Can we impose stronger taxes for mobility?

Hexs Fortune·May 26, 2017·11 votes·607 views

Too many champs don't pay enough in their power budgets to account for the safety and engage opportunities their dashes allow for.

31 Comments

SnakDatSmilesBakMay 26, 20178 votes

Let's go champ by champ. Mention one champ that you think is overloaded by virtue of not paying enough for its mobility so that we can discuss the issue properly.

Brain Errör 404May 26, 20175 votes

DreadlocksMay 26, 20176 votes

Basically Darius who has little mobility should be able to kill everyone with 1 damage item bcuz he is immobile..

Irelia BotMay 26, 20174 votes

He does that already though.

deadlychuckMay 26, 20175 votes

I mean, i think that's kinda what he's saying... In response to champions who have mobility not exchanging enough power in their kit to have it, it's created monstrosities like Darius, who needs absurd levels of power, by virtue of simply not having mobility.

When they create mobile champions, they might consider their strength relative to immobile champions, and then they undervalue the mobility. When they then release (which is very rare now), or rework, a champion without mobility, exactly how undervalued mobility is becomes more clear, by the exaggerated amount of power immobile champions are given, when their relative strength is considered to mobile champions.

Range can also have a similar undervaluing or overvaluing. Though, that depends more on who is setting the values (in this case riot) who seem to have a more accurate method of evaluating the value of range than mobility.

SnakDatSmilesBakMay 26, 20172 votes

You have a good point that the immense power given to immobile champs may be used as a metric to measure the power budget of mobile champs. Still though, nobody has mentioned a specific mobile champ to discuss....

Lord DesertMay 26, 20172 votes

Well, "nobody" is not entierly true, I have giving some examples of strong and even to strong mobile champions for discussion. If you want to dicuss power adjustments/"balance" Yasou and Fizz would be prime examples. The thing is "balance" is more then just adjusting the mobility, so only talking about mobility adjustments will likely not cut it :/

SnakDatSmilesBakMay 26, 20172 votes

Nobody is entirely true. Nobody has mentioned a specific champ. You listed a lot and I'm not skilled enough to carry so many discussions at once. However, let's start by discussing Yasuo if that's OK with you.

According to lolalytics, yas has a 51% winrate. To me this says he's balanced. Do you have anything to add or anything you disagree with? If not then let's move on to look at fizz.

Lord DesertMay 26, 20172 votes

Do you want to open a new comment for the discussion? this could get rather big :S Anyway just looking at lolalytics he has 52% winrate top, 8%ish pickrate. Overall 51% and 16%. That is to high for a highskillcap champ like yasou. His pickrate is to high which should lower his winrate and high skill champs especially should be around 49-50% with pickrate of +7% ish. to be "balanced". With 16% pickrate he should be at ~48% to be "balanced". So he needs some nerfs just based on the statistics. Looking closer: He got directly buffed via GA changes and the -300gold for IE + zeal. And shiv got buffed too. Also his %pen was not adjusted so the tank item update (+armor/+Mr but - HP) was also a decent buff for him against tanks. Randuins update is by far not enough to cancels those out. So he needs nerfs. On the PBE they are nerfing his Q charge duration(10s -> 6s). Pretty good nerf, so he is less opressing vs melees if ahead. The E changes are basically irrelevant.

Further changes could be:

he gains his double crit with levels (50% extra on level 1/ 75% at 7/ 100% at 13)(or 25/50/75/100 at 1,6,11,16)
ult cd up, potentionally reduced by a flat amount if he hits his 3rd Q on enemy champions
passiv shield value lower by ~50 at level 18

Sr, I'm a rather slow writer ....

SnakDatSmilesBakMay 26, 20172 votes

It's alright, no worries. To be honest I'd prefer to make a new thread but let's finish up yas here and then start a new one.

Imo a 52% winrate is very close to acceptable. There's a lot of changes that could be made to weaken yas enough to drop his winrate by 2%. I know that probably this isn't the answer you're looking for but I'd like to see how he does with the q nerfs on pbe currently before trying to determine whether he is balanced or not.

