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Skirmishers, Fiora, and the True Meaning of Target-Agnostic

CritDoge·10/18/2017, 11:58:20 PM·10 votes·1,177 views

I had this idea while back but I've been hesitant to put it out to the public because the few people I've brought this up to have basically shot me down immediately. However, I feel like it is a subject that needs discussing, so I'm posting it here in the hopes that it will gain more visibility and have people thinking more about what direction things should be taken.

So hold on to your item 3089, because the following idea, I have been informed, is really, really far out there. Like, CertainlyT levels of out there.

So by now we're all familiar with the Skirmisher subclass. For those of us who are a bit hazy on the details, this is how Riot Games defines a Skirmisher: "Unlike Assassins, Skirmishers aim to shred through any nearby enemy that approaches. Because Skirmishers lack high-end burst damage or reliable ways of closing in on high-priority targets, they are instead armed with situationally powerful defensive tools to survive in the fray, along with extreme sustained damage to cut down even the most durable targets."

Now that we've had a brief refresher, let's examine the concept of Target-Agnostic damage. Someone with target-agnostic damage basically should not care how tanky a target is, they should be able to damage anybody equally well. This seems to synergize particularly well with the Skirmisher subclass mentioned above.

So why am I putting this discussion up? Because right now, the "target-agnostic" champions in League of Legends don't really follow that rule. They're, in actually, target agnostic-adjacent. What I mean by this is that in reality, champions like Master Yi, Fiora, and Tryndamere do not kill every other champion equally WELL, they are just ABLE to kill sturdier targets. In actuality, when any of these champions gets fed, they gain assassin-like levels of kill time on squishy targets, AS WELL AS the ability to duel sturdier champions.

I'm going to use Fiora as an example here because she's who I'm interested in talking about, and where my rather absurd proposition comes from. A sufficiently fed Fiora can Q forwards onto a squishy target and kill them with E and a few more auto attacks, leaving very little room for counterplay since all of that happens in about a second, maybe less. This is mostly due to the fact that building AD on skirmishers empowers their autoattacks against champions by default as well as scaling their abilities, so they get to double-dip on the squishy-deletion power, especially since many of them also build attack speed for high sustained damage (Fiora is an exception, since her target-agnostic damage comes from Vitals which have a set spawn-in time, and thus, a set amount of time before a vital can be procced).

But what if this weren't the case? What if Fiora were TRULY target agnostic? What if, if left alone with a target, it took Fiora THE SAME AMOUNT OF TIME to kill anyone?

Enter my far-out idea:

Fiora's auto attacks no longer damage champions. They can still damage minions, neutral monsters, and towers, but against champions her autoattacks do not deal any damage. INSTEAD, any autoattack (or ability) that connects with a Vital deals %health true damage, significantly increased (in bases or scalings) from their current values. We can tweak the numbers, or alter some of her other abilities in order to help her out (give lower CD on Riposte, perhaps change Bladework into something that forces a Vital to spawn facing her, there are a bunch of things you can try), but the core essence should be that, at a certain level of threshold AD, Fiora proccing 4 vitals on you should kill you regardless of your tankiness. In other words, if she is able to successfully use Grand Challenge and proc all the vitals, her target should die. Conversely, Fiora would be UNABLE to blow you up even if you are a squishy, and theoretically should have the same kill-time on you as she would on a tank if she is left alone with you (And you aren't moving, I suppose). She has enough levers on her that this can probably be tuned (vital spawning time, vital spawning rate, where they spawn, etc.)

Currently, late-game, she's basically almost at this point if she builds a sufficient amount of AD, just because her basic attack damage + vital procs is usually enough to kill a tank by the time she procs all parts of Grand Challenge. However, this change would remove her ability to instantly delete an unguarded squishy like an assassin (By just Q->Auto->E->Auto->Hydra->Auto), while still chunking out respectable amounts of HP by smart proccing of vitals.

This idea basically takes her mini game and ramps it up to 11, and I understand if people aren't super hot on this idea. But I felt like it was interesting enough to share, and perhaps an idea that would make a champion truly target-agnostic. Thoughts on this are very welcome.

19 Comments

ModKnightsKemplar10/19/2017, 7:47:20 PM3 votes

This is a fun thought experiment, but there's a pretty clear reason it isn't going to work in game.

This takes almost all of the opponent's agency away from them, especially if they aren't a mobile champ. If you can't run away from her in time when she ults you, you just die. Period.

This game needs levers that you can pull to defend against a fed champ, and there is nothing to do if you're playing an immobile champ against a fed fio in that instance.

This is a fun thought experiment, and a cool thread, don't get me wrong. I enjoy a good discussion about it, and it's not my intent to shut down conversation. But it would take a ton more convincing for me to believe this would be healthy or balanceable at all. It seems to me it would simply come down to mobility only, and that's not a healthy thing.

terribleplAyr10/19/2017, 4:47:56 PM2 votes

Let me give you a proper fiora update - from someone who actually plays toplane and knows a thing or two. This is my secondary account for smurfing to try new things (not boost people as i don't really duo, nor to just smash people to be a jerk), so it is lower elo and I don't want to bother signing out and signing in again.

