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Complaint about Riots Balance Attitude

Ronin Tamos·8/7/2019, 9:08:54 PM·7 votes·943 views

Disclaimer: So first and foremost i'd like to make it clear that i am no longer an active player. If you think this disqualifies me from making any kind of post relating to the current state of league or i have a negative bias towards Riot, part of you might not be wrong. I quit the game due to balancing decisions. Not the ones you might think of. It was after the introduction of Aram-specific changes. I am or rather used to be an Aram mostly player owning 90% of champions but this is another story and not the issue at hand.

I shall begin by naming a couple of champions.

  • Aatrox Aatrox
  • Galio Galio
  • Irelia Irelia
  • Ryze Ryze
  • Tahm Kench TahmKench
  • Akali Akali
  • Azir Azir

These are popular examples for the case im trying to make. Some more and some to a lesser extent. Maybe i even forgot some due to not keeping up with all the league related stuff anymore.

Now what to these champions have in common: They were and sometimes still are a balance problem Most of them due to their performance in pro play or the higher realms of elo (Master and beyond) I am not, i repeat, _not _ trying to talk about their reasons for being a balance problem. Sometimes it was due to meta development, sometimes due to the weakness of counters or the existence of certain keystones.

I want to complain about the way Riot aproached the balancing of these champions. Let us keep it simplea and get straight to the point.

They removed mechanics.

This is the entire point i want to complain about and if you don't want to read further you won't miss much as i only will start my personal reasoning why i think this is bad.

Imagine a peaceful little world, for namings sake we will call it Retroville. In Retroville everything is quite straightforward, like back in the good old days. The sky is sepia coloured, the united kingdom is still united and every champion is the level of depth you expect from garen. Beautiful, it is not? And now imagine the line i am trying to draw here, the connection i am making. From the balance aproach of riot to the garen levels of mechanical depth and outplay potential. Some might now feel personal offended and scream phrases like "Skill Purity", "Less then five words of description for passives". Well thank you. I hate it.

The pure imagination that every other champion might receive the same treatment as the afromentioned examples. Getting their wings ripped of in a literal sense, their Skills reduced to a pure damage special animation. Bare boned. And yes i am aware of some hyberbole. Maybe it makes for a better reading getting all emotional, what do i know. You who has bested these long paragraphs might feel betrayal. "This is just emotional bs", you might say. "There are no valid arguments", you might add and hover your mouse over the downvote button. Go ahead. I can relate.

But if you want further reasoning and are willing to read some more text, longer than any youtube highlight video description, then follow me onwards. I might make some arguments you even could agree to. Partially.

1) It hurts a champions identity

Galio. Protector of Demacia. Warden of the marble city, full of narrow-minded magic haters. Except that Riot has removed most of the protective things from his kit. Damage reduction on ultimate? Removed. The ability to taunt enemies reliably? Removed? The strength you'd expect from a huge statue to go anywhere but support? Removed.

2) Pure Damage buffs (which is the only kind of buffs they receive afterwards) introduce other problems

You remember that time you got molested by some giant ass catfish-toad hybrid in the toplane? Could have been very recent. Back in the "Good old days" you could see that waddling fellow on the other side of the map slurping and swallowing alongside your beloved ranged late game princess or prince. Or Yordle. No one had a problem with him. But then meta shift happened in pro play, Irelia and Akali appeared and made the protection of the glass cannons down bot lane a necessity. Time for the live in the spot lights. Bad luck that the headlights could get really hot and burn you. Happening to our boy Tahm. After making his W highly unusable and "compensation" he apppeared as the obnoxious terror of SQ Top Lane. Great job Riot.

3) It dulls down the game

Higher entity beware that People focus Soraka, Buy Executioners versus Mundo, Pink ward Shrooms, play a tank to peel or simply not walk trough a wall of blades to not get disarmed. I am not saying her numbers where fine but the mechanic itself was unique and at least required to think around it.

4) Less reward for playing champions

Now we all can't be Riven and her OMG get the camera animation canceling but why is it so bad for certain mechanics to only be manageble for the better players? The mains? Looking at you blue smurf and your recent kneecapping. Maybe you don't have the community support like that bunny battlegirl, but why is so bad to be a legend in the higher echolons?