He has such a high pick/ban rate but most of that comes from bans. There are more people banning yasuo than playing him! I feel like on other champions a 52% winrate (51% on some sources) would be ok. However, since it's yaso we'really dealing with bias is a big factor in how boards wants him to be balanced. Overall I think making any judgment on yasuo at this moment is a bad idea because of the bias and current pbe nerfs.

If I had to say, I'd say yasuo is fairly balanced but the armor pen his ult gives him is the place I would "hit" him. Yasuo is meant to be a skill dependent champion so why not make his ult scale off of skill like the rest of his abilities? Make it so that the armor pen he gets scales off of the number of enemies that he hits with his ult. It would start at a number lower than it currently is, break even at 3, and be a buff to his ult at 4 or 5 enemies hit.

It just doesn't feel right to change his mobility, any change i can think of only serves to make him clunkier. The thing is, yasuo is balanced around very short windows of intense mobility and hitting that changes the identity of the champion. The change I suggest would leave him a weaker 1v1 champion and help to slow down his spike in lane phase whIle retaining his late game. Skilled yasuo players will get more damage out of his ult and weaker yas players won't. While he will still have the massive powerspike with his first and second critical items, he won't get the full power of his ult until late game teamfights.

This change also makes him want to go mid more often as opposed to top where he wants to build semi-tanky. This is because he's closer to bottom and therefore has easier access to more people to ult earlier on. It's a long shot but perhaps this will discourage yas players from building tanky, since usually top lanes build tanker than mids.

This also provides clear counterplay for people who want to stop yasuo by capping his power unless the yas can make flashy big lcs plays by forcing people to line up with clever use of his wind wall and his dash.

Lord DesertMay 26, 20172 votes

Its true that there is alot of bias against Yasou here on boards, but he got just to strong because of the buffs & nerfs that happend :/

He had 49% winrate and 5% pickrate before, from OP.GG. Same with Riven, she was also always strong but still "balanced" (Also 49% winrate and ~7% playrate). Until this change in 7.9/7.10 Riven skyrocketed to 52/53% and Yasou got up to 52/51%. Understandably the small increase of 2-3% really doesnt seem like much, but with those play- and banrates the impact is extremely huge! Every other NonHighskillcap champion would be fine if they had 51-52% win- and ~7% pickrate in terms of balance.

The problem is that we cant change the overall mobility that much, because the champ was designed and "balanced" to have this kind of mobility. So we would very likely need to do close to a full rework if we want to change that :/ And that could upset alot of people. The best we to influence the high mobility would be to "gate" it. Like: Dashes towards a champ are the same length/a tiny bit longer, but dashes away are shorter(pushed towards enage/less escape). Or higher cd to the targeted you want to dash to again. Or something like that... I dont see much room for other/bigger changes without rebalanceing everything :/

His midgame spike got shortend pretty hard, I would suggest we try to pull it back a bit, the passiv Crit/lvl could be used for that. Ult cd up is a general nerf, but also rewards skill with the refunds if you hit your Qs. The lower shield is to weaken his realiablity/ inbuild surviability lategame, since you can use your shield once and then ult to get another free shield. A very big, on demand shield!

To your suggestion: This would lower his 1v1/splitpush pretty hard against bruisers/tanks and normaly something like 4-5 man knockups happen because of other members of his team, its often not his own accomplishment. The idea is not bad as a nerf/tradeoff but it would push him to much away from what he is now in terms of gameplay, riot certainly wouldnt go that way. But I'm all in for tradeoff nerfs where skill gets more rewarded!