Fiora drops either the %hp damage in favor of flat damage (scaling with ult level) for her passive. Or she drops the sustain from hitting vitals. This passive of hers gives her insane power and sustain early for such a strong late game champion it is absurd. Especially when you consider that her q isn't even really a skillshot. It allows her to proc the vital, get some very strong damage in combo with her q damage, and use the movespeed to prevent many opponents from trading back on her.

Fiora riposte gets fixed. It no longer can be activated during an enemy cc animation to block said enemy cc. It can block future cc if cast during this time, but not cc already in progress. For comparison, right now fiora's ability to do what I call retroactively blocking cc is like morg being able to pop black shield on a target in the first second AFTER malzahar ults a target and the shield actually stop malz's cc. It doesn't work that way because there would be no skill involved. Tahm can eat said target to rescue them from malz cc, but morg cannot do that with black shield. Fiora riposte needs to work like morg shield - not tahm eating people. It's supposed to express SKILL, but right now is way too forgiving.

Fiora e could use some improving or something more interesting.

Fiora ult gets %hp damage dropped to 18-33% of a target's max hp as true damage. Or, it stays at 55ish percent hp damage, but is changed to PHYSICAL DAMAGE. Why? She already has strong dps. She doesn't need to delete someone's hp in 4 hits via ult regardless of them itemizing against her as best they reasonably can. For another context that puts the retarded level of excess damage in fiora's kit into perspective, let's look at mordekaiser. One of his most op things is his ult. It deals huge damage. Huge as in - around 35% hp damage... as MAGIC DAMAGE. First off, this is about 20% of hp LESS damage for mordekaiser. Secondly, his damage is MAGIC DAMAGE which can be ITEMIZED AGAINST; fiora's damage is TRUE DAMAGE, which has no counter. Secondly, mordekaiser lacks the safety of mobility while fiora has both riposte to RETROACTIVELY dodge enemy cc AND high mobility via proccing vitals and via her q. And her dps outside her ult is by no means weaker than morde's.

Put quite frankly, fiora can currently match early game bullies at all ranks from bronze to challenger or at least stay close to even early if she plays properly. If they mess up even once, the lane is over for them. If they make one mistake, they lose at their strongest point. Meanwhile fiora can make 5 mistakes in a fight mid/late game at her strongest point and STILL EASILY win 1v1. This is not balanced. Either the other champ needs much better scaling so that fiora must win out with as much difficulty late game as the other champ wins out early, or she needs to be as garbage early as the other champ is late vs her. Yet it is not even remotely close to that now - and claiming "weaker in teamfights" bs is untrue to any meaningful degree (living another 2 sec and dealing probably less damage doesn't make you strong in teamfight).

HaIlMonitor10/21/2017, 4:07:54 AM2 votes

While that sounds cool, it would seem to me to be very hard to balance.

Lets say its 25% per proc so 4 of them kill someone.

  • Well that mean if it takes her 4 seconds to do them, cho would die really fast, and she dies to anyone squishy (like ADC's and Assassins) basically because it would take her forever to actually kill someone

  • if its faster she would not only blow up tanks instantly, but also all squishies

  • Last but not least laning as any melee that isn't shen/panth would be very hard.

I wonder what would happen if Riot made a champ (like your idea) where they have weak autos like a tank, but all of their abilities just did a low base + % total health damage. I think true damage is way to strong though.

Muzét10/19/2017, 12:31:54 PM1 votes

On paper this is fine. But in fact it doesn't. Except if you put a instadeath if you received 4 vitals procs. This won't work simply because "some" classes get access to constant heal. Furthermore you have support that can provide shields. I get your idea but if proccing 4 vitals leads to an instadeath I can foresee Fiora full Tank. You know what I mean?

So how would you fix that?

Catastrophic10/19/2017, 3:11:54 PM1 votes

Really really interesting concept, and well explained too. It's still too early for me to decide where I stand on this I need to think about it a little more, but you sir, deserve an upvote.

CritDoge10/19/2017, 9:05:58 PM1 votes

You're correct to a certain extent. Implementing something like this will probably not be for everyone; I only singled out Fiora because she already had a mechanic that gave counterplay (as opposed to counter-build) inherent in her kit, so it was easy to take it a step further and wonder what would happen if that were her ONLY means of dealing damage.

I think the balance team actually briefly considered making crit armor shred as well. But the fact is that, just because of the way stats are arranged, pretty much any damage enhancement is going to be more effective at killing squishies than killing tanks. I'm not saying that %armor shred would be more effective against squishies, I'm just saying that the lower kill time that sort of mechanic would bring (especially now that GA is an armor item and Zhonyas is an armor item) would end up just making it faster to kill squishies, which is, what we really want to avoid in terms of people who don't care who they're shooting.

