A question we all wanna ask...

What are the requirements to work for the Riot balance team?

I honestly want to know what the requirements are, because they get PAID to balance a game for MILLIONS of players. But they work like that teen at a fast food restaurant whom is only there because his parents are making him get a job. The reason I wanna know the requirements because I honestly feel like I can balance better than they do because I have a memory that lasts more than a couple weeks and I actually play the game. Like do they even play the game they balance? Because if they did they would realize they are terrible at balance.

My mental image of the balance team requirements:

1. college grad
2. play any game (casual game preferred)
3. must be antisocial so you wont communicate with anyone who actually knows the problems of the game
4. must suffer from short term memory loss so you can't remember that something was a bad idea. aka: nid spear nerfed because it was unfair and uninteractive but releases a champ with the same game play and a more broken kit aka zoe.

So I have been playing league since early season 1 and I have seen many meta shifts, new champs, reworks, re-reworks (looking at you Ryze). I won't act like I know how to perfectly balance the game, but after playing for so long and spending so much time watching high elo streams and pro play, listening to podcasts and having numerous friends to theory craft and bounce ideas off of I feel like I can do a better job than the current balance team.

For example lets look at Baron. He is a raid boss that gives the team that takes him a massive buff, hell it even buffs their minions. It is such a large objective that you will see teams dance around him for more than half the game (100t and CG). He is so important that it is a requirement that pro teams be able to play around baron (as it should be). When Riot buffed him a couple patches ago we were singing their praises because they finally did something that we have been asking them to do for awhile. And then... they nerf the hell out of his damage. Making bad baron calls less punishing. If they wanna lower his damage while keeping it so only teams can take him them what they should do is increase his damage but make it spread to all champs nearby. So what this means is that if you are trying to duo baron (tank and adc usually) this means the adc will have to have some kind of sustain or else they will likely die from baron due to his damage only being split twice. Whereas if all 5 are there then he will still be very doable, since his damage is cut down to 1/5th. Alternatively, you can super buff his resistances and have them decrease per the amount of champs around him, also making it difficult to duo while making it easier to take as a team.

Next thing I wanna address is mage items. Lets compare them to ad items. Each subclass of physical based champs (fighters, assassins, and adcs) has their own set of items specifically built and tuned to be used on certain types of champs (assassin less so). Lets look at mage items... Well if you just do a quick glance at items you will see that they have significantly less options. And these options are rarely balanced around subclasses of mages. Not only that but they have fewer alternatives than ad classes. For example, QSS and GA these are exclusive to ad classes unless a mage wants to waste money for the GA passive (can't use the attack damage) or unless they want to lose half a slot because they have no reason to upgrade qss. Like how is it allowed that ad classes can have access to items that mages have no comparable item for. the GA passive can be a game changing passive as well as qss being a game changing active but Mages get screwed if they go for these items. Throw on top of that the fact that many mage items are just not efficient which leads to mages building the same items every game, whereas ad based classes has numerous items that they can build to adapt to the game.

Next, adc (i refuse to call them marksman until having a melee based adc in the bot lane is viable) changes. For the most part I think the adc changes were a step in the right direction by delaying crit builds. But the number one thing I wanna pick on is the fact that the balance team couldn't figure out the fact that the two strongest adcs in the game werent even crit based and left them in their broken states while nerfing competition. EZ needs more nerfs in my opinion as well as kaisa.

But if I'm honest they should have nerfed the supports that made adcs broken before they touched the adcs. Because I honestly think that if they nerfed the supports first that would have gotten us close to seeing the actual power of the adcs. Granted the adc damage is busted but the biggest problem is that is currently very hard to kill adcs as long as they know how to position even moderately well due to the fact that most supports are just too efficient at keeping the adc alive (looking primarily at supports like janna).

Lets not even mention the champs that have been left in obscurity due to not synergizing with runes or items or simply having an outdated kit that cant compete with the overloaded champsbeing put out nowadays. It shouldnt get to a point where so many champs are considered troll picks because of how bad they are I'm looking at: Ivern, mumu, elise, fiddle, hec, heim, karth, kass, kayle, kindred, liss, morde, naut, nunu, pan, poppy, rammus, reksai, rumble, teemo, urgot, vi, viktor, voli, wu, yorick, and ziggs.

Riot used to be so good at nerfing things that were deemed broken quickly, were they prone to overnerfing? Yeah they were, but I would rather them overnerf and slowly buff it upto being playable than to leave something broken for months (ardent censer meta). Also, they need to stop buffing champs on release, there should be a lockout period where they simply arent allowed to buff the champ, if the champ still looks like they need buffs after the lockout period then fine buff them. And obviously if a champ is plain busted on release then they need to acknowledge this and nerf (initial release of xin and leb).

I know I started rambling some, but I just love this game. I have put so much time and money into League that I want it to be the best it can be, but the current balance philosophy is ruining the game. They would rather change the game for sake of changing it than to fix it. They are the epitome of running from a problem instead of facing it.