@Morello can we PLEASE talk about Elise?
So Morello recently gave an interesting interview that talked about some balance philosophy, and the jungle. It was a cool interview that among other things confirmed that he thinks Lee Sin is a problem (yay!). There was also a section on Elise which is what I'd like to talk about here. Quote:
"Elise is a champion that actually, until you got up to diamond, had a pretty low win rate. She's not very accessible by most players and some of the little optimizations you have to do require a coordinated team or require a high degree of mastery over Elise that's beyond most champions. That's cool. That's interesting. We think that makes an interesting champion.
However, it wasn't as if she had a slope that was really sharp. She had a slope that went straight up once you got to the professional level and it was such a problem there. In that case, we ended up making changes to Elise even though we knew that could end up having effects on lower levels of play. Was that the right decision? I'm not sure. I'd like to see how that shakes out but that's a good example of where we had to make a tough call. We can only pick one, what should we pick?"
To start, I don't really agree with their judgement to balance Elise for pro play, but I can respect that. However, from what I'm seeing here I don't really feel like Riot accomplished their goal very well. If I'm reading correctly then the best aim they could have had was "make her viable (but not overbearing) in competitive at the expense of making her weak in lower ELO" but from all the data we have both in general play (~41% win rate) and pro play (saw a couple of games at the very beginning of the split, then abandoned after horrendous performances), it seems like Riot severely overshot their goal. If it's impossible to make Elise decent in normal play without her being too strong in competitive then they should aim for the highest power level in competitive that they're comfortable with a champion having, i.e "strong, occasionally contested pick but not a pick or ban champ". There's a bunch of examples of champs like this - Ahri, Orianna, Morgana, Maokai, etc. Champs you often see but don't take over games or series. But Elise isn't there, and hasn't been for a long time.
The problem is that if Elise isn't strong in competitive play then she's not only not strong elsewhere but she's outright unusable elsewhere and that is the place she is in. If Riot were aware of the disconnect between LCS Elise and low ELO solo q Elise, which Morello states they were, then it was always going to be difficult to preserve her use in lower ELOs without leaving her as a problem in competitive and that's understandable. But it seems obvious to me that she's been pushed down too far even in competitive and I just don't feel that's right. In a competitive tier list I'm sure she'd be ranked as "Subpar" and when someone like her needs to be at least "Somewhat Strong" to have any use in normal play then I don't think that's acceptable.
Sorry this is so wordy but there are so many people out there who would love to play Elise and genuinely can't without feeling like they're handicapping their team because she has to be kept down in competitive. It seems pretty clear to me that she's far from dominating competitive, and is actually outright bad in it, so can we please try to buff her to pick-worthy status? There are a lot of champions that are commonly seen in the LCS as the seasons pass by and if Elise has to be one of those champions to have any use in regular games then can we please discuss buffing her to that level? There is clearly room to maneuver here without making her problematic again.
She's my favourite jungler, no other one is as fun as her and no one else has skins as cool as hers :( But I just can't play her without expecting a loss.