ADCs, I would say, aren't target-agnostic by design. They're target-agnostic by necessity. Their role in a team is to basically kill the tanks that other people cannot (similar to the other melee carries, and to a certain extent people like Azir and Cassiopeia). However, that doesn't really make them target agnostic, it just means that they can kill tanks in ADDITION to blowing up squishies if they get crits on them. But this is another discussion, since I think the whole 'what purpose does the ADC role serve' is an entirely different animal.

I would say that Crit and %health true damage aren't really the same solution at all. Taken by itself (without any additional damage), %health true damage takes you no longer to kill a tank than a squishy, and conversely, you wouldn't be able to kill a squishy faster than a tank. Crit in its current iteration just...makes you deal more damage, period, so you'd still be killing squishies faster than the tanks.

And I guess my last question to you would be why you think that having all your damage come from autos is any less binary than the issue of what you mentioned with Fiora before. In my opinion whether or not someone's autos will kill you is even MORE stat-checky and binary than positional play like Fiora's vitals - you either win the auto-duel or you don't. You can even give her E a mechanic (now that her autos don't do damage) where hitting with both hits spawns a new vital in her favor, or something like that. Details unclear - I haven't put much thought into exact skill specifics. But I believe there are ways to give both her and her opponent more ways to play around the Vital mechanic than there are to having 3 or 4 champions that are based around auto-attacks for their "target-agnosticity" (Yi, Trynd, Irelia, Yasuo, etc).

HalcyonDweller10/20/2017, 9:49:43 PM1 votes

I hadn't seen such formal discussion of 'target agnostic damage' before here, and I found it quite informative. Thanks for an interesting read!

I like your ideas, but I'm not sure about having such huge damage proc per vital for Fiora. Maybe it could be altered so that vitals spawn quicker or even simultaneously on higher health targets? Then instead of dealing more damage per proc, she just gets faster access to fresh procs of the % damage?

Even linguistically speaking it would be thematically appropriate, because health = vitality. Having more health would equate to having more vitality = more vitals to hit maybe? That's just me rambling about linguistics though.

Anyway, great post 10/10

Thanks for making me think in new ways!

CritDoge10/21/2017, 3:55:00 AM1 votes

It's entirely possible that major adjustments would need to be made to the vital spawn rate, etc. in order to let this no-basic-damage iteration work. I think the important thing to get out there is that it CAN work given some thought, and making a champion's only damage source %health true damage without anything else would actually make them truly target-agnostic.

In a reply to Muzet's comment above, I think that saying 'this is what Fiora is supposed to do' is something that can only really be dictated by Riot. I'm hoping to instigate some thought into what champion identities ARE. Is the fact that Fiora can delete a squishy just a SIDE-EFFECT of the fact that Riot wanted her to be able to duel anyone in the game, and forced her to build AD to scale her Vitals so she couldn't just build tank and become an unkillable duelist? Or was she MEANT to delete squishies? Riot likes to say that they build target-agnostic damage into champion kits to allow them to deal with sturdier targets, but this pose asks the question of what that would actually mean if ALL of a champion's damage were target-agnostic (in other words, it took them the same amount of time to kill a stationary tank as a stationary squishy)?

DemonBoneJangles10/19/2017, 12:17:26 AM1 votes

you've put a lot of thought into this? the only issue I see is that if this were to be implemented then fioras counterplay simply becomes avoid her because as your proposed changes state she would be unable to damage champions. her effect in a teamfight would become zero unless she was able to single out a target and her early game would become unbearable because she would have no way of trading with her lane opponent pre 3 unless she was willing to risk significant damage for the attempt to 4 shot them. everything you said was well thought out except the consequences of such a design change on her laning phase and team fight effectiveness

CritDoge10/21/2017, 6:24:26 AM1 votes

I get your concern. However, I believe that the lever that makes it so that she HAS to build squishy in order to up her Vital procs to 25% makes it viable. I agree that it would be incredibly difficult to balance. However, the upside is that her damage would be the same % of someone's health bar invariant of itemization changes, which means that you can balance her against basically her own metric: time to kill, because defensive itemization changes wouldn't make her either stronger or weaker.

You can give her Riposte a shorter cooldown but also a shorter window of invulnerability if we wanted to pursue that route, but all in all this was more of a thought experiment than anything. Something rather far-out that I'm not expecting to be implemented at any point in time, heh.

zaire9010/19/2017, 4:15:36 AM1 votes

So if all she has to do is hit 3 vitals wouldnt the fiora just go full tank and split push entirely if the enemy team sent less than like 3 people they would all die if she just has 2 hit her vital 4 times to kill them. Correct me if im understanding this wrong

SpookyNeedle10/19/2017, 11:50:39 AM1 votes

They'd have to lower the vital prep time on passive and maybe ult