Urgh since when is Tryndamere a valid pick again? (Kinda long thread, I try to make a Tl; dr)
Seriously, even thinking about that champ gives me headaches. You wanna know why? Becuase the design is so horrificly outdated, unhealty and unbearable that is absolutely clashes with modern League. It's like a shitty crossover in cartoons and you see the different art styles clash and just looking at it makes you feel uncomfortable.
Sure, many of the original 40 are, or have been, downright garbage in design. That's why we are having reworks in the first place. But Trynd is the only one who can win his lane with sheer luck and has the easiest to use kit, and still can snowball so brutally hard it's downright ridiculous - and all that while playing PvE most of the game.
And yeah I just lost a game to one, you can see it in my matchmaking, but this never went past minute 10, as bot started to tilt and intentionally feed and I just got my ass whooped every time I even tried to farm as probably even their Zyra support could 1vs1 me given their level and gold advantage. (So not that anyone suspects I was intentionally feeding here).
But that doesn't change the fact that no matter how you look at this champion, there is literally nothing, NOTHING you could preserve and use as a core for a worthwhile redesign. Sion had still the shield going for him. Poppy had her wall-crush tackle. Even when their entire kits had to get redone, there was still something in there worth preserving. Not so with Trynd. His kit is not interactive, and his ultimate has the same issue Poppy once faced: yes it was iconic, but also horrible design and consumes WAY too much of his power budget.
Also, what irks me the most: even when measured by the standards of the time of his creation he doesn't compete. I know that early Riot was a bunch of enthusiastic noobs banding together who only were at the very beginning of becoming professionals... but holy shit, who greenlighted that design? It's as if someone with absolutely no idea of literally anything just butted in, made a joke character, and everyone had to roll with it for some stupid reason.
And yes, I'd see him as a joke character made by an untalented amateur.
I'd like to imagine it like this is how it happened: the design team is working and suddenly a dude, let's name him "Dave", comes in. Dave totally loves the game and also wants to make a champion, so he keeps bugging the team if he can't just make one single champion. Only one, that can't hurt right? And maybe one on the team owed him one or maybe Dave was a big-guy in the upstarting company, or maybe they were all boozed at that time... whatever was the case, and so he got his wish. And as Dave has absolutely no clue about design he just copies something that he knows already from RPGs: the classical undying berserker archetype, because slaughtering your way through enemies without dying and just spamming the attack button is always fun, right? Maybe he should have thought how the monsters in an RPG feel like when encountering such a character, as this is what other players would come to experience soon.
Meanwhile, the art and vfx guys doesn't object the design either, they are just happy they barely need any particle work or overy complicated artworks done. "Half naked dude with a sword? Yeah that's simple and easy, we can do that."
Then Dave gave his character a "generic tragic backstory" (tm) as a finishing touch and puts it into the game, where it miraculously didn't prove to be absolutely broken despite the design being the most shoddy thing the entire team has ever seen. But as long as it works and if it would keep Dave from bugging them they are ok with it. Also, the current meta was slower, with less damage and mobility creep (these really piled up over the years...), more hard cc and generally a slower game pace, so the shoddy design didn't cause too many problems.
Either it was that or the designer had a really bad day when coming up with the concept and was feeling especially unmotivated and had a random character to do to fill his quota for the week. That's just how uninspired and bad this design appears to me.
Now fast forward to today, LoL is a multi-million player game that has expanded all around the globe, one of the world's most popular Esport that managed to steal that position from Starcraft 2, the company has become a lot more professional as well, they are no longer a bunch of wacky amateurs that they were almost a decade ago. Structures have become more efficient, fixed team structures now work on champions, a lot more testing is done, and the impact of a single designer is reduced, as three brains work better than one mostly, especially when it comes to spotting flaws in one's own work.
And yet, the mistakes of the past still haunt this game. Generally, melee and bruiser design was pretty much an "experiment gone wrong", as the releases of Irelia and Xin Zhao (I still have traumatic flashbacks to that one...) had shown. But before all that, Tryndramere is pretty much the "original sin".
The main problem in here is melee-carry design. How do you make a champion based on melee damage ability/complex mechanic dependant? I think the new Fiora is a good design (minus the true damage, seriously, that's always an issue when balance shifts around), heck, even Riven, Yasuo, and Ekko, with ALL THEIR FLAWS THEY HAVE AND OF WHICH I AM TOTALLY AWARE OF show more promise in terms of delivering a "melee brawler design". Yi, Warwick, Aatrox (he only needs a real ultimate tho), Irelia, Xin, Trynd... all have issues of varying degrees, but a successfull rework can only be done if the issue with melee designs has been tackeled.
Isn't this something you can get mechanic-obsessed people like CertainlyT on? Seriously, put 5 designers together, give them a Kasten of beer and infinite amounts of coffee and make them come up with as many "modern melee" kits as possible. Especially when you want to update the "Diver" class you will need that, so you might as well start now with a massive rework-offensive that gets most if not all of the old shoddy design out of the game.
And until then I will keep banning Trynd from my ranked games wether he is OP or not, for I cannot stand seeing such shoddy backwards design in such a great game. It would be nice if he would be gutted just like Yorick, who pretty much had the same thing called "design too horrible for our game" going, but I think this would be too much to ask for.
And as I said in the title, here the attempt of a conclusion:
Tl, dr: Tryndramere a design failure from all possible perspectives, however, he is only the worst offender in an entire group of champions. So to fix his issue, we gotta fix all the champs also affected as the problem runs deeper. Until then, I recommend gutting the champion entirely, not even for game health, but simply because of how embarassingly shoddy and inaesthetic his design is, and this brings dishonor to the game, the developer, the dev's clan, AND their cow. And that's not something anyone could want, right?
: Trynd ult that can be cast on allies
when you took 17k physical damage and 3k magic damage.
).
Trynd has a bit of RNG in his kit. Well for some reason everyone that has something against tryn uses that argument.