A huge problem with balancing around pro play
Especially when it comes to buffs: If they can possibly avoid it, pros will never play a balanced champion.
When pros look at a balanced champion they think, to steal an expression from the only Hearthstone YouTuber worth watching "It's actually pretty good! ...But it feels too...fair. I don't think this will be able to compete with T1 picks".
Every champion played successfully by pros falls into one of two categories:
- There's some element of the champion that can be made unfair by highly skilled or highly coordinated play (see Taliyah, TF, Azir, and Shen)
- It's so hilariously overtuned at every level of play that it can still compete against those in No. 1 above even when played to their maximum effect (see any time a champion without any especially difficult mechanics or unusual team utility gets successfully used in the LCS, such as someone like Volibear, Darius, Caitlyn, Syndra, etc.) Oh and of course let's not forget 3. Both of the above which has in the past included such faces as Orianna, Lee Sin, Orianna, Zed, Lee Sin, and Orianna.
So when the patch before LCS has shit in it like "While x champion seems to be in a good spot for Solo Q, and has an exactly 50% winrate and 0.0733 pick rate, we would like to give them some buffs to really compete at the proc level" What it actually means is "x champion is very popular to see in E-sports and we always make a lot of skin money when they see play. Unfortunately, they're currently to well balanced in the meta and so the pros won't bother using then...unless we give them a nice, big, Arbitrary E-Sports Buff! Hooray!"
