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I feel it's also important for a champion to play with, not just as or against: The video doesn't talk about this at all, but as League is a team game, I think it's important that champions get to play well with each other. This applies more to champions with ally interaction built into their kit, and can include cool synergies and interactions, but at the very least, no champion should be unpleasant to play with. I feel this is the difference between champions like Taric and Leona, whose ally interactions empower them and give them more options towards success, and someone like Kalista, whose ally synergy often feels like it removes agency, forcing her Oathsworn into uncontrollable states and rarely giving them the choice to act on their own initiative while around her.
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The part about skill expression doesn't feel as clear as it could be, and only talks about high-end mastery: I feel an important part of skill expression involves not only enabling long-term mastery on a champion, but also forging solid learning paths in their kit that let a newcomer intuitively figure out how they work. Newer designs like Sion and Warwick, for example, both feature ults that are pretty decent when used the "easy" way, i.e. at point-blank range for quick CC and damage, but that also directly lead the player towards greater mastery by encouraging them to use the ability from greater distances. Not every champion has to be easy to pick up, but every champion needs to at least offer some success to players who make a genuine effort to learn them, something champions like Azir or Kalista don't really do. This also means getting a second opinion from different elos, so that whichever buff or nerf you want to apply doesn't disproportionately affect one division over another (i.e. any of the many nerfs in the past that were intended to make champions less overly present in competitive play, but simply made them more difficult to use properly, without affecting their performance as much at higher levels).
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Popularity is fickle and has a lot of other influences, and so isn't the most reliable indicator of long-term success: I think this is worth bringing up because Ghostcrawler talked about how Thresh's consistently high play rates make him a successful champion. While I do think Thresh is well-designed, I also think much of his popularity comes from his prevalence in the competitive scene, due to his very strong generalist kit. Effectively, once you play him enough, you can expect consistent success from him, which is why he gets played so often. The same can be said for similar champions such as Lee Sin and Janna, and I feel applying the "success" of competitively popular champions to balance and design decisions has not always led to the best long-term consequences, e.g. mobility creep, kit overload, champions with too few weaknesses, and so on.
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Weaknesses need to be neither too harsh nor too soft: One think that annoyed me a little was when the topic of range and kiteability was brought up as the core example of counterplay. For sure, a ranged champion like Ziggs is weak at melee range, and deserves to suffer for letting their enemies get that close, and a juggernaut like Darius shouldn't be able to immediately close the gap between himself and his opponent, but in isolation, these weaknesses are too binary. In the case of Ziggs, he doesn't have much health, can miss his abilities, telegraphs much of his damage, and so on, and Darius also has other instances of counterplay, but League still has many cases where range is practically the only counterplay. Juggernauts are the prime example of this, as many of them obliterate melee champions without really letting them fight back, while having practically no openings against ranged opponents. Champions like Annie or Malzahar, whose main counterplay is to stay out of their spell ranges, also do not present much interaction.
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"Fair" isn't enough, counterplay needs to be fun: Another thing that bothered me was that GC mainly talked about fair play inasmuch as a champion didn't feel too awful to deal with. This isn't enough, imo, and I think a successful champion should, at least at times, be fun to play against, and offer opportunities for satisfying and unique counterplay. This doesn't have to mean every champion should give enemies bonuses for outplaying them or anything like that, but it does mean that bringing a new champion to the game should mean the enemy team gets to try out new things as well. Double-edged abilities like Bard or Kindred's ults are a good example of this, as they give additional options to both allies and enemies, and to a lesser extent sufficiently telegraphed effects (e.g. Veigar E, Warwick W, etc.), self-debuffs or CC (e.g. static channeled abilities like Nunu ult or Sion Q) and clearly indicated periods of weakness (e.g. Kled dismounting, marksmen reloading) are all opportunities for players to interact better with a champion by exploiting those instances. Contrast this to champions like Fizz, Kalista, Kassadin, etc., whose counterplay has been pushed at most towards being bearable, rather than truly fun for everyone, and I think it's clear that there's much that can be done to improve their design. Similarly, pushing for assassins to be truly interactive, rather than simply less able to one-shot targets, would allow them to be much more effective at killing and escaping when they play well and their opponent doesn't, instead of leaving them in a state where they often get overpowered by the champions they're trying to damage.
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I don't feel like Riot fully understands Aatrox: This is more of a minor side comment, and I'm also speaking as a non-main, but I feel like Ghostcrawler's description of Aatrox's fantasy kind of misses the mark. He starts off really well by mentioning that Aatrox doesn't have a very satisfying or unique kit, fails to deliver on his thematic fantasy, and therefore needs a larger update, but then concludes by saying Aatrox should feel like "an evil blade-wielding demonic creature that terrorizes the Rift". Yes, this does sort of describe Aatrox, but it's not a complete description, and that's the issue: from just his lore, the biggest thing that's missing about Aatrox is his ability to stir armies into bloodlust and turn the tide of battle. This is the central, defining feature to his entire backstory, along with his blood-drinking living sword, and is represented in no way in his current kit. Whenever players discuss changes to Aatrox, the idea of giving him an offensive boost to his team almost always comes up, and from what I've seen this isn't something that has really been echoed or even acknowledged by any developer. Now that Kayn is part of the roster, it's all the more important that Aatrox doesn't just fade into the background and feel like Rhaast with more autoattacks.
And that's about it for this wall of text. It might sound all negative, but overall I really appreciated the video, and the effort Riot and Ghostcrawler have taken to share their design philosophy with the playerbase. I think Riot's overall approach is solid and, while I disagree with some of it, as well as several of their design decisions over time, I do feel it's had a tremendously positive impact on League.
same "i only have CC and offer nothing else" niche so nope
and the pillars