5) What happens if everyone is Garen

Not to hate on our demacian sunnyboy but if we head down the vicious nerf cycle what awaits us? If everyone is bound to become a stat-stick wielding warrrior who requires less brain activity to handle than playing Microsoft Pinball. No more fancy combos, the highest of outplay being a flash-skill. No combos, no depth.. Only one dimensional champions. Heaven for some surely. But it is not something i would ever want to return to. And yes, i sometimes feel the urge to start the climb through the elo hell again but it dies down as soon as i read another bunch of patch notes.

Well thanks for reading. Leave a like and hit the subscription....oh wait.

Have a beautiful day on the battlefield that is life.

BR.

3 Comments

Yets42408/7/2019, 11:26:20 PM6 votes

When you have a few (less than 20, usually less than 10) champions who break the game and are functionally unbalancable because, quite simply, they are massively and obscenely OVERLOADED and can do fifty million different things, have no functional weakness, and have skills and other effects that completely negate any intended weakness in other parts of their kit, what do you think should be done, other than removing some of the completely unnecessary features that they have, to allow dozens of other champions the ability to once again compete?

Compare the aforementioned champions to your Garen example. Before their kits were trimmed there is an interesting commonality between all of them. Unless they themselves severely and massively fucked up, the Garen in question cannot do anything to them, and will be perma kited with literally no response available from him, other than maybe trying to run away. In fact, immobile melees in general could not touch any of them, and have next to no agency against such champions even now, unless someone lands a ranged hard CC ability on them, despite every one of them having oodles of ranged and mobility tools to make landing such a CC much more difficult for the immobile melees. When you have entire groups of champions from multiple different classes all but invalidated do to the overloaded, overtuned bullshit you're trying to defend, surely you can see that the problem actually lies with those few new and busted champions. and does not lie with the 40-50+ champions rendered moot by the powercreep present in these more recently released champions/reworks.

Trailsmix8/7/2019, 11:28:31 PM5 votes

While there are some things I disagree with... mainly that some kits are overloaded(like Akali Akali, Yasuo Yasuo, and Riven Riven), and need to have some parts of their kits removed for better game health. Akali used to have a cancerous stealth that let her ignore the tower, which breaks a stated design choices for the stealth mechanic(mainly being that tower was 100% safe). Yasuo has two passives, for no good reason. and Riven... she needs changes for better health. Her kit is overloaded with stuns, dashes, and damage that riot either needs to make her kit artificially clunkier(similar to Aatrox's strange Q-E interaction) or remove some of the cc she doesn't deserve for being so mobile.

Secondly, Riot has a problem with not including built in counters to some of their champions, with kits focused on "supporting" a single ability or removing interesting counters. Champions like Zoe have kits that infuriate players as one hit deals a more than half a champions HP on average. Illaoi's old E had an interesting counter to it, being that champions could decide to fight her to get their soul back, but Riot removed it to maker her stronger, not considering how the other player would feel.

As long as a champion has something that makes their skills be reliant on the opponent, or be counter-able, then that is great. I love Yasuo's reliance on enemies to dash around, and Kled's feast-or-famine style of gameplay. Champions should sell the theme of their character, from their kits to their personality. Zoe's kit has one/two abilities that sell her trickster nature. While Yasuo's kit sells his status as a Blademaster entirely (I know I mention him a lot... its just that his kit does make him a good champ to point at). Illaoi used to be a champion whose kit could test the knowledge/guts of an opponent... and now it just feels that she is another bruiser that has a few neat interactions.

On top of Illaoi's changes, sometimes Riot removes the identity of a champ... like Aatrox. Forgetting the old intent behind the champion, or deciding that they would rather balance another "Riven" than any others. Aatrox used to have interesting interactions with other players, getting low on HP, but just surviving, rampaging like a beast of war, killing all who dared to oppose him. Now he stays a decent distance back, throwing out q's to deal damage rather than just diving head first into a fight.

In the end, I feel that Riot's new design methods are just... annoying for characters. They can't seem to learn from past mistakes and decisions at times, and are sometimes oblivious to the communities complaints.

ZephyrDrake8/7/2019, 11:40:54 PM1 votes

so... you are complaining because overloaded champions have had parts of their kits removed? part of their kits that were completely unnecessary for them to function or that you even thought about when playing as these champions? There is a reason why "less is more" is more often than not actually a true statement.