Alot of people say this meta has too much damage and everybody one shots everyone, however as an player that only started playing this game in season 8, this is the only league of legends that I know of. What exactly was league like when it wasn't this damage meta? What was lol like in it's most optimal and balanced state?
Just from what I remember:
Some of these weren't serious answers (I do want my old sej back though)
Feel free to correct me on this as my memory was basically erased from all the brainwashing riot did with adding so much damage.
Edit: As others have said, this question leads to very biased answers as people enjoy different times. I enjoyed S5 + S6.
99% of the players will just say the seasons were LOL was still fresh and new to them, deluding themself into thinking that they enjoying it more cause "OMG THAT WAS THE ONLY TIME WERE LOL WAS GOOD!!11!!1". In general, LOL actually got MORE balanced as time passed, ppl just "forgot" the "little" problems of the "good old days".
Subjective, and a lot of people's most balanced meta are others least balanced. Like a decent amount of people will likely say season 2 or 3, but most of the people likely didn't play ADC back then, Randiuns used to not only have an AS slow, but an MS slow as well, and when a bruiser bought you, if you hit them, you basically cut off your only means of actually staying alive in a fight.
It was Never balanced each season had a meta and disgusting champions But people who complain will never shut up no matter what happens
Well League back then was a lot more simple, I started playing by end of season 2 and I had most fun in season 3 and 4, but the truth is everything started going downhill at Juggernaut update, later marksman update was a huge fuck up,adc were in a balanced state and they got 4 new items that made them INSANE, the old kog maw W? Yea, but to me honestly what really broke League was the introduction of Lethality, who even wanted it? No one. What did it gave to the game? More damage, more damage and EVEN MORE DAMAGE, because 3 months BEFORE, they reduced all armor on every single tanky item and increased the health. Soon later after lethality Riot started giving a lot more items CDR, CDR makes games a lot shittier, games end faster when you look at it every champion is spamming spells way to fast. Now about the champions, every newer champion TBH just has too overloaded kits, I mean just look at the difference between Zoe 2018 champ and Sydra 2012, both have damage, both have cc and then Zoe has spammable movement speed spell, wtf? Look at the champion like Rakan, double dash, shield and heal and insane R. ??? But the thing about champions Riot is obsessed with idea that every champion has to have something unique. They don’t! It only makes things harder to balance around other interactions in the game!
And lastly, the runes reforged was also a big failure, it took them 1 year to put the option to select flat rune stats, regardless of rune trees, i mean why did we have to wait a year? And keystones in general are dumb, why did we even needed them? What was wrong with let’s say a season 3 masteries???
I'll be honest, the original tank meta. not the "tank meta" where Tanks did as much damage as a damage dealer while being tankier as well, the old tank meta where tanks were a walking brick wall of denial, where the only real way to kill them efficiently was to get the ADC fed so they could focus down the tank. Conversely, you also couldn't win with only a tank, cause they did to little damage to be able to deal with the enemy team. Back then fighters could build more beefy cause defense was worth more.
It wasn't without its flaws and was far from perfect, but it still felt the best to me. Tanks felt tanky, ADCs felt important, supports were helpful, mages carried weight (either they had the CC to lock down the Tank or the damage to blow up the caries). Only class that didn't really matter too much was fighters, but you still would have them in matches all the time as they were pretty much jacks of all trades who could focus on building what the team needed.
Some people claim season 4, others claim season 5. It really is entirely subjective, though. I liked Season 2, but as someone else said I wasn't an ADC player then, I was support.
However... games lasted longer. Kiting was a thing. You could be burst or sustain, and be equally viable. Tanks rose and fell in dominance, but honestly everything else just sort of ticked over, patch to patch, with the only thing people agreeing on was that Irelia needed a nerf.
There was far more emphasis on team synergy, placement, and group movements. It was less of a team of play makers, and more teams that made plays. For the most part. Pros aside.
at the end of seaason 5 after juggernauts had been balanced out was the best state the game had seen.
it felt like you could be relevant from every position and if you could carry for your team had more to do with how you played out the lane phase than what champion type you picked.
marksmen werent buffed yet and still lategame scaling. juggernauts and fighters in general had been brought up to par with their new items. mages were a bit on the weak side, but nothing too bad.
yet, damage wasnt out of control, and tanks and fighters could actually survive enemy focus for a bit.
