well its simple. "balanced" is always in perspective to the rest of the game. lets say every champion except azir gains +100% damage on everything, azir would suddenly be balanced even tho he was not changed.
exaggeration aside, you get the point. tho people who talk about balance mostly dont even understand the concept of balance.
true balance comes from within. this may sound like some zen buddhism, but what it means is that a champion or a THING that is balanced in itself can also be balanced in a specific environment.
"balanced" means that his power, no matter how much power it is, is distributed somewhat equally or at least in some concept between all his abilities and possibilities. they dont ACTUALLY have to synergize with eachother and even tho synergy is very cool design wise, it can be harder to balance.
lets check league more specifically because this was very general.
fiddlesticks is in my opinion the most well balanced champion in the game and also the most well designed for several reasons.
-
he is very free of restrictions on what he can do and has alot of utility and damage but everything about his kit is extremely situational and only unfolds its true potential when used properly. since "using properly" is always open to disruption, enemies have many viable ways of counterplaying and disturbing fiddlesticks while he tries to lay down his power.
-
all of his abilities are very strong in their own sense and no ability is purely supportive of another, as for example azirs kit depends entirely on his soldiers to such an extent that you can actually not choose your level 1 ability yourself. wow, thats restrictive.
because all of fiddles abilities have very distinct powers and applications, he is very balanced in itself as a champion and is also very easy to balance because you can simply balance that what is too strong without overturning the entire champion.
those two points are what make fiddle the most balanced champion in the game aswell as the best designed one. he is absolutely unique, has a very distinct design, plays differently than any other champion in the game and has absolutely clearly visible powers and weaknesses that make him easy to understand for allies aswell as enemies. just great. 10/10 best champ in the game.
now lets talk about the opposite, the most imbalanced and worst designed champion in the game. i talked about this poor soul many times on the boards and allready explained far and wide why he is so bad.
ofcourse the first champion you thought of when i said "worst design" was yasuo, and you are correct. im talking about him.
yasuo is the most broken and most imbalanced and impossible to balance champion in the league.
his problem comes from his role. his internal balance is prettyy good as all of his abilities have relatively distinct applications and neither of them is extremely more powerful than the others. they also synergize somewhat well with one another. great, sounds like a well designed champion, right?
i have to explain a basic about champ design that you have to understand to understand yasuo: if you give a champion the ability to deal higher than average damage, there is always a certain restriction to it. lets take master yi for example: his restriction is that he has to auto attack. auto attacking requires you to stand relatively still and be unhindered over the duration. now because to do this, you have to find openings or create them yourself or with your team. in essence, if master yi gets to auto attack you enough times to kill you, he allready outplayed you beforehand/you allready made big mistakes to let that happen and it doesnt matter, balance wise, if he kills you in 5 or 7 auto attacks. he gets to attack you for 2-3 seconds, you die.
now master yi has some abilities to allow him to deal his damage more consistently, namely his speed + slow immunity and his alpha strike. tho both of those strengths still leave weaknesses and counterplay and thus, even tho master yi deals alot of damage, the things he has to do to be able to even deal his damage are allready restricting him.
last but not least, his entire design revolves around killing people. he can literally only do one thing, auto attack. he has zero CC and zero team utility in his kit so all he can do is kill, and since this is a very specific thing he is designed for, he can also be balanced very easily around that fact.
now lets get back to yasuo. yasuo is also very much designed for killing people with high, bursty sustained damage just like master yi, but other than master yi he actually doesnt have to constantly auto attack for it and he also doesnt neccessarily have to walk (E/R) at all. this means, slowing effects and also short time hard-cc doesnt reduce his damage significantly due to the fact that he is partially a cooldown reliant champion.
this means, where master yi gets his "means to deal damage" as part of the rest of his kit, yasuo has his means to deal damage inbuilt in his actual damage abilities. imagine if zed throws shuriken, he can reactivate shurken while they are in the air to instantly teleport to their current location.
now since he allready has means to deal his damage in his Q (which has hard CC built into it too) and E alone, which are both his damaging abilities together with his auto attacks, he has a passive and another two spells to do other things. master yi actually only has his meditate as a gimick-ability while yasuo has his passive, his W and his R.
now his passive doesnt only absurdly increase his damage, it also gives him a shield which also is part of his ability to consistently and safely deal his damage.
now his R is essentially the same thing. not does it only deal damage and allow its own damage+utility+cc to be applied with little restriction (ALL displacement abilities count towards his ult, not just his own or specifically knock-UPS), but it also enables alot of the rest of his kit. it positions himself to use his other damaging abilities, it allows him to use one of them (Q) DURING its duration and it refreshes his shield. zero downside or thought process involved.
now if this isnt enough utility and damage allready, he gets one of the weirdest defensive utility spells in the game that isnt allready incredibly strong and game-deciding by itself, it also synergizes with his shield effectively making him even more tanky.
now if we look at his kit and his damage potential, we can clearly see that his utility is mainly self-utility and not team-utility (aside from a situational knockup and the windwall) and that most of his utility either works towards his tankyness or his damage dealing ability. (there isnt much else to self-utiliy anyways).
so now lets look at his role. he is a killer. he has damage and he has ways to deal that damage and he has little team utility, little defensive waveclear, no poke or on-demand ranged abilities, relatively bad peeling and generally cant really do anything except killing people, but to do that his kit is loaded to the maximum with utility and options.
now to the actual problem: if yasuo has enough damage to ACTUALLY kill people with his current kit, there is almost no counterplay possible and he is completely overpowered instantly because not only can he kill people, he can also survive it, add MASSIVE team utility (relative to his role) and have very little restriction and downtimes on his power. basically the strongest most oppressive champion in the game (as you probably can remember).
OR if he DOESNT have enough damage to kill people, as it is right now, he can not fulfill his role and he brings almost no team-utility to the table (relative to his role not actually existing), effectively making him useless. i mean, nautilus also cannot go and instagib people but his utility is insane. do you rather want a nautilus with crazy utility or a yasuo with low utility who both deal the same damage? probably not the yasuo.
the really big design flaw here is that there is no middle-ground. either he CAN kill people or he CANT. "somewhat killing people" sadly is not an option in this game so there is only an overpowered and a useless state. currently we have the useless state where i would instantly dodge with a yasuo on my team and certainly regretting it if i didnt, and before we had the overpowered state where nobody had a yasuo on his team because he was banned every game.
no matter how much you change his numbers, he can not be balanced. its impossible. his kit is designed so that there can only be black and white.
if we look back at master yi, his damage is so high he can kill everyone, but his means to deal that high damage are so restrictive that ENABLING YOURSELF to deal the damage is allready the challenge. after that, rightclicking isnt very tough anymore. but no matter how much damage master yi deals, he can always be balanced by changing very simple things about him.
for yasuo, his kit needs a complete rework that defines his role more. either he is an assassin or he is more of a utility/dps fighter type with more utility and tankyness and good dps but less burst. i would LOVE to see him as the utility bruiser because i think thats a very interesting design concept and we have enough assassins and they are boring in general, or at least the ones we currently have are.
PS: actually, there is one champion who is even more horribly designed than yasuo, namely rek'sai, but she is badly designed for entirely different reasons and i might discuss her in another episode of: "why rito pls?"
good night.
or 
is the "most balanced" in the game. Help me out here.
