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Game Design Input by a Fan and Fellow Developer

RiotCaptain Gameplay·2/27/2015, 12:14:28 AM·14 votes·1,724 views

Edit: This Thread was made prior to employment

Preface I am "Beluga Whale" - NA. I have played Moba's for 5 years, and developed/lead the design and balance on two separate Indie Mobas (Rise Of Amon, Aeon Of Storms/Storm Of The Imperial Sanctum. This thread is meant to serve as my own take on Game and Champion Design, which I will try to keep relevant to the latest patch. As always, I'm open to any and all discussion and criticism.

Current Patch 5.4 Game Design Overview

For this patch's Design Overview, lets talk jungle. With the 5.4 Patch, there was a huge outcry about jungle changes and direction. Why don't we back up a bit and look at what exactly the jungle should be about, and what separates it from lanes.

The jungle should be essentially a higher risk area with great diversity compared to the safety and role definition of laning - where towers and friendly minions helping you out, and your general location on the map dictates what you should be doing (ie, mid roams, etc). The jungle should be the very scare areas in the map where you fight over vision and and try to predict your opponents movements and actions, and anything goes. Note, none of these design goals preclude any specific role! It is not necessarily a "place for tanks", a "place for gankers", or "a place for carries" - it can be all three, and more. However, each of these roles need specific catering in order to be viable. This is why we currently see a meta where one role is favored so highly over others - at the moment bruiser/fighter junglers like RekSai, Vi, J4, and Lee. How do we solve this issue?

One possible solution is to create greater diversity in jungle camps. Riot has begun this already, with the varied smite buffs - but it can and should be taken further. Lets direct our attention to this quick Jungle Datatable.

Based on each camp's stats, I've come up with 4 main stats:

Difficulty Score - the DPS*[Averaged Effective Health] of the camp/10000. This should serve as an estimate of how hard it is to take the camp. The 10000 Denominator is arbitrary, and just makes the numbers more legible.

Bounty/Exp

Bounty/Difficulty Score

Exp/Difficulty Score

So you may be asking what the purpose of each of these stats are, and how we can use them for improving the jungle's design:

By adjusting these ratios, we can diversify jungle camps to allow for multiple roles - who each need different things from the jungle.

For example, it doesn't make sense that the Raptor camp, which grants a buff that allows you to make aggressive invasions - also has the highest difficulty scores outside of Red and Blue. How can you play aggressively when you are at your weakest? Instead, it should grant a below average bounty/dif, average exp/dif, and have a below average difficulty score. This means that the camp can be taken quickly by all junglers, but is only worth taking from a bounty perspective if you then utilize the buff successfully - meaning invading, ganking, or otherwise establishing map control. Thus the raptor camp is now a favorite of the counter-jungler/early ganker -> granting enough experience to not be behind exp wise, while still being easy enough to kill that you are quite healthy and ready to fully utilize the buff it grants.

Another possible tweak -> Lets examine a carry jungler who scales better with Gold than Exp who should be weaker early game due to his scaling. The wolf camp already grants a very powerful defensive "ward", yet for some reason is also one of the weakest camps. It would make more sense for it to have an above average Difficulty, above average Bounty/Diff, and below average Exp/Diff. Thus it is risky for the jungle to take this camp, but it grants him lots of gold and some defense against invasion.

By better defining each jungle camp, we can foster a much more role diverse jungle.

Current Patch 5.4 Direct Tweaks This section is not necessarily connected with the Game Design Overview, and is more of a "random concepts" kind of thing.

For the most part, I feel most champions are not generally considered viable due to meta rather than any significant imbalance. Outside of those champions, these are individual champion tweaks that I feel would be interesting, and do not necessarily have anything to do with game design. This is not a complete compilation.

Aatrox W - Slight Rework -> Healing changed from 1-3x at 50% break point to 0-400%, depending on his current Health. Just a finer resolution R - Slight Rework -> Deals 10/15/20% Target Current Health as Magic Damage to all enemies in 500 radius, granting 30% Weapon Speed for Each Enemy Champion hit, up to 120%. Aatrox also gains 175 Weapon Range. Lasts 12 seconds.

