Anyone else worried League is going to lose its 'magic' with these S6 changes?
I'll get straight to the point I play a ton of MOBAs, primarily LoL and Heroes of the Storm. I'm no master at these games but I'm not a nooblord either; I'm sitting at Diamond 5 in League and I'm the equivalent of Mid Masters in HoTS so I feel like there's some merit to my statement when I say LoL is trending heavily towards the same type of gameplay as HoTS and I think it's going to hurt League because its just not League's strong suit.
But what do I mean? Traditionally League has been pretty lenient in that you could do almost anything you wanted and it'd probably be OK as long as you didn't suck, it almost feels like a sandbox RPG compared to Heroes of the Storm in which the equivalent of Joseph Stalin tells you to pick X specific team comp then group up and push such and such objective right now or lose immediately. Meanwhile in LoL you can go Tons of Assassins, Pick comp, protect-the-ADC, Bruiser comp, stack damage, stack CC, double jungle, good jungler, Trick2G in the jungle, Tank-comp, split push all day erryday, Press R team, get carried by Mage team, early pressure, kill lane, late game scaling, etc etc.
There are so many strategies to carry with or feed with that all worked because items were OP except everyone was poor, objectives weren't 'take them or lose instantly', it was really hard to have any kind of global presence, and there were so many different forms of 'power spikes' that you could never be too sure who was winning. In addition to all the diverse strategy, League has always had an honestly magical balance between 'team focus' and 'solo #carrieed' that I haven't seen in other MOBAs.
Now I think League is Trending heavily towards HoTS style gameplay where the game just tells you to 'do this in this fashion now or lose':
- Heavy team fight focus; League is more Team-Fight oriented than ever before - double TP is common, there are a bajillion global mobility spells, much higher mobility in general, and the new items/kits make it much easier to force a fight. Overall its just way easier for a team to be at some objective and have the tools to force that objective. Y'all might think this is all well and good but keep in mind Team Fights are by far the least predictable facet of games. An increased team fight focus just means for most players winning and losing games is going to be even more volatile and luck based than before.
- Giving out so much free $$$. I mean literally, global GP10 was boosted, Jungler items are so cost efficient it's like Obama-care for Junglers, Support items literally give out so much gold for doing nothing, and now you just buy a trinket instead of wasting gold on Wards/Oracles and it's only going to be more socialist in S6. Again this sounds great, but then recall that item advantage is most significant when everyone has no items. 2 Dorans blades to 1 is literally double the other dude's bonus stats, but IE+PD vs IE+Zeal is basically nothing. When everyone's getting all this free welfare, it's become much harder to snowball and solo carry which makes the game far more team oriented. We spend less time trying dikking around AFK farming and denying our lane opponents and more time beating the crap out of the enemy team over objectives. This SOUNDS good, but consider that dikking around in lane is part of what makes League so great.
- Increasingly reinforced meta. It used to be you could do whatever you wanted whenever you wanted and it'd probably be OK, but over the past year or so Riot's made it very clear that there's an 'optimal' way to do things. Support and Jungler items are ridiculously cost efficient but are virtually restricted to that class, what this basically means is that theres increased class differentiation where certain roles have very specific tasks to fulfill e.g. if you're a Support Riot's telling you, "build ancient coin and Sight Stone; your job is to ward, set up engages, and peel." And now Riot's taking that to the next level with Marksmen reworks as well, there is literally a new item that rewards ADCs with 15% more damage when they smack tanks so instead of having the freedom to melt anyone that comes close to an ADC you now just wanna focus Mundo to get that bonus dmg. You might say 'well gee I like it when people tell me what to do' but increased class differentiation is just taking away freedom from the players. You're not going to want to stack like 5 tanks on a team like you might have in S2 because you really need the utility offered by other classes. So essentially Riot's just saying 'have a team comp that consists of 1 or 2 tanks, a DPS, a mage/assassin, and some utility'. Sounding like Heroes of the Storm yet?
- It's getting sooo damn hard to kill anyone. Everyone's so mobile, Assassins keep getting nerfed, erryone runs so fast now, walls and terrain don't mean anything, there are friggen free wards EVERYWHERE, the blue trinket is like an NSA satellite, Ashe is always Watching, there's a billion different ways to peel, there are defensive itemization choices even for DPS champs like BT's cancer shield, and to add insult to injury Riot's literally been adding even more 'haha u can't kill me' abilities like Tahm, Kindred, Kalista, and Bard. So in other words, Riot's again saying, "don't do shyt alone because you're going to need your team to do anything meaningful."
- The Marksmen reworks look suspiciously like the DPS classes in Heroes of the Storm Like it or not, LoL's troll-mode late game ADC crit damage has always been a signature hallmark of this game. Crit ADCs put a timeline on late game teamfights that make it so you can't just have Mundo and Shen running around for 4 minutes 'team fighting' while minions push. ADC lays down enough unavoidable damage that both teams are given a clear goal of 'killing the other one'. Now S6 promises to remove crit, add diverse itemization, and is giving 'unique' autoattacks like Graves's new shotgun. I agree this sounds cool and stuff, but I've seen first hand that crit-less ADC is basically cancer in HoTS. They're either too fkin strong or virtually worthless; There might be a very very thin sliver of 'balance' for crit-less ADCs but HoTