Yasuo killed my dog and CertainlyT made me watch!

Anotherherolost·8/1/2016, 5:18:23 PM·50 votes·3,369 views

This is a reason to hate something, not "I can't AA or shoot projectiles for 3 seconds".

You all hate Yasuo because he was the beginning of the end, the quintessential "Next Gen" champion. He marks a huge turning point in this game, the designers capabilities are finally catching up to their imaginations. As long as the "less complex" champions outnumber the Yasuos, Ekkos and Azirs of the world people will never stop complaining because lets be honest, it's not really fair. These champions have more in their kits and get much more attention from the balance team. However, this is just a long transitional period, for League to continue it must evolve and this is the path Riot is choosing.

If you look at his work without the bias of the game, CertainlyT is an amazing designer, all of his champs FEEL good to play. They flow and are far less clunky than most of the others, they all have very solid themes and art styles which is wonderful. The problem is that all 5 of them Darius Kalista Yasuo Zyra Thresh either are or have been despised by a good chunk of the player base. Despite the hate they receive, they are all fun as hell to play as and they all have relatively high skill ceilings and all see pro play. HE MAKES REALLY GOOD CHAMPIONS, SORRY. (SHOWER ME IN DOWNVOTES)

The frustration comes from the older champions just being outclassed by the new ones, not from the newer champions themselves. Riot has bitten off far more than they can chew with all these goddamn champions. I fear this game will be completely gone within two years unless they can speed up the older champion updates while putting them on equal footing with the newer champions. They may as well have two different games at this point, at the very least add a game mode where you can only pick champions released in the first two years.

TL:DR Yasuo isn't the problem, the state of the game itself is the problem.

95 Comments

Mordepool8/1/2016, 7:53:23 PM30 votes

CertainlyT butchered Morde. Thats reason enough to hate

Battlecast Sona8/1/2016, 7:37:39 PM18 votes

If you look at his work without the bias of the game, CertainlyT is an amazing designer, all of his champs FEEL good to play.

stopped reading here. His job was to make a League of Legends champion - not a champion that "feels good to play". While I don't disagree that a big part of Yasuo's strength comes from other champions just not having comparable options, pretending that a character with so many mechanics on each of his skills that they literally are incapable of fitting it all into the tooltips is a well designed champion is just a falsehood. The fact that there are aspects of Yasuo's kit that are literally not written anywhere in any official tooltips is bonkers to me, and the people that defend him have to understand that it's not that his Windwall is the problem. It's not that his double crit is really the problem. It's that on top of this he has a bunch of little safety/useability things in his kit that are TOTALLY absent from the tooltips. Like, Last Breath will place you outside tower range if possible when you use it - why on earth does Yasuo need the ability to do this? What does it add to his gameplay, how does it improve his gameplay experience and, most importantly, how does it feel when it denies you a kill? I can answer that - it feels awful. Yasuo didn't do anything skillful at all - it's a damn autotargetted ability that also automatically places you in an advantageous position. Not to mention he gets FREE CDR on his Q just for leveling up due to the cooldown paradigm he has. His kit is overloaded like crazy, but it's not what's on the tooltips that's really the problem - it's what's NOT on the tooltips that's the issue.

As I've said in other threads - making a champ that's fun to play is EASY when you don't limit yourself to something that's also healthy. Making healthy, fun champs is hard.

PopePancake8/1/2016, 7:49:17 PM18 votes

Thing with CertainlyT champs are, and you're right, they ARE fun to play, but most of the time, people dread fighting against them.

And im just gonna give my opinion and say i love alot of the old champs BECAUSE they dont have insane additions on them.

Dextix LT8/1/2016, 8:47:40 PM11 votes

Yes, he is an amazing designer, but he is completely shit at balancing. While his champs are fun to play with, they are shit to play against. Thanks but no thanks. Champions such as bard, and even tahm have showed that you can make a different yet fun champion without making him completely broken and without adding 10000000 passives.

His job is to make a balanced champion that is both fun to play with and against, but he fails at that job.

Sona x Rubick8/1/2016, 9:12:08 PM10 votes

and that's why people asked for certainlyT to rework every champions. The problem is that certainlyt's champions are on a whole different lvl than the other champions.

Tilthankaldar8/1/2016, 5:21:34 PM8 votes

'' CertainlyT is an amazing designer, all of his champs FEEL good to play. ''

Yeah i know it feels good to pick any of his champions and have the power to kill anyone at any given time.

''SHOWER ME IN DOWNVOTES''

If you already know you're going to get downvoted then that means you know your post is garbage. So it doesnt deserved to be actually looked at. Goodluck

KING OF MASKS8/1/2016, 9:51:22 PM8 votes

So... CertainlyT is absolutely brilliant at making fun, cohesive champions, huh? But they all fail to mesh with the actual game.

Hypothetical: I'm a contractor working on a construction project. My job is to supply some materials. I have some really great materials that I've designed myself; they're pretty much flawless, in fact. But unfortunately, for whatever reason they're incompatible with the building being constructed. I supply them anyway because I know they're great. The building consequently collapses.

Would you say I'm an "amazing designer"?

A Liberal8/1/2016, 8:31:03 PM6 votes

HE MAKES REALLY GOOD OVERLOADED AND THEREFORE VERY VERSATILE CHAMPIONS

The reason they all see pro play is because there is so much you can do with them, which is the same exact reason they are infuriating to play against. They are so overloaded that they have to be nerfed into the ground to be not broken, and even then are powerful when played correctly decently. (See: Yasuo Kalista ThreshMordekaiser )

Lord Galvatron8/1/2016, 10:31:23 PM5 votes

To be brutally honest, the champions he has created were only balanced after they were heavily modified by another group of people over a long period of time. There is a reason why we have never seen CerT after he conpletly butchered the Jug. Morde update. It would appear Riot has deemed him unfit to create and balance champions.

CasterGilgamesh8/1/2016, 5:50:15 PM5 votes

thats what i always thought honestly doesnt make yasuo any less annoying though

Skias8/2/2016, 3:36:33 AM4 votes

The problem with Certainly's champs aren't their character or feel. He's actually pretty good at making fun champs. The problem is, he's terrible at making champs fun to play AGAINST. His champs are fun because they are all incredibly abusive or require an intense amount of bullshit to fight. They come across as irritating opponents with actually is a witch's brew. He makes abusive champs that are fun to play and picked often, thus hated by everyone else. The net fun in the game comes at the cost of frustration for 9 others.

If he had a better system in place to filter the counterplay feel for his champs, he would likely be one of the best designers there.

Valexfor8/1/2016, 9:56:38 PM2 votes

Thing is: Those champ are fun to play, they feel good, they feel smooth, they actually aren't as overpowered as people (myself included) make them to be, but they are FRUSTRATING to deal with, so frustrating that, even as an ex Thresh player, I get what people mean. Don't get me wrong: I hate Darius, Zyra and Yasuo as much as the next guy or probably even more, but I also LOVE to play Thresh (right now I'm Seriously bad at him, but I used to be better) so I know what frustration people have to deal with when they play against him: You've got a shitton of burst damage if you max e first, you've got 3 cc in your kit and even though he's quite hard to play (to make Thresh work, you have to be at least 3 times better than the enemy and you need to also have a good adc you can trust, else you're fucked from the beginning, Thresh is not a champ that's played alone, you need 2 people to play him effectively) when he does make what he's supposed to do, he's incredibly frustrating, like there is no way you could do anything about him, like no matter how hard you try, a skilled Thresh will always fuck you up so bad you can't even play in your base, and I've experienced it myself lately. And that's theyr problem: they make you feel miserable and utterly useless, you know they are hard af and they need to outskill you quite highly to beat you (except maybe Zyra support, let's be serious: anyone is able to plant some seeds, miss a skill on the enemy by a mile but still have the plants do the work when you don't need to focus on anything else than poking), so when they succeed at doing what they do you feel like shit, you feel miserable and NEED to say they're op, you NEED to find a plausible excuse tp why you lost which is not "he's just too much better than me". So they are in no way a problem for the game, like you are saying: the problem is that other champs, while usually esier to play, can't match up with them when used by a skilled player.

