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On the Thematic Dissonance of Rek'Sai

Aohaku·12/27/2016, 12:23:05 AM·3 votes·557 views

Dear Riot, Two and a bit years ago, you created a champion focused around the idea jungle control by way of leaving collapsable tunnels everywhere she went, creating shortcuts where there ordinarily wouldn't be. She was advertised as and designed around the idea that she was a predator, a land shark if you will, swimming below the earth and surfacing to murderize anyone unlucky enough to be caught out by her. And boy howdy did you deliver on release. Her global presence was ridiculous, rivaled only by her raw power.

Then the nerfs started. Granted, the first one (5.1) was definitely needed. She was way too freakin' powerful for everything she offered on release. Tunnel, surface, Q thrice, bite. Oh look, your enemy's most of the way dead without even having a chance to respond! Heaven help them if they were already damaged or if you had a teammate to help you (which, as a primary jungler, she usually did). And that on top of global presence, tremorsense and tunnel pseudovision? Yeah, a nerf somewhere was definitely needed. Then came the second nerf (5.2). Her damage was nerfed even further. This didn't break her. She was still playable, although she was struggling a bit damage-wise. And look! More uptime on her knockup! That's something, right? At least she could still offer something to the team.

5.7: Rek'Sai officially becomes an ad-hoc tank because she doesn't do enough damage to be a fighter anymore. More uptime on her tunnels, but by now we've officially left the champion's theme of being a predator. 5.10: Base health nerfed seemingly out of spite, with the given reason being her professional viability remained unaltered through two meta shifts (spoiler alert, neither the Warrior nor Cinderhulk upgrades have anything to do with her pseudovision tunnels or global presence and thus nothing to do with why pros play her). 5.13: Unburrow radius gets nerfed, reducing her effectiveness at the thematically dissonant role you selected for her. 5.17: Full damage combo gets slowed by three autoattacks, further cementing her need to be tanky in order to do any appreciable damage and eliminating her ability to kill any champion with a movement ability or who decides to walk away rather than fight. 6.14: After nearly a year of being largely untouched and in a rare case of removing power from something other than raw stats, tremorsense gets nerfed (which is pretty okay, to be perfectly honest). 6.18: An admission that Rek'Sai has strayed very far from her intended role and that any further changes should be focused on getting her back to being the ferocious predator she was always meant to be. Also a nerf to her armor, because what else is there to cut at this point when she wins more than 50% of all games on the professional level (with a 100% pick rate) but less than 50% on the casual level?

So what's the point of all this? Basically to point out that you've been gutting her in all the wrong places (which I think you've figured out by now). From what I understand, the reason she performs so well on the pro scene is because of the free pseudovision on her tunnels in tandem with her potential for global presence. If those aspects are the problem, and were the primary problem basically the whole time, why not nerf those bits so you can give power back where she needs it? Reduce the number of tunnels she can have, or maybe give her ult a range similar to Pantheon's and make it so she doesn't know if a tunnel has been collapsed until one end or the other is within that range. Or maybe introduce a time delay between a tunnel being destroyed and her knowing the tunnel has been destroyed, maybe five seconds or so (this would introduce a potential frustration for Rek'Sai players wanting to ult to a tunnel only to find out four and a half seconds later that the reason they couldn't is because the thing was destroyed, but I could live with that). Or maybe change her ult to something else, something not reliant on having tunnels somewhere, and maybe you'd be able to afford to remove the pseudovision component of her tunnels entirely. At that point you could afford a ten, potentially even twenty second delay on her knowing whether a tunnel is present (sans actual visual confirmation or being within tremorsense range, of course) allowing her to be more than just a global vision tool.

Ultimately, these are all suggestions to bring a champion a fell in love with (and potentially suggested? Unsure, but the timeframe seems right.) back to the casual scene without feeling overbearing on the professional level. Do with them as you will, but please do something to mend this huge gap between casual and professional playability.

Sincerely and respectfully, Aohaku

P.S. If anyone has any other suggestions for fixing Rek'Sai's current sorry state on the casual scene without making her explode professionally, please feel free to add them below.

2 Comments

Aohaku12/27/2016, 12:23:51 AM1 votes

Reposted because I accidentally deleted the first one. Such noob. Much wow.

Xintium12/27/2016, 10:16:23 AM1 votes

Rek'Sai is one of the few champs (like Kalista and Azir) which Riot (implicitly or explicitly) admitted that they have no idea how to correctly balance. For Rek'Sai, patch 6.18 clearly stated that.

Back in the day, Kalista was dominant in pro-play. They nerfed it and now she is not viable anymore. Same thing for Azir, and now the Emperor of Shurima is a mere shadow of his former self. Sometimes, number-tweaking can only get you so far and can't solve all problems. You can change the numbers to nerf the damage of any champion, but what's left is an empty shell with theoretically game-changing moves but nothing besides that. And this enforces weird builds.

But this is nothing compared to the current balance right now, where Riot could remove 60%-70% of champions from the game and only a small minority would notice. Probably everything began at the start of S6 (or even earlier), I honestly can't pinpoint a specific moment in time. But, right now, the game is so broken that seems like an extended version of Death Recap.

There was a time when Riot said they changed some champions because they felt like stat-checks and no skill was involved. Believe it or not, the game, right now, is becoming a huge, weirdly entangled stat-check. And (even worse than little diversity) with fake diversity.

P.S. Very well written post.