I personally view the faster powerspike as more problematic than the %ArmorPen on his ult (its also gated by how fast he gets to high critchance). But we could switch this bonus pen to his W, so he gets 10/20/30/40/50% bonus ArmorPen for 15sec on critstrikes after he ults someone, this stretches his power against tanks until later. Or lower the bonus if you want to make him weaker against tanks overall. There are some other ideas but this is already way to long xD

deadlychuckMay 26, 20172 votes

Well you can't just take the current state of the game for this consideration, as with champions being less mobile getting power power to compensate for the miscalculation of mobility, you will have a fluctuation between mobile superiority and immobile superiority. This is kind of swap would likely be indicated by changes to champions, or items used by the champions, which have the currently non-dominate design.

What i mean, is that if riot reworks champions who are immobile, while mobile champions are dominating the meta, those champions will likely be extremely strong. Where as if they rework champions who are mobile, while the game is dominated by extremely strong immobile champions, they will likely undervalue the mobility.

Now considering that the tank update recently dropped, it would make sense for the immobile champions to currently be overpowering the mobile ones atm. Which it seems to be the case (at least according to OP.gg), though some good examples of this would probably be champions which gained mobility of some kind in a rework, but then would later be adjusted through means such a damage numbers rather than the mobility.

I really don't have the time, or the desire, to go through a list of champion balance histories and find cases of increasing mobility, so say ahri Q ms, spiking a champion's win rate, and then riot balancing the champion through damage nerfs. Idk, maybe if i find myself with nothing to do, i might write a script to scrape the wiki pages and find cases of this.

Lord DesertMay 26, 20172 votes

I would say we need to clarify mobility a bit more, because there are 3 things packed into it: Engage- and Disengage Mobility (aka. initiating/getting closer and escape) and Dodging. Examples of Champs with overall very high "mobility" would be: Ekko , Fizz , Leblanc , Ahri , Camille , LeeSin , Nidalee , Rakan , Yasuo , Fiora , Riven . So 7+ are Assassins, rest bruiser ish.

The problem is that some of the Assassins have high enough base dmg to go tanky, while still dealing huge (enough) dmg AND also having very high mobility! Their high mobility gives them alot of safety, they can engage easily if ahead or disengage if behind + dodging some high impact and high cd spells.... That is some serious power! Thats why we see those who can fight against a tank in terms of base dmg go "bruiser" toplane. And not the assassin/full dmg builds they are intended to go.

To solve this we ether need to reduces their mobility/utility (maybe just 1 part of it) or lower their basedmg + small/slight increase in there scalings (which could backfire hard if we give them to high scalings!).

I consider every one of the mentioned as strong/very strong and some could need some slight nerfs/ they could be a bit more risky to play. Op/broken is a bit tricky to say, but if I would need to pick some, Yasou, Fizz and Riven would be my current "too strong/ need nerf" picks. (In Rivens case I would rather see some DD nerfs)

Mira Arya EntheMay 26, 20177 votes

So let's just nerf all mobile champions in the game, regardless if they are balanced or healthy, just on merit of a blanket philosophy that you feel mobility needs to be punished?

Lord DesertMay 26, 20174 votes

Can you and/or your friends stop with the massiv vote manipulation? Your comment was not even 8 mins old and got 3 upvotes already.... every other comment pro the op's suggestion and even neutral ones all dropped by 3 votes! While the cons all jumped up by 3... Coincidence? I dont think so.... What if I would do 8 accounts and downvote everything that is somewhat against my point of view? Or heck just for fun only against your comments?! Would that be funny for you? I personally dont care one bit about the votes, but others might do. We have some kids here too, they normaly dont take it so lightly if they get some downvotes, so please stop it! I only downvote someone if they are harssing me or others or if they just spouting nonsense/ try to insult me etc... I dont care if they have a different opinion than me. They can think whatever they like. Thanks!

SnakDatSmilesBakMay 26, 20173 votes

Don't make accusations you can't back up beyond suspicion. You don't know for sure if this guy's manipulating votes so lay off of him. :/

Lord DesertMay 26, 20171 votes

3 upvotes in less then 8 mins on a low viewed topic (maybe around 6, at the very best, viewed the comment in this timespan) is already very suspicious! Thats a fact. But to further support my claim is that absolutely every comment got + or - 3 votes in the same timespan! It is not even possible to read them in this timespan! And there would have been some difference in the votes. Or atleast a comment! Except if they are all voted by the same person via multiply accounts or if you call friends to vote like you want.