Higher resolution on W just allows more leeway. R Change fits his theme from his Heroic Passive/Q/W and lore -> turning fights around when all hope seems lost. It will make him weaker as a 1v1, but much stronger in team fights - especially losing team fights - helping with one of the primary issues Melee AA Heroes face (snowball one way or the other too hard).

Brand R - Rework -> Fires a giant ball of fire at the target. After impact, the fireball attempts to bounce back to Brand (similar to say, Gnar Q). If Brand catches it, he cooldown is lowered by 75% and half the mana cost is refunded. Hitting a enemy currently Ablaze grants Brand a movespeed buff for a short duration.

Brand thematically/Heroic Passive...ly is a mage who wants to "burn" down enemies, not blow them up. This change would give him slightly less burst, remove the RN Jesus, and give him a reliable way to re-proc his Heroic Passive - assuming he can position well enough to catch the fireball - offering a more compelling gameplay aspect. Brand would need to catch his ult multiple times in a fight to reach even damage with his old ult, but masterful brand players could even exceed the old ult's damage.

Fiora Q - Can no longer dash twice W - Successful parry now refreshes Q CD and immediately grants Fiora her E (without putting it on CD) E - No longer resets on Hero Kill/Assist R - Reworked -> For the next 2/2.66/3.33 seconds, Fiora becomes immune to all CC. During this time, she cannot attack, move, or use abilities (except W). Instead, every .66 seconds, she dashes 300 Units in the direction of the Player's Cursor, dealing Physical Damage to all enemies she passes through.

Fiora's unique kit aspects are her W and R. Thus it makes sense to push more of her power into her W - adding significant skill leeway in her kit, allowing her balance to be a lot more lax. R, from a game design perspective, is fairly terrible - another RN Jesus press to (hopefully) win does not offer compelling gameplay nor does it give much leeway for the rest of her kit. The only thing that makes her Omnislash appealing is how it looks visually. So why not just allow the player to control it? Personally I think that would feel awesome.

5 Comments

Deathnor2/27/2015, 4:30:25 AM3 votes

i dont agree. not even a little bit. you are right on meta junglers overall. their are quite a few more viable ones but is the case with any competitive game things work out in orders of magnitude meaning someone is always at the top. or more a certain play style .

i feel the problem is in base design. overall the problem with the jungle does not lie in champions themselves. it falls into overall design. its the same problem you see with flash imo. i think before i go over what i feel problems are overall a little precursor to why i feel this way might be in order.

ive been playing right after release. the problem is for whatever reason 0 CS supports and junglers, although not new concepts to the genre were not present in the overall design. it was months before WW stepped into the jungle and a lot longer for 0 cs support to become a thing. i recall when WW was the only jungler and both teams picked him. hell i remember when no one jungled at all. i feel the problem was one not addressed in the original design and they havent updated base functions to reflect either role yet.

the first major problem is smite. actually more then anything else its always been the core problem. summoners were made to enhance strategic choice. it was not their to shoehorn, gate, or even allow a certain play style but to enhance it. however the challenge has always been how do we gate the jungle with smite and have it work for many different play styles from mages, to bruisers, or tanks, perhaps assassins, sometimes supports, or even duelists. the truth is each plays so very differently that a singular summoner spell cant and doesnt encompass them all equally.

overall i dont have a good option that doesnt expound the issue further by adding a new gate without the flat out removal of it. you could make smite a active off of jungler items. you could try and gate it threw a multi talent. more on this further down at point 4. or you could keep the enchants and just ditch the summoner.

the second major fault was in the jungle its self. you slightly hit upon this point but i plan to expand on it. where is the monster with a crap ton of armor and very weak to magic damage? where is the camp with of guys with middle HP levels even the big monster with out a overload of HP but high armor for magic damage aoe junglers? take for example you choice of calling out raptor camp. they make it high damage to avoid mid laners over farming it.

