Why Poppy is pretty good and why she needs a rework
(tk;dr and presentations at the end)
In a lot of threads talking about unviable picks, or forgotten champions, or low win/pick rates, or reworks, there's always one topic that's sure to come up. Poppy, the little blacksmith/ambassador yordle. She's typically used, alongside Urgot, as the figurehead for such topics. However, I feel that a lot of that opinion is simply unimformed. I feel that until she sees LCS play, and right after gets nerfed (she's in historic-Olaf's state imo), she still will be seen as a terrible pick by most of the playerbase, yet incredibly accepted among higher leagues.
#Why people thinks she's bad I'm only listing them here and stating my opinion on why the judgements are flawed, I should be explaining indirectly why they're false later on.
1. She has a weak laning phase In fact, I feel that her "weak window" is around level 7-14. Level 1-3 she's a monster and at 6+ she insanely hard to gank while being able to dive you super efficiently.
2. She is starved for mana The only spell you should be using in lane is Q, or E when you can stun someone. If you only use those 2 and get an early Sheen, it's pretty hard to run oom.
3. She has no wave clear This one is much truer, but then again her Paaragon of Demacia's passive allows her to clear normal waves pretty fast (she still struggled against stacked waves). She's also probably one of the easiest to farm under tower with thanks to her insane passive AD and low cd on Q.
4. She is out of meta I feel like the meta right now is actualy mighty fine for her. What you're looking for is early aggression, mid game rotations and late game siege. Her early game allows for some monstrous damage; come mid game, she has her ult available to her to perform surprise dives or gigantic turnarounds; then late game, she can tank towers for 9-10s before she starts to take any real damage. If you want, you can add objective control to the list, but high base ADs for towers paired with a short cd %max hp spell for monsters say to me that she's well geared for taht too. So, in short, I call bullshit on this one.
#Why is Poppy actually not bad? 1. She has insane trading potential Like I mentionned, early on Poppy is actually an insane lane bully. People would think that you'd have trouble surviving lanes against the likes of even Dr. Mundo or Nasus who have weaker laning phases, but I've in fact bullied more Renekton to an early recall (which escalates into harder bullying) than I've lost lanes to them. Your passive's synergy with potions paired with your insane Devastating Blow damage with triple scaling (AP, AD, max HP) that serves as an AA reset means that you're extremely hard to trade with. Also, your Heroic Charge allows you to exacerbate those leads, since 50% of the lane is always in your "danger zone".
2. She is able to draw aggro like no others Her threat of a stun-burst means that you can never really ignore Poppy. However, the fact that true damage is nearly required if you want to finish her off means that she'll most probably tank the ignites for you, leaving all the regen/lifesteal on your carries. Otherwise, using her Diplomatic Immunity also draws at least one person's aggro : the person on the receiving end.One of the classic late-game strategy for Poppy is to ult the enemy's bruiser while killing one of the carries. If you do that, 2 things can happen : either the bruiser goes on you, or he doesn't. If he does, you can tank him while dealing with the carry before turning on him. If he doesn't you have free reign on their back line and can basically chunk and/or zone both enemy carries and maybe more. Lastly, you probably won't be surprised, but it's a lot easier to be greedy on a 700hp Poppy than it is on a 1200hp Draven. The first one will still probably take longer to kill though.
3. She is able to skip defensive items The fact that during teamfights she can simply use her ultimate on the weakest enemy (or the one that has the hardest time aiming for her) means that she can mostly ignore damages for 6-8s during teamfights, but more than anything else, it means that at any one time, she can choose to receive damage from no more than 1 person. In most games, lifesteal will be the only defensive stats you will need, paired with movement speed. In fact, defensive items will make your passive less efficient (except for Thornmail), so you're getting less out of every gold you're paying if you buy defensive items.
#Why are people not getting as much success with her There are actually a few reasons that makes people trying Poppy out unsuccesful, but the main reason (and the one I will be extensively discussing here) is that she's historically been played wrong.
Up to now, I've brought the points from the point of view of a top lane Poppy, since it's easier to grasp. However it's fundamentally wrong as she has much better potential as an adjuvant character, either as a jungler or support.
In the jungle, she can do a full clear potion-less thanks to her passive + camp regen. The blue buff also allows her to spam Paragon of Demacia early, giving her basically +15AD on all camps. Just pair that buff with very offensive masteries and runes, and your clear speed is far from negligible. Additionally, Spirit Stone totally erases whatever mana problem you could've once had. In term of dragon control, she's slightly lacking since his rework (because of true damage), but can still dish out gigantic damage with her Q, making for really quick objectives. Otherwise, she's the queen of dragon/baron contesting since she can use her ult on a target with no CC and thus stay in the fray for 6-8s using her Q+smite as a truly terrifying stealing tool (you usually outdamage Lee Sin's Resonating Strike).