So I'm very confident to take the chances of 99,99% that he/she voted multiply times. (Also speaking psychologicly, persons who have "power" aka. "publicity"/beeing "famous" fear they might lose it. And they want to counter that. So the likelyhood of them having multiply accounts as "backup" just in case is alot higher than for normal persons. So we are at 99,999%). So you can trust you me, if I make "accusations" they are more then backed uped. I dont make them just because of a whim.

SnakDatSmilesBakMay 26, 20172 votes

Yeah I agree it's really suspicious but you can't actually prove it so leave him be. It could just be that 3 different people happened to view the comments and upvote/downvote them the same amount at the same time.

Lord DesertMay 26, 20172 votes

The funny thing is now after 1 hour he/she still sits at +3 upvotes xD same for all the other votes. And we had ~+40 views on this. Also if you dont believe me about the 3+/-3 votes press rightclick on the number; press "Q" and search for -...-up-votes and -...-down-votes they should be A bit higher from where you are looking at. About at top right. Now you see the total number of up and downvotes :D Have fun and check out all the comments! This should clear the last rest of suspicion :D

SnakDatSmilesBakMay 26, 20172 votes

Still this isn't concrete proof so I'm going to continue defending this dude and give him the benefit of doubt.

Lord DesertMay 26, 20171 votes

There is no 100% concrete prove possible, not legaly, but statistics dont lie xD I think we surpassed the likelyhood of beeing struck twice by a lightning in a row right now xD Anyway I honestly dont care at all if he/she has multiply accounts, but I do care if someone tries to abuse this in discussions. To get your post started? Nobody gets harmed, no one cares. Liking your own comment? Its like liking your own balls, but thats still somewhat "acceptable". But downvoting other opinions, without any comment/reasoning why and ontop just to make your comment/view better, thats where I draw the line! I'm a man of maths and statistics cant lie what so ever. Opinions be opinions but the facts remain the same. I hope he/she refrains from doing that from now on, I dont think theres any point in further investigating this :/ Anyway it has been fun, I always like to do statistics :D

SnakDatSmilesBakMay 26, 20172 votes

Your exaggeration of the op's viewpoint is very unhealthy. As such a popular member of the boards you have a responsibility to not misrepresent viewpoints like you have done here. This is an obvious straw man, yet you already have more up votes than the op.

Instead seek to promote discussion. I mean no disrespect, I'm just pointing out that you have a certain power, so to speak, to sway opinion very quickly.

Mira Arya EntheMay 26, 20171 votes

The OPs post is very short and too the point. Mobile champions need higher taxes in their powerbudget for being mobile. If you are taking something from them elsewhere that is a nerf. Since it states mobile champions, not anybody specifically, it is demanding mobile champions be nerfed because they are mobile. Perhaps if more effort was put into the OP to provide explanations and thoughtful discussion rather than a vague philosophy that mobility needs to be penalized more, I would have more to argue against.

SnakDatSmilesBakMay 26, 20172 votes

I understand that the op is vague. Nonetheless, op said "too many" and not "all", so this is an exaggeration on your part. Reading between the lines of the op one can also see that he's referring to champions he deems unbalanced since they do not pay enough power for their mobility. Once again you exaggerated his viewpoint by saying, "regardless if they are balanced or healthy."

The op believes that mobility is part of a power budget - which I agree with and if you don't then we can debate this point between us - however, you call it a blanket philosophy based on his feelings implying that you think he's wrong. There you go. Here's something that you, correct me if I'm wrong, disagree with. Meaning if you had wanted to argue a point you could have done so.

You make some good posts and I respect you, but the amount of up votes you get for some comments that should not be up voted is suspect and indicative of your popularity rather than your comments themselves. This is why I pointed out your "power," people here blindly follow you. You must be careful. I'm sorry if I offended you, I didn't mean to.

