Overloading in kits has gotten excessive.

AccurateYeet·11/4/2019, 7:54:37 PM·2 votes·823 views

We're at the point you could pull entire abilities off a champion's kit and they wouldn't be bad on rate, which is a serious problem.

We'll start with Akali, Community agrees she's overpowered, consistent pick/ban in pro play, so lets just rip what's generally considered her most broken ability, her shroud, right out of her kit and look what's left. She still has easily spammed waveclear/harass on her Q, Both a gap closer and an escape on her E, multiple dashes and massive mobility on her ult, there's nothing wrong or lacking in that kit. And we pulled out an entire ability, a powerful ability at that, which covers any time you might be able to punish her. Akali doesn't need her w to function as an assassin, she already has all the damage she'd need to single rotation her intended target and leave no trouble.

By contrast let's take Ezreal and take what I assume is his most hated ability, Arcane Shift. We'll even do it for his W too. If you take his E he loses his mobility, which is the only thing that makes him viable over any other ad, and basically turns into a shitty poke bot that dies instantly. He doesn't even have real damage. If we pull his W he gets to keep his mobility but his damage gets gimped again and he's still functionally useless in his role.

I'll admit Akali would also suck if you took her Q, but ezreal is also shit if you take his and he's still worse on rate than Akali who could still theoretically one rotation someone with E and both halves of her ult.

Yasuo is in a similar boat: We'll also take what's considered his most infuriating/overloaded ability his Windwall. He still has an excess of dashes on his E, both getting in and out, AoE waveclear/harass on his Q with decent range (Just like Akali) Which gets considerably worse if you can't zone him completely, Free shielding on his passive, and long cc/damage on his ult. His kit is 100% fine without Wind Wall. This is still a functional champion that does everything you'd expect or need out of him in the average game.

If I can pull a whole, hugely powerful ability off a champion and all it does is give them meaningful counterplay and bring them in line with the roster you've got a problem.

6 Comments

Keiaga11/4/2019, 8:06:10 PM4 votes

Fun fact - "the community" is wrong and most champs that have overloaded kits are some of the absolute worst in the game right now, up to diamond elo. Akali being one of them, but also champs like sylas, azir, leblanc, qiyana, yasuo, irelia etc. They're all in the bottom 45 of the 150~ character roster with less than 47 or 48% winrate.

Meanwhile the top 20 right now are dominated by very simple or straight forward champs like jinx, ashe talon and malzahar.

DalekZec11/4/2019, 8:02:41 PM3 votes

Overloaded kits is automatically a piss poor design anyway to my eyes. Akali and Yasuo are both designed by the same designer who doesn't understand what a PvP game is, nor what "enough is enough" is, so naturally those 2 champions will fall into a pit of problems for a very long time.

To me, if a champion is so overloaded that riot had to shave off 2 or 3 mechanics from the kit and still be a problem, this calls for another rework rather than nerfs because no amount of numbers can fix it.

musixxal11/4/2019, 8:03:41 PM2 votes

akali isn't even good right now lol.