The best piece of constructive criticism I can give to the balance team for this year.

Speed up. Balance changes are being made too slowly and it's really annoying. A few examples off the top of my head:

• Orianna, Syndra, Cassio became the mid lane meta in pro play around worlds 2016. While a few others came and went (Corki, Galio, Taliyah), these 3 were the top dogs for almost all of 2017, and finally got nerfed just before worlds 2017. LeBlanc was in the mix too but I count her as being apart of another group.

• Speaking of that group, it was made up of 3 of the most overpowered champions at the start of the year. It consisted of Leblanc, Rengar, and Camille. LeBlanc and Rengar were fresh off the assassin update and were incredibly overtuned while release Camille was also overtuned and overloaded as all hell. IIRC they were all highly contested pro picks for a majority of the spring split, with Camille falling out of favor the earliest of the 3.

• At the start of 2017, Ivern sat at around a 56% winrate. And he kept that up until around June or July until he finally got nerfed.

• Malzahar support was a thing at the start of 2017. This was somewhat cool, until he was only being played as a support and was pick/ban in pro play. It took until around mid season for Riot to get him out of bot lane. This trashed him as a mid laner. To Riot's credit they did fix this one decently quick(2-3 patches iirc) but they ended up overbuffing the hell out of him. After a nerf the next patch that really didn't do anything, he was and still is one of the best solo queue mid laners. He is just now being looked at again.

• Crit item buffs happened in the mid season. We're still dealing with the fallout of Twitch, Tristana, and Xayah that caused.

• Duskblade was changed in June(I remember looking this one up) so AD assassins weren't forced to rush ghostblade every game. The change broke the item. A hotfix and a nerf the next patch were given to it (again, good on Riot for noticing the problem was there), but nothing has been done since and Duskblade has spread to marksmen and fighters. To my knowledge, there are still no plans to fix this item.

• During the tank update Zac was overbuffed. Overbuffs happen sometimes, oh well. Zac became pick/ban in pro play and solo queue for month and a half to 2 months with nothing happening to fix this. The champion was blatantly overpowered and was just allowed to be that way for 1-2 months for pretty much no reason

• Kalista became strong at some point around the mid season last year. Despite the fact she was supposed to be kept weak until a rework because of the negative effects she had on pro play, she received only 1 nerf which didn't do anything. Kalista then went on to be pick or banned in every single game at worlds. LPL's 2018 season started today, and Kalista was picked or banned in all 5 games played. While I understand that a 5 game sample size is pretty poor, it's still a worrying fact that a champion that was picked or banned in every single game at worlds is still S tier.

• Vayne has been doing this 1 Q = half health crit build for a while now too, but I'm not putting that much weight into this one since I can't recall when exactly that started.

Let me know if i'm wrong on some of these points, im doing this from memory. A few of these that cross over from last year are a bit more understandable because new runes and whatnot. But a few of these are just head scratchers. Malzahar and Duskblade were being looked at and then suddenly they just weren't seen as problems anymore despite them not remotely being fixed.