reason why Riot sees a discrepancy between high MMR players and low MMR players is because of Matchup knowledge, and knowing exactly what fights they can and can't win. High MMR players try not to fight if they know they can't win the Matchup, and will often farm until they are in the right position to fight.
So now we hit the age old question of how we buff a champion without giving the top end of the spectrum a flat buff?
Free up W to be fully self castable. Lower MMR players tend to go in 1 at a time, while higher players tend to team fight more often. This would offer Morde at all levels of gameplay more self readability, but as stated helps the lower MMR players more because of how teamfights pan out in lower MMRs. To top it off, you could even make it so that his ally still functions as it does now, so we don't get old ap morde interactions of placing W on a tank and watching your ally destroy someone without Morde even being in a teamfight.
Lower his W MS, in favor for more Base MS While this may sound like a buff to all mordes at all MMRs, due to how teamfights work in Lower MMRs This again frees up morde to get into position better without the use of a teammate. However if W's MS is reduced by 35, and his base increased by 15, in higher MMRs he would still have a harder time getting to the enemy in a teamfight setting. The risks of this is making his lane phase stronger across all MMRs.
Make E larger, but reduce shielding slightly Hitting E can be extremely hard to hit, but is super rewarding when it hits champions appropriately. The reason why this would be a buff at lower MMRs but not as much at higher MMRs is because lower MMR players have a harder time landing skill shots, and it is already a binary skill. Potential issue is that higher MMR mordes get to hit 1 more champion slightly more often, but with a small shield % nerf it could end up being a moot point argument.
Make his passive scale off of all damage, instead of just magic damage. This one is slightly harder to justify as a low MMR buff, but it opens up build paths to get a shield out of more than just AP damage heavy builds. From what I've seen tanks are more viable in lower MMRs, as people typically don't position properly to avoid being damaged, making high damage builds harder to play. This would allow a larger variety of builds to function better, opening up tank and ad builds. Titanic hydra splash damage, sunfire cape, thornmail, or even liandris building shield would be absolutely amazing. The potential risk to this is that morde's across all MMRs would be able to generate shield more efficiently. The reason I don't see it being an issue is that alot of the builds that it would allow seem to function worse at higher MMRs.
The last way we could balance out champions like morde is to have Melee and Ranged version of juggernaut items. A few items that gave morde alot of power, stereks gauge being a prime example, were nerfed because of other classes using them too well. The only issue with this is a buff like that is a buff across all MMR's.
Final thoughts, we need to stop favoring the skill that it takes to play a mobility champion because it is seen as "high skill". Both mobility and non-mobility champions take a different set of skills to play. That and In my personal opinion the nerfs and buffs that riot are doing right now to mobility champions like Lee Sin who function better in High MMR aren't going to work. His R nerf is a nerf across all MMR's. If they want to appropriately nerf lee sin, they need to change his second Q to deal less damage, and make his R less reliant on kicking an enemy champion into another enemy champion. The positioning just isn't there in low MMR's to kick someone into another enemy, or to even do a really cool second Q combo with a W dash out, but what do I know, I'm just another player.
Final Takeaway, is not all champions need an entire rework just because they don't fall in line with Riot's paradigm, instead sometimes small changes should be made to balance a champion. A lot, of reworked champions go from 1% playrate ----> 100% pick or ban ---> nerfed ---> right back to 1% playrate. Then the community wonders why they go right back into the rework pool (ryze anyone?).