Burst could oneshoot really fast yet had actual cooldowns but defensive items felt really good. Games were less snowbally, tanks were actually tanky as fuck and didn't do much damage. There wasn't any bullshit sustained true damage flying around, resistances mattered and lifesteal was good. Late game adc's were strong, but they had garbage early and supports were there to carry them through the earlygame and fell off because the game wasn't catered on giving them free gold despite them not taking resources on the map. Vision wasn't free, and you could take gold items to scale by sacrificing some pressure. (late season 2)
League has never been in a balanced state and every season has been the worst season
4.10 or 5.15 outside of my clueless season 2 days were the best. 4.10 was ended by Ryze and nidalee taking over top lane in the following patches and 5.15 was destroyed by the juggernaut patch in 5.16.
Season 2 and season 3. The damage was not this extreme, the only 1 shot champions in the game were Nidalee and Rengar. Every champion used to have a clear counter and a champion that he counters. Every champion had clear strengths, they were early, mid or late game champs, never all 3.
Every champion used to build at least 1 tank item or guardian angel so fights were long, strategic and required multiple outplays to get ahead. Objectives gave mostly gold instead of stupid amount of stats. Towers were destroying non-tanks at all stages of the game.
As for classes:
tanks did zero damage but were unkillable for more than 20-30 seconds unless you were Vayne, a tank soloing someone was unheard of, they were mostly used for engage and zoning the enemy carries until your carries can kill theirs
assassins were as cancer as they are today, only back then it meant they were taking 50% of your HP in 1 go, still in todays standards they were rather balanced, also there weren't many assassins in the game
ADCs were crucial late game carries, they dealt insignificant damage early unless it was Draven or extremely fed ADC, late game they could DPS and lifesteal their way through anyone except tanks and occasional Jax
bruisers were notoriously strong as hell, but still their early game was really weak and abusable, if they lost early they were truly useless
mages were arguably the strongest class, they could waveclear for days so they could stall out the games until they did a comeback, they also had significant aoe dmg and strong laning phase most of the time, still they almost never 1 shot people, not even close to that
The only thing that sucked in those seasons was that the splitpushing was just too strong. Everything else was perfect, at least compared to what we have now.
Yasuo didn't exist.
season 4 and season 5
People here aren't really telling you the season that was balanced but rather the season they prefered. Whatever's currently strong or a common theme will be what's talked about here on boards, it's probably true except that it's just how this game functions, different things will be strong at different times. People prefer their own seasons as each season generally had some sort of meta that probably suited the players. Personally, I enjoyed early season 7 before the tank and cho meta being extremely powerful, but after rengar and khazix got nerfed. I might've prefered season 3-4, but I took a break during season 5-6 so I don't really remember much from back then.
The game was balanced around 5-item carries rather than 1-item power spikes. Diving a tower was a calculated decision rather than anyone can do it for a free kill. It was rare for one person to snowball so hard that they can 1v9, whereas now games are frequently decided prior to the 20-minute mark. CARRIES were important and it was important to work as a team. Assassins couldn't assassinate tanks, and armor/magic resist made a huge difference to the length of your life in a fight.
Season 5 before Juggernauts ruined everything. ^^
Sure we always had some overtuned stufff but back than you could basicly play everything you wanted everywhere and could get away with it. Stuff like ArmorTank Galio Top, Leona-JGL, Fiora-JGL.
The diversity back than was over the top - barely any two games you played had even remotely the same champs on it! Said Diversity is - imo - the best indicator for a balanced game state.
Without delving into the pro and cons of this stage I'll just come out and say it, mid-season 2, early season 4 and patch 5.1. Those periods were arguably the best times in terms of balance, at least from my perspective.
Mid-season 2 because that's when pro play really started to shape the meta and we saw a huge variety of champs and builds at the time (I still remember, Toyz, his Ori was sick, also he went shit like D.Blade Ori into certain matchups lmao), and before "League of BC" became an apparent issue.
Early season 4 was great since every role felt interesting and we got Spirit of the Elder Wraith and Lizard, which brought with them Spirit Stone which brought Machete, which more or less fixed the jungle role since it gave junglers an actual first item instead of just going boots, D.blade or Long Sword. Also because of the fact that it was right before any bullshittery occurred cough Yasuo and Rek'sai cough and Morello and the team had more or less balanced each pick relatively well outside of a few exceptions such as Renekton and Kha'zix.
