@Riot, Malzahar players are overdue an explanation riot

deadlychuck·Aug 18, 2018·2 votes·761 views

Ignoring the fact that the rework somehow managed to be upheld despite the explanations for the overhaul. In particular, why was this change never explained?

DAMAGE TYPE Attack damage dealt as physical, bonus damage dealt as magic ⇒ Both components dealt as magic

Such a change would have no influence on the proposed reasons behind the overhaul, but had other side effects which seemed completely unnecessary.

https://na.leagueoflegends.com/en/news/game-updates/patch/patch-711-notes

Edit: in fact, not just malzahar players. Every player deserves an explanation for why a change of this manner took place. As such changes appear to be an arbitrarily discriminatory towards a subset of champion's players.

4 Comments

ParoeAug 18, 20182 votes

Malzahar was, pre-rework, a balanced champion who was viable in multiple positions with multiple builds. While he was a victim of riots change for the sake of change policy, him being homogenized was the real goal of his rework. Riot DOES NOT like build diversity and they do NOT like champions who arent designated generalists succeeding in more than their designated position or role.

deadlychuckAug 18, 20181 votes

I don't disagree, but if that's a philosophy or policy, then it's absolutely something that should be confirmed by a red.

There's no excuse for hiding such a policy knowing full well that it's bad, because you aren't protecting your players (or your bottom line) from it, you're knowingly failing.

TitanAnteusAug 18, 20181 votes

Generalists tend to do too well.

When Zoe was released she had a cooldown reset on her E when it landed on anything. Minions or monsters. This was designed along with the E traveling through walls to make her viable in Jungle as well. What it did was make her too good. She could cast E every 2 seconds as long as it landed on something IN LANE. It was pretty dumb.

Riot's faced this problem quite a lot when they try to give more options to a champ, but the more options they give, the stronger the champ is inadvertently.

New Rune system succeeded in curbing that a bit though. People can experiment w/o cost now since runes don't cost IP and that means that people can take a variety of keystones and rune setups and make it work with their playstyle.

ParoeAug 18, 20181 votes

{quoted}

Generalists tend to do too well.

When Zoe was released she had a cooldown reset on her E when it landed on anything. Minions or monsters. This was designed along with the E traveling through walls to make her viable in Jungle as well. What it did was make her too good. She could cast E every 2 seconds as long as it landed on something IN LANE. It was pretty dumb.

Riot's faced this problem quite a lot when they try to give more options to a champ, but the more options they give, the stronger the champ is inadvertently.

New Rune system succeeded in curbing that a bit though. People can experiment w/o cost now since runes don't cost IP and that means that people can take a variety of keystones and rune setups and make it work with their playstyle.

A lot of what youve said is true and i agree with it. Generalists have a place in the game, but to many are bad for game health and if a generalist is better at a role than that roles designated choices they become very bad for game health.

However, being a generalist and being diverse are two different things. Just using malzahar as an example... He had two builds; AD and AP. His AP build was in the midlane and used as an anti-assassin due to his low mobility, making him a fantastic ambush assassin. His AD build was in the jungle or the top lane, and was used to push waves and take objectives. He was still an ambush assassin though, but the means by which he did it were through voidlings. The playstyle between the two was vastly different, and their niches were different. He wasnt a generalist because of that.

But riot doesnt like Diversity, and theyve been on a campaign to squash it wherever they find it.