Poppy support could seem like a quirkier idea, but it actually kinda makes sense. A support needs 2 things mainly : lower-than-average gold reliance and the ability to help your carry more than the enemy support helps his. Poppy's core build is fairly simply : Trinity Force. That's the only item you actually need, everything after that is situational and changes from player to player. In term of helping carries, you're a standard kill lane... with more burst. At level 1, if you catch someone in your stun and they don't have Doran Shield or 21+ defensive masteries, you can usually chunk 20-30%hp solo. At level 2 once you get that Q, it's usually 60-80% hp when helped by your ADC (without any follow up cc). The base damage of Poppy is just so ridiculous that anyone inside a brush or near a wall has a constant death threat on them. Once you pair that with your passive, you can often outdamage the enemy support, meaning that if your ADC gets jumped, you always have the choice to either "peel" or dive the ADC and go for a solo kill (which you will get unless they kite back). Once late game comes, you will often trade your life to zone the enemy carry/ies for 8-10s... and that's if you're not fed, if you actually own your lane you can probably kill 1-2 since you deal 40% increased damage. Also, the tower-dive potential of a team with Poppy is exponentially better, no matter how farmed or not that Poppy is.
If I had to make a comparison, I'd say it's like pre-rework Gragas. If Shushei hadn't broke out hat AP Gragas style, and people would still build him with Abyssal-Sunfire-Warmog top, he could very well be called bad and people could be flaming AP mid Gragas, but that wouldn't mean it's not a better option. In this case, top lane Poppy is not the way to play her, it only limitates you.
#Why does she needs a rework, and ASAP I feel that not only is she filled with nasty bugs, but she also goes against a lot of current balance objectives.
1. Poppy as a champion is a relic of the past First of all, she probably has the single most unresposive AA of the game. The hit sequence is so incredibly long that you can probably get kited by melee champion if you don't get any AS items. Also, the fact that her AA animation is so clunky (hit registers late compared to animation and sound) paired with an AA reset will yield frustration in many games until you're used to it.
Even once you get that AA out of the scene, I feel that her Heroic Charge being cancelled by dashes and blinks (sometimes semi--cancelled yielding incredibly awkward results) means she's slowly getting pushed out of the game by the newer champions. It's not a secret that the proportion of instant dashing/blinking champions is much bigger now than it was back when she was released (aka 45 champion roster), and it's come to a point where having one is nearly more common than not having one.
And if you also remove the charge from the arguments, there's still the fact that her Devastating Blow, along with Twisted Fate's Pick a Card are the only abilities that makes an Auto-attack deal magic damage. In fact, both of them can deal magical critical hits thanks to those spells. It also transforms the damage of Trinity Force into magical damage. So against a target with black shield or high MR, resetting your AA could actually make you deal reduced damage, which makes no sense.
Otherwise, even the creative department's take on Poppy is extremely outdated. They recently took the "character over story" approach and it is the exact opposite of her Lore. In her Lore, you can see a lot of what happened, where and when a few interactions also if ou look at other lore pieces... but you don't have much ideas of who she is. You can assume a lot based on her reactions/history a 1-2 one-liners, but overall she clearly lacks personallity.
2. She goes against the Design team's objectives They never clearly laid out those objectives, but Zileas' old anti-fun patterns paired with many of Morello/Ghostcrawler's posts, you can see that there are a few things definitely wrong with our little blacksmith.
First of all, Ghostcrawler recently talked about strategical depth, and how every characters should feel different to play against. However, Poppy actually goes mostly against that argument, since you're mostly playing the same against everyone. Your ultimate basically makes it so you can ignore part of the enemy team, making your gameplan extremely static. Sure, you have to cope with defensive abilities and temporary terrain, but to me, it makes very little difference when I'm going for a kill on the enemy Draven if his team is made of Morgana/Zed/Dr. Mundo/Lee Sin or Zyra/Ziggs/Rengar/Evelynn. Enemies can't have different play patterns if your kit allows you to disregard enemies. There are a few diferent patterns, but you could probably dress a flowchart with 2-3 choices at most and it would summarize like 50% of your teamfights. Even when you look at it the other way, you don't really play differently against Poppy, she simply limits your choices.
Next, there's the issue of counter-play. Poppy has by far the hardest counter in the whole LoL roster. If you think that Talon coutners Orianna, just try to play Poppy against Irelia or Olaf. As soon as they reach level 4-5, you start losing your lane and there's no "farming safely", since they can basically tower dive you. True damage counter Poppy, and having it on a low cooldown means you don't have windows to exploit. Against Cho'Gath or Darius, you can actually try to not get ulted or use your ultimate ot block theirs, but against Irelia/Olaf, it's a constant flow of true damage negating your innate.
