So, I've been playing for a bit of a long time.

Some could say I'm a veteran player, some could say I'm an awful player since I've been playing for so long and am still around silver-gold level.

I started playing the game a few days back before Ahri's release, still am playing it now. Balance team has made some pretty good and pretty bad decisions over the years, which is understandable. I never expected the balance team to be perfect, or even great. They're people after all, and people make mistakes.

I haven't really played much in terms of ranked, always been more of a casual player, so I never really cared much about which season it is besides what it has brought to the game. And to those of you who say that this is the worst balanced season of all, you have no idea what you're talking about, because some of the earlier seasons were utterly hilariously broken. And way more buggy, believe it or not. (If you don't count Huedekaiser, anyway.)

Still remember how hyped I got for the releases of champions like Zed and Syndra, which were pretty awesomely innovative at the time. I found the mechanics of Zed's living shadow and how you could make plays with and against it just plain amazing. Same with Syndra's magical ball thingies.

And yes, I had fun playing against them. And I still do. The various assassins have been fun to play, even though I'm probably the worst Zed you've ever seen, and have been fun to play against. Even with their disturbingly high damage at times. (But that doesn't mean I'm masochistic enough to enjoy playing against a certain somebody's windwall that has a weird hitbox.)

It's been a bit of a long journey, many of the champions I most enjoy playing have gone through many iterations for various reasons. Some changes I liked, some I disliked, and very few that really upset me. Good and bad items have come and gone, as have runes and masteries.

Champion, ability, and item design has gotten more and more complex over the years, and in some cases, ridiculously overpowered for a while. I'm looking at you, Huedekaiser rework.

Feel free to take my thoughts with a grain of salt, but ADCs as a whole, and assassins, aren't that broken this season. A few specific champions are in need of some serious tuning. Or you could just put kleptomancy on a cooldown to make it less easily abused, something like 10 seconds for a melee, 15 for a ranged champion.

Damage is high across the board. Yes. It is. But that's not the first time this has happened, nor the first time champions have been abusing certain features of the game. Don't pretend that it is. Once upon a time, Rengar could kill you in a timespan of 0.1-0.01 seconds. If you thought ADCs were bad in 2017, you should've tried being one then.

Some of you will be outraged with the mere thought of this, but give Riot's balance team enough breathing room to communicate. The rioters shouldn't be afraid to post on the boards, people shouldn't swamp them in toxicity if they do. They are, and people will swamp them in toxicity. That's how we ended up in this messy place where the balance team doesn't listen to us much, not because of Riot being happy to ignore the players but because the boards have proven themselves to be unreliable and as toxic as a chemical factory.

Buffs and nerfs may be slow, but they're coming. Ornn's losing his CC immunity, Vayne's getting a decently sized nerf to her ult at all stages of the game.

One small change could offset the balance of the entire game in unexpected ways. Or just break the game with some kind of weird bug, because Spaghetti code. So try to understand why Riot doesn't rush to patch everything the players are dissatisfied with. Twitch abusing runaan's? Fixing that could make him bug out and be completely useless or ridiculously overpowered to a unbelievable extent.

Like the time people were abusing scripts to exploit a weird Xerath bug where his Q would hit all enemies on the map if it was fired from a certain position, at a certain angle in the top fountain. Things like that could happen. Or a bug like the instant recall.

Most likely, it could break the item for all ADCs or champions that have any feature that extends their autoattack range. Like Rapidfire Cannon, Caitlyn's Trap/Net function, Tristana, etc. I've got a little bit of experience in coding. I'm no professional, not even a competent programmer, but the small change in the spaghetti code of how Runaan's interacts can result in so many horrifying bugs that I can understand why Riot has let Twitch run rampant with abusing it.

The alternatives are potentially far worse than Twitch abusing Runaan's.

Now, I'm not defending Riot, though somebody's probably gonna say something like "how much did rito pay you for this lul", Riot has made some really bad decisions on the design and balance teams, in my opinion anyway. (inb4 lul silver-gold player opinions r dumb and don't mean anything about balance.)

Vayne is still probably going to be problematic after the nerfs, but we'll see about that. Ezreal, Miss Fortune, and Tristana are still all going to be very annoying to me. Jhin is still going to have his issues with not being able to use most of the keystones well. And that's okay.