Mira Arya EntheMay 26, 20171 votes

Part of the problem is knowing people on the boards. I have seen Hexs Fortune post blanket balance concepts before. I feel all champions should be balanced and designed case by case. For example, Nidalee's mobility cannot be directly compared to Katarina's mobility because of the restrictions and advantages of each. So you cannot blanket the same rules over both of them just because they both have mobility in their kits. So I am basing it off of a tendency to post blanket statements about entire classes or groups of champions.

Perhaps that isn't what the OP meant, but until they explain their philosophy more thoroughly I have to go on the information I know. All things are part of power budgets, mobility, range, base stats, itemization options, mechanics and so forth. So if that is what they are requesting they are requesting something that is already there.

SnakDatSmilesBakMay 26, 20172 votes

I agree with you, but creating a strawman didn't promote discussion and that's the goal right?

FooDangMay 26, 20174 votes

LeeSin - I don't see what your problem is...

WhiperSnapersMay 26, 20172 votes

- I don't see ~~what your problem is~~...

I fixed it for you

MordepoolMay 26, 20173 votes

My problem with Mobility: it covers champion weaknesses for the entire game length so even if they are intended to have a bad early/ mid/ late they usually don't.

Also the Metric used as the balancing point is usually Durability vs Mobility having one excludes the other to a point

Mobile champions can't be inherently durable. For Balance

Durable champions have very limited mobility if any. Seems a like a decent notion.

Except what happens in the Late game Damage Always Out Scales Defense. So the Above exclusionary Design is invalidated by Mobility which always comes out on Top.

Perhaps the Metric should be Mobility VS Damage

AvienalMay 26, 20173 votes

{quoted}

My problem with Mobility: it covers champion weaknesses for the entire game length so even if they are intended to have a bad early/ mid/ late they usually don't.

Also the Metric used as the balancing point is usually Durability vs Mobility having one excludes the other to a point

Mobile champions can't be inherently durable. For Balance

Durable champions have very limited mobility if any. Seems a like a decent notion.

Except what happens in the Late game Damage Always Out Scales Defense. So the Above exclusionary Design is invalidated by Mobility which always comes out on Top.

Perhaps the Metric should be Mobility VS Damage

In that same note champions like LeeSin and Hecarim should not exist because they have insane mobility and are able to build tankie, they need to be rehauled into 'assassins with very terrible damage if they do not build at least 3 damage items', This does not help Hecarim's case where move speed= bonus damage to him, so ghost+scuttle crab+His 'ghost' ability=dmg bonuses to him, because no true 'cap' exists on how much damage he gains from move speed, just like with the 'Flash' in infinite crisis moba, he gets too much damage from being able to 'move around'.

Likewise if a champion has HUGE amounts of CC measures, they should have less damage to compensate otherwise they can just take advantage of a 1 second root/stun/fear and easily melt a enemy in that 1 second of 'disruption'. Which pretty much Ekko fits that bad example because he has slows, stuns, shields, empower damage by 'repeatedly' hitting targets with abilities/autos and a R which lets him jump back a' huge distance within 4 seconds and allow him to regain his entire health if he went down to 20%~40% health and can basically immediately reengage a low health enemy he was fighting or just run away with relative 'ease'. by using his Q together set up for another round or easily slow the enemy and escape.

Riot needs to basically balance things into a chart so no champion gets more power from opposite sides of a 'chart of power' beyond a distribution of 100% between the both of them, because when a champion gets both of them at full 100% each, they tend to be overpowered and broken in so many ways for a 'long time' and leave more impact then a day 1 release champion who gets a quick hotfix patch to 'balance' the power they have.

[zombie-nunu-bummed]

MordepoolMay 26, 20172 votes

Obviously I'm not accounting for the affects utility, range, base stats have on any given champion (which have to be treated on a champ by champ basis).

Seems to me the hyper Mobile since they deliver much more reliable damage should have less overall damage