A Serious Question About Champion Development, Identity, and Balance
Hello,
I'd like to ask an honest question to any reds who'd care to weigh in: Do you think a champion can have a bad identity, especially to the point where it should be changed? Let me clarify.
A lot of times when you discuss changes to a champion, you refer to a "core identity" that you prefer to make changes around but not to, even when the reworks are pretty extreme (take Sion, for instance). The Sion rework is a good example because I think a lot of people like where he's at now. He has interesting tools in his kit for laning, jungling, teamfighting, and has even seen some LCS play. Additionally, his kit now plays more in line with the core identity you tried to preserve: an undead juggernaut.
Now let's look at a champion who has historically been a nightmare to balance: Kassadin. If I cared to comb through and reread patch notes I'm sure I could find some paragraph about how you don't want to alter his ultimate too much because it's a "core mechanic central to his theme/identity (hyper mobile disruption assassin anti-mage... thingy) ." However, pulling into line a "core mechanic" of "I have a low-cd long distance blink" sounds like a pretty tough task. We could argue about how successful it's been but that's not my point. (This isn't a QQ kassadin thread, i don't even think he's that much of a problem anymore)
I respect the creative process and appreciate that focusing on building and developing ideas instead of scrapping them is a valuable part of that process. Part of good champion design is a "core identity" that can be worked around and fashioned into a healthy addition to the champion pool, and I think on the whole you guys do that very well. I'm not asking you to throw the dev team under the bus either, I'm just asking if you think a champion can have an identity that is so challenging to work with that it is better to scrap it and start fresh.
's identity as a hyper-mobile assassin has a lot worth keeping (assassins are mobile by nature, and mobility as a mechanic isn't fundamentally flawed in itself). The problem, though, basically boils down to pre-rework 
's where, as Meddler mentioned, despite having this potentially awesome identity, it was implemented in a way didn't do much good for gameplay. Just as Soraka's healing was gated improperly, so is Kassadin's mobility at the moment, at least in relation to the rest of his kit. I feel the mini-rework he got a few months back was done to quickly get him out of his state where he could only be banned at a ridiculous 90+% rate or be near-unplayably weak, and while the changes did a great job in making him significantly less toxic, they didn't entirely address all of the issues he had (at least not the issues we know of now). Ideally, Kass's changes could give him the coolest mobility in the game and play up his hit-and-run disruptor theme even further, but would also give him a fully functional gate to his abilities that would prevent abuse.
and 
. Everybody jokes about how irritating they are, but that's literally how they're designed to be: annoying enemies is a core part of their identity, and the question remains as to how that identity can be preserved without degenerating into toxic play, which is the main issue right now. Is trolling your enemies even something you'd want in a game where positive interaction is crucial? If it's something that's going to stay, how does one make a champion annoy and even frustrate their enemies, but still promote fun play for everyone involved? Is the fun even worth the frustration created by such an identity?