And yes, some champions definitely do too much damage and or exploit certain items too easily. Akali for example, just exploits gunblade too efficiently. She gets a ton of damage and sustain off it, with no tradeoffs because of her good dual scalings. Midlane mages need some optimization in terms of items as well, due to the current state of the game innately favoring some mages over others.

Shaco, Zed, Kha'zix with duskblade, for example, have on demand invisibility (Zed's ult counts as invisiblity for duskblade cares) so you can't stop them from proccing it besides CCing them, bursting them down faster, or somehow managing to be fast enough to kite them to death. Which is often easier said then done.

The problem with the simplest solution, which is just nerfing duskblade, is that it penalizes all assassins that have to rely on it to be relevantly powerful in the early-mid, not just those that easily abuse it.

Some assassins are too bursty, but don't really have anything to follow up with if that burst doesn't work. Evelynn, for example. Though the nerfs she's getting are really harsh, and she's one of my favorite champions, they're justified since she's too bursty. (Don't misread that as busty.)

Though it would be nice to get some compensation elsewhere on Evelynn, preferably her Q damage so she can be more relevant in the earlygame, since most of her burst was frontloaded into one ability (Whiplash), which is getting heavily nerfed in the upcoming patch.

Others are bursty, but are more well rounded and less binary since they have more utility, but not quite enough to be outright oppressive unless extremely fed, in their kits. Such as Talon.

And now, let's talk about ADCs, bruisers, and the problem that is kleptomancy.

Kleptomancy is just too damn good.

Nasus can be oppressive because of it, because he doesn't need a damage keystone to do significant damage. Illaoi, Ezreal, and almost every other champion that uses it well can be oppressive because of it, for the same reason. I suspect Trundle can also abuse it, though I'm not sure about that.

Money. Kleptomancy gives far too much free money. The simplest solution to the problem that is Kleptomancy, and arguably the best, is to simply lower the amount of gold it gives. Reduce the average and maximum amount of gold it gives by half, so it'll be more functional as a support keystone than as "You thought you had gold advantage for having better CS.. BUT IT WAS ME, EZREAL!"

Make a sack of gold worth 20 gold minimum, 30 sale value, 50 gold at max. With gold payouts of 25-40 gold per sack. Kleptomancy will still make you scale faster, still be good on the champions that currently rely on it, but it'll be significantly less overpowered.

Increasing the RNG so it's harder to get it would also work, but that'd just skew it worse since it'd still be equally problematic as it is now, just less often.

There is in fact, a keystone for bruisers coming soon. That's right. So you don't need to keep complaining about it, because Riot is actually making that happen.

Most Toplaners are in a very iffy state, with some being strong due to being able to exploit kleptomancy, and others being weak because gold advantage from kleptomancy, lack of a keystone that fits them, and free stats + vision too, allows toplane to be easily stat-checked in a klepto user's favor.

Nerfing the amount of gold given would probably cause toplane to settle down significantly, since the gold advantage from trading/harassing becomes significantly less oppressive if Klepto gets nerfed in the manner I said.

ADCs are in a similar state. Klepto and a certain gold income item has made some ADCs obscenely strong, while others starve because they fall behind in gold even if they CS just as well and don't get killed. Because if they have seriously bad luck, the enemy can get a kill's worth of free gold off 3 procs of it. Which is equally true in toplane.

I would say that in its current state, Kleptomancy has been one of the most balance breaking additions to the game, of all time. Simply because it lets some champions hyper-snowball, while others starve because they can't abuse it. A Keystone that makes you snowball more easily is okay.

Dark harvest is okay. Kleptomancy should be okay, when it doesn't allow people to have such a gigantic amount of a gold lead. Trading a damage/utility keystone for faster snowballing is a fair trade. When it's a fair keystone. Which it would be, if it didn't give so much free gold.

So, Riot, I kindly petition, Nerf Kleptomancy. Make a sack of gold worth 10 gold minimum, 30 sale value, 50 gold at max. With average gold payouts of 25-40 gold per sack. To any of you people, not just the rioters, that did take the time of your day to read this rather long ramble of a post, thank you for your patience, have fun, and game on.

> TLDR: I'm a veteran player, the state of the game isn't as bad as it has been in the past, but it's on the lower end. Riot is actually working on things, not just happily ignoring all the angry players. The boards are toxic as usual, which is why you shouldn't be surprised if you don't see rioters responding to G&B board posts. > And Kleptomancy needs a nerf to the average and max gold it gives. Seriously.