So tl;dr: CertainlyT champs, while balanced (certainly overloaded and strong, but not really so op as people make them out to be) and hard to play, make you feel so bad about losing to them that you NEED to just tell yourself that the game is cheating and that the enemy is using a broken op shit because it totally can't be he's just far better than you. And I repeat that, as an ex Thresh player, I still get frustrated when I lose against a good Thresh and blame it on luck, it's just normal.

AFK Push8/1/2016, 9:47:31 PM2 votes

I would rather have champs like Yasuo Ekko be brought back down to Earth like the rest of the champs power in their kit wise, rather than buffing every dimension of the game to compensate for more overloaded champs in the future. Much less work to just rework these champs in the long run anyways.

Teridax688/2/2016, 1:01:38 AM2 votes

The quality of a champion is not purely defined by how good they feel to play, and that's why I think the OP completely misses the point of why many players dislike CertainlyT's champions. I absolutely agree that his champions tend to feel extremely fun to play, and CertainlyT is practically unmatched when it comes to giving a champion a flow and power that is completely unique to them. One of the greatest aspects of his champion is the agency they have: when mastered, they have so many options available to them that they kind of transcend the game itself with the freedom they have.

Trouble is, that agency usually comes at a tremendous cost in the agency of other players, both on the enemy team and even with the champion's allies: Kalista, for example, has this phenomenal kiting power and command over her partner, but the flipside to that is that some champions, namely low-mobility melee champions, have practically no way of dealing with her, and her activating her Black Spear and ult both yank control away from her ally, which can feel awful if both players aren't in sync with each other. On a more subtle level, Thresh sometimes feels unfair because he gets to do practically anything one could ask for of a support (he can initiate, save allies, poke, trade, tank and lay down crowd control -- all decently well), at a time when avoidance of hyper-versatility is extolled as a reason to either design champions with notable (and valuable) deficits, or tone down the kits of existing champions until they feel unsatisfying.

This is definitely not a problem exclusive to CertainlyT's designs either: Ekko and Azir, who were listed in the OP as well, are both notable for having existed in states where, at least past a certain mastery threshold, they have no substantial weaknesses. Azir is slated for a rework precisely because, even though he's terrible below a very high skill threshold, past that mark he can give himself far too much safety against even his toughest counters. The problem is that these champions, and more generally many recent tropes in champion design (e.g. complex, versatile kits, mechanics that appear to bend or break common in-game rules), feel like the result of a trend that originated with his champions. Suddenly, it's okay for a squishy champion to be able to nullify ultimate abilities, because that precedent has been set with Yasuo, and it's acceptable for a ranged champion to have more mobility than most melee champions because Kalista did it first. These effects aren't necessarily bad, but they are certainly polarizing, and when handled improperly can create really frustrating situations where a champion feels like their enjoyment and power comes at a cost in everyone else's.

Technically, you could have an environment where everyone would have as much personal agency as Yasuo, Kalista or Thresh, but a risk of that would be creating a game in which personal enjoyment could end up turning cannibalistic, with everyone treading over each other to feed their own fantasy of somehow superseding the game's conventions and feeling special as a result. On top of that, CertainlyT's most infamous champions also happen to be particularly tough to use properly: sure, they have a ton of options and a great flow, but until you understand all of that champion's intricacies and how to piece their complex kit together, you're not that likely to succeed. By contrast, a great deal many champions have achieved similar depth, if not greater depth sometimes, with far simpler kits, all while properly achieving their fantasy and offering sufficient counterplay (Ahri, Lux and Bard come to mind). Riot's juggled with complexity creep in recent champion designs and reworks, and have succeeded in implementing fun, relatively simple kits in recent times, but the hallmarks of that original impetus for more kit complexity were CertainlyT's champions, who among other things are poked at for each having a long list of passives, conditionals and secondary effects, many of which don't feel particularly essential to their kit (even if they are, as is the case of Yasuo's crit passive, though not so much in the case of his original bonus flow generation). CertainlyT has had a major impact on League's design, much of it positive, but as he is a very experimental designer, his works are also prone to error, and those errors have had a larger effect on some of League's relatively recent design decisions as well.

CeexSett8/1/2016, 8:15:18 PM1 votes

What the hell is the title supposed to mean? Is it an expression? It flew right behind me...