Patch 5.1 simply because it was right before the removal of DFG, so off-meta AP builds were still possible and moderately successful, and this was also the time when Weedwick was fixed and tank meta wasn't a huge issue. Diversity was still just great, if not better since top lane was beginning to see some positive changes in the right direction.
Pretty much, every patch after 5.2, especially the class updates helped to shape this game into the volatile snowball that it is now. Runes Reforged definitely nailed in the fate of this game, however every patch past 5.1 contributed immensely due to the continuous hate of "tank meta", assassins and eventually bot lane. All of this was because of Riot aggressively pushing what they considered to be "unique" champions and reworks to the forefront, giving previously fine characters who filled certain niches too many frustrating and overloading options to work with, and releasing overloaded champions whose kits never should have seen the light of day. Sorry, but class updates were a failure.
Also, the game started to decline in quality due to Riot removing items and moving their passives onto another item. Example, Malady's on-hit damage passive is now on Nashor's Tooth. Effectively what this did is that it made items exceptionally overloaded and streamlined since there's no longer any choice since Riot has completely removed all choice entirely in favor of overloading single items with too many different features. Additionally, they also try to replace items and make them more "healthy". Example, DFG got replaced by Luden's. While Luden's appears to be more healthy it isn't quite as healthy as people say since it still adds more damage to your burst, and the bounces are all entirely random. You heard me, random. That's another thing that came with this strategy, we first saw their promotion of RNG or "pseudo-RNG".
Basically, removing items caused item variety to decline drastically, class updates overloaded champions and newly released champions got continually more broken and overloaded as time went on. Moreover, the keystone system could also be to blame since instead of raw stats. and the like you got one mastery that's excessively powerful that defines your playstyle to the point of absurdity and a few minor masteries to give you basic stats. Initially they weren't a problem, but as we're clearly seeing now Riot has again aggressively pushed changes through to make keystones entirely defines your pick. This also resulted in them completely sacrificing the old rune system in favor of this system, which they were then forced to change; partially bringing back old runes anyways.
tl;dr Any time before class updates, overloaded releases, removal of DFG (and other items) and Runes Reforged was a prime example of League in its most balanced state.....except for late season 2 and early-mid season 3 (99% Pick/Ban Kassadin with 60%+ win rate, I still remember the horror). Removal of variety killed this game's balance.
Every season after the one you started playing is the worst season. Or at least that's what people on these boards think.
patch 8.11 was the best state of league ever, every role could carry a game, there were no truly useless roles, and the balance outliers weren't as strong/weak as usually.
Back on my main I joined around Mid season 6 when jhin was released, that was the most balanced the game has ever been, there was much diversity in the game like tanks weren't extremely good neither were mages or assasins or bruisers or marksmen, they all had pros and cons but games were actually fun
go watch any high elo/pro season 3/4 videos. After that, watch the same type of videos for s8. It'll be a drastic difference. You'll get nostalgic for something you've never experienced. Lol.
SR peaked during S2 imo. It had the largest viable champion pool and both offensive and defensive itemization/scaling were equally strong, though penetration was arguably weak. Defensive itemization in particular was SO much better than it is now and back then you had to choose between getting more damage and getting tanky. Mindlessly stacking damage was a good way to lose unless you could force a 20 min surrender. Assassins could build tanky for example, but their damage would suffer greatly for it. Even ADCs used to include items like GA and Banshee's Veil in their builds, back when both items only offered pure defensive stats.
One of my favorite builds was aura/support builds with stuff like Aegis of the Legion (this item used to be godly) and Shurelya's Reverie. There were also gp10 items to help out champions with weaker early games and/or bad starts, because full build late games used to be common back then.
I suppose the biggest difference between then and now is that it was a lot harder to blow people up. Sustained damage was much more reliable and stronger than burst in most cases. Burst didn't really start outclassing sustained damage until the penetration formula was changed at the start of S3 (back when everyone used to just stack penetration and ignore resistances). S5 had strong defensive scaling, maybe too strong, but Riot gutted it and has shown far more bias toward offensive scaling ever since.
Also, Dominion and the old 3v3 map were still around. Those were good times.
It's not comparable, things have changed so much it's not even the same game. Almost every champions, abilities and items have been reworked. I would say tho that the game used to be much more segmented into mmo-type class with clear strenght and weaknesses and was easier for ppl to understand. Nowadays, it's very hard to make the distinction between divers and assassins for instance. Ultimately, it became to a point where every type of champ could do the same thing except they've different kit to achieve it instead of having a clear purpose to the group.
