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The case for point-and-click hard CC

DrFiveMinusMinus·5/25/2019, 6:33:39 PM·36 votes·14,161 views

Please read this entire post before you downvote and leave an angry comment telling me how i'm a worthless subhuman who doesn't understand this game.

So, I hear a lot of people complaining a lot about champions such as Malzahar Annie Lulu that have point-and-click hard CC, with the main argument i hear being that they nullify the ability of skilled players to fight multiple enemies who are less skilled than them. While this might be true (To an extent), I'm here today to argue that undodgeable hard CC is an essential part of how teamfights should work in this game.

Also, just to fully put my cards on the table, yes, I do play quite a few of these champions. However, I also play several champions that can get completely screwed over in a fight by this type of CC (Rakan Pyke and occasionally Yasuo) so I hope you can see this as something other than just blatant bias.

First off, I'm going to talk about this mythical type of player who wins all his/her games by fighting 1v5 and killing the entire enemy team. The fact of the matter is that unless you are A.Smurfing or B.Ridiculously fed, you should not be able to win a 1v5 under normal circumstances. Now, you may have games where you get insanely fed off of one player on Riven , only to get Malz ulted and die in a 1v3. While that sucks, what sucks worse is having one person on the enemy team get insanely fed off of a poor player and not being able to stop them. Why can't you stop them? This leads into point two.

Point Two: Hyper-mobility. Okay, raise your hand if you can consistently land crowd-control skillshots on champions like Yas, Riven, or Yi. Okay, now put your hand down. The problem with these champions is that if the enemy player has even a modicum of mechanical skill, they can easily dash to one side or the other and dodge any skillshot no matter how well-placed they are. Being able to dodge skillshots is an important part of these champion's kits, and I'm not saying they shouldn't be allowed to do that, but there has to be some other way to stop them.

This gets me into point three: the idea of there being "no counterplay." While there are some exceptions, most point-and-click cc is very short-range or puts the user at some substantial risk, meaning that if you are playing a teamfight correctly by getting flanks off rather than jumping straight onto 5 people they will have a much harder time stopping you. Also, QSS exists, meaning that even these "No counterplay" abilities absolutely do have counterplay. Finally, I would raise the question in turn: Where's the counterplay to Yasuo dashing around in your entire team at Mach 3 and shredding them with his Q?

Thanks for reading, and I hope I've adjusted your perspective somewhat on one of the less popular mechanics in the game.

94 Comments

Moody P5/25/2019, 9:19:26 PM30 votes

Point and click hard CC is only a problem when its instantaneous. Fiddle fear, Malz R, Ryze W.

Tarics old E was one of the healthiest CC spells in the game because of its slow speed to counterbalance its reliability

LetMeAfkPlss5/25/2019, 9:27:06 PM9 votes

LOL imagine complaining about annie boards are the best

DGAGAAsharpAGD5/25/2019, 6:44:29 PM8 votes

I personally complain about Malza, mainly bcs how boring it is to lane against him, once you learnt his abilities, you know that you shouldn't dive him/be near him without proper vision in jng. His endless braindead pushing is what makes me hate him, same for Anivia.

It's kinda like what that Rioter said few weeks back about oneshotting that isn't dodgeable skill shot, there are other ways around it. Especially now when you can peak 63% or something of tenecity/QQS/game knowledge. It's part of the game and it's good that everything isn't tied to skillshots imo.

Lissandra is good exemple as well.

SweedishGunner5/26/2019, 1:17:24 AM7 votes

As a Malz player nothing brings me more joy than shitting on a hypermobile champion trying to one shot our ADC.

Ðroxx5/25/2019, 9:32:39 PM4 votes

All these new champs like pyke/rakan/etc with annoyingly stupid mobility shouldn't make point and click CC ok. I think both these overly-mobile champs and point and click are so un-fun to deal with.

Anaphiel5/26/2019, 1:22:49 AM1 votes

I agree entirely. It may be frustrating to have fiddle dare to press the Q button in your vicinity, but he can do that to one man alone. If you dont wish to get killed by that, don't ram the entire enemy team with your yas/irel/pyke/satans left testicle.

Remove the point and click murder buttons, and the game becomes a duckshooting expedition. 10,000 xerath's feebly attempting to land someting on Leagues legion of hypermobile irritants as they sail through the air murdering people. You can and should keep the numbers low, but they NEED to exist.

Mobility has always been difficult to increase without increasing frustration for immobile champions. Point and click CC is the last vestige of defense allowing mages to even dare go mid. It is the last thing preventing the hopelessly fed irel/akali from killing their team just because they were lucky enough to fight an autofilled toplaner and think themselves skilled. It is the last reason that a shutdown is even possible on a decent subset of the trash-heap of champions that is modern league.

ChaosReyn5/26/2019, 1:40:56 AM1 votes

One thing to note - almost all point/click cc is single target And even including Tibbers stun or Gnar ult (which technically arent point and click, since they can still miss/be dodged with flash/blinks before the actual impact) they have the drawback of generally low range. On top of that, the most instant ones (Fiddlesticks Lulu) deal no damage at all. Malz is the only exception to that - and his is an ultimate with a decent cooldown that does pretty low damage unless he has his voidlings.

Imo, one of the most ridiculous point and click ccs in the game is Yasuo ult - but I'd never complain about his ult since there's the stipulation that they already have to cc'd in a specific way for his to go off, even though his is the longest ranged point and click cc in the entire game. (His wind wall was my complaint, but apparently, they're making it where if your ability is skullfucking him before he begins his animation, it'll still hit him, so they're moving in the right direction, even if it was a bug...) The 2nd worst imo is probably Wither, and that's not really even a hard cc.

Now, if you wanna talk about some real point and click issues, I'd bring up Jhin Syndra and Nasus , with huge regard to those latter two. You can miss 3 Qs in a row on Syndra, but her R is still gonna rip about 70-80% (or 50%-60% if youre the tank) of your hp while also setting up her next E/Q/W combo - with 6 orbs in front of her, whoever manages to miss the stun are at a level of bad so indescribable I'd die if I witnessed it and the rest (if she even needs it by then) is free.

Nasus is pretty much just LoL on a timer - it seriously doesn't matter how bad you are at stacking, you're going to reach a point at some moment in that game where you're going to be dealing a load of damage - if not to champs, then to structures. Add to that the part where they wanted to make it a little easier for newer players to stack on him (back when they did the juggernaut updates) and now the people who were good with him are GODS and the people who weren't are still relevant even after being completely shut down in lane by like 35 minutes.