but i ask you how is that the answer? its purpose is more a duelist invade type buff. alter it to a single monster with high MR. of course you still have outliers like zed but i think its going to be impossible to make it competitive and tailor different camps to different weakness with out some overflow from lanes. which FYI already happens even with the way they altered it. but you talior the red side to pysical. you talior the blue side to magical. suddenly a champion like Vi plays very differently as she is automatically weak to half the jungle. maybe push the wolf camps opposite wall side out and link another pack of wolves. maybe 4 more little wolfs with both sides liked and having pretty good armor. of course overall numbers from health to damage would have to be altered but again the jungle becomes multi tiered to various play styles. you can even ignore everything i said and retailor it as you please. as long as the jungle is built where different champions have different strengths and weaknesses to different styles it will work out better. do i take the extra damage and semi waste time to farm those camps that are much harder or do i attempt to make a impact on the lanes?

i think this is actually the key. we are on jungle 4.0 (or is it 5.0 i forget) and each time they alter the whole jungle but do it so that the whole jungle reflects a new idea. they should have mixed and matched from several versions and expanded on it more. this would even allow a option of a double jungle meta which might need some tailoring overall but the problem is again at the core of the game not the champions themselves.

the third problem is machete. they seem to have come to a understanding that multiple paths are needed in terms of itemization. so why is it that a Vi uses the exact same start as fiddle? does you support thresh start the same thing as a janna support? the branching for different roles, aka play styles, needs to be tailored out the gate. again they try to solve a multi tiered problem with a single thing.

its real simple. you make upgradeable dorans or machete version items for the jungle. maybe even alter build paths to where each can build into all the items and later all the enchants. or if you dont want everyone taking a tank version for extra sustain and maybe more defensive stats you shift it to 2 items choices (would require not just new base items but new upgrades) from the original and from their they all can make the enchants. which really should just be a active and not a summoner.

the fourth problem is masteries and runes. you want the same stats for the jungle no matter which champions play style you are using. however if you alter the jungle as stated very little has to be done as each jungler should build differently as their role and strategy to attempt to tame the jungle should be vastly different.

however bladed armor might need need to become true damage and maybe a T1 talent while butcher might get a true damage extra vs monsters and a support version as well. of course bot laners can take advatage of butcher but they are already taking camps anyways so its less of a effect then one might think. also with a junglers easily viable camps being cut in half stealing some of those camps might hurt your jungler a LOT. overall masteries are still kinda a mess imo but this isnt that topics aim. also 3 21 point talents that each have a smite that acts slightly different might be a way to still gate with smite but tailor it for different roles. the offensive tree might have a slight advantage to keeping your health up in order to go out to gank, the defensive tree a smite with a slight increase in damage in order to be able to beat camps easier with less damage taken, and the support tree gives a smite a slight increase in gold. overall i would think with other over arching changes smite could be phased out or into the the smite enchants themselves as a active right off the item. again if you dont want junglers ending up with all talents push them to 16s in the tree. or maybe 11s so if they chose to diversify they can take 2 of them but not specialize deeper into a mastery tree.

of course your still going to have outliers but with a few patches the jungle should be pretty smooth and you can alter kits on problematic champions at that point.

TLDR riot seems to use single items/spells/jungle design to fit all types of junglers rather then talioring them to each play style.

Sulfuric2/27/2015, 12:32:17 AM1 votes

I like your suggestion with Fiora's W refreshing her Q CD. Gives her W a lot more synergy with other parts of her kit.

The Red Warden2/27/2015, 4:21:46 AM1 votes

For Brand what if instead instead of refreshing his ult's cooldown it halves the current cooldown of any of his abilities that are on cooldown. The Ult would still return to him but if it collided with any champion on its way back it would damage them for 50% of what it originally and stop with them.

This would solidify his combo-mage identity, while adding counter play with the fact that enemies can either take the returning ult to reduce his damage potential or risk him unleashing another full combo.