There's also the issue of invisible power. A good example of that would be Valiant Fighter, her innate, that lets a faint yellow glow when it absorbs any amount of damage, ranging from 1 to 3-400. Unlike Alistar, there aren't big grey runes floating around her, and unlike Leona, there are no resistances added to her sheet; she's simply tankier with no feedback nor reasons. Otherwise Paragon of Demacia lights the weapon up when it's full stacked, however the damage difference between lit and dim could be anywhere between 1.5 and 35 AD (and armor), with no ways of knowing it without checking her buffs. Damage amplification on ultimate is also another example of hidden power.
When it comes ot burden of knowledge/learnign curve, her ultimate is actually one of the worst offenders. Not only does having a big yellow sphere around you for 8s doesn't really scream "The guy with spinning yellow bars is the onyl one who can affect me", but it doesn't appear on anyone's death recap, leaving no ways to actually read about it and learn from your mistake. The target will simply say "wow she popped me" and the others will say "wow, she was tanky".
3. She is riddled with bugs If you have to rework someone, might as wel do it before you repair the dozens of problems in her kit, otherwise you're wasting time. If you remember the insta-kill bug with Ryze, where he could 100-0 someone with 1 E if they were on the same pixel, well Poppy won't dash at all in the case she's superposed, negating both the knock and the damage.
Talking about Heroic Charge bugs, in a lot of cases, you will ned up behind your target (since that makes sense). This means you can charge someone and lose vision of them since you left hte brush and they didn't, or you can get headbutted into the enemy team by the Alistar without either of you moving.
Talking about clunky Heroic Charge interactions, hitting your dash at the same time as someone else's will often yields awkward results. I believe it was with Jarvan's EQ combo that he will dash all the way behind you, then once you land back to the ground, you will knock him back based on his intial position but you won't follow him.
Are we talking about Heroic Charge? Because I forgot to mention that you can actually knock people over mini-ledges/corners based on bad luck/dashes. Meaning that your gap closer ends up creating a gap which is kinda not what you want.
There's also the problem of Heroic Charge not stunning people who are visually inside the wall. My guess is that as long as 50% of the body doesn't enter the wall, you won't be stunned. However I feel that the gamplay doesn't fit the visual expectations.
While we're talking about visuals, Poppy's Diplomatic Immunity's visual effects stays for 8 seconds in spectator no matter how long the ultimate actually lasted. It also happens in-game, but not as reliably.
There are probably a lot more that I forogt/don't know of, but in short, most of her kit needs to be re-coded.
4. Her visuals are still up to par Honestly, her splash arts are slightly outdated, but her in-game models still holds strong against newer champions, and I've seldom seen anyone say they don't like X/Y/Z skin. In fact, when watching Poppy players, it's isnane the amount of requests to play with given skins since they all look badass (I think Scarlet Hammer is the most popular, followed by Lollipoppy for the splash and Battle Regalia. Noxus is also a big hit.) Honestly, just allowing players to get a soft-reset on their opinion would allow for better usage of her incredible assets.
#TL;DR Poppy is actually a jungler that is on par with other standard picks and a support comparable to Vel'Koz. Poppy can actually lane decently top when not counter picked. Poppy is terrible design wise. Poppy needs a rework.
#About me I'm Ploki122. Been playing NA for a few years now (started pre-season 2 I believe, around the time Dominion came out). I used to main mid champions for level 1-30 like Ashe or Lux, but quickly transitionned to supports as I started playing Ranked (partly because I was bad and partly because my supports were bad). The first support I truly mained was Karma (pre-rework), which nearly got me Gold back in S2. Since then, I fell in love with the Yordle, playing her mainly top in S3 (but still some jg/support) and mainly support in S4. I've currently reached Plat5 where I currently plateaued (but I consider myself strategically and, on average, mechanically better than the average Plat 5 player, so I should start climbing up soonish).
Right now, I've probably racked up more than 500 Poppy games across all game modes and multiple servers (NA, EUW, PBE).I've also spectated a bunch of games (probably at least another hundred or two) of other Poppy players, ranging from Silver 4 (lolnexus search) to Korea Challenger (douyuTVMaknoon). I'm fairly consistenyl visiting D1/Challenger players streams of players maining Poppy (especially Benign Sentinel and Opened) to inquire about heir opinions of patch notes and discuss about new/old strategies.
In short, I believe that I'm fairly knowledgeable about the current state of Poppy, and I would actually love her to get reworked ASAP. On the flip side, I don't believe it is possible to preserve her identity of "melee AD carry" through the rework, making me very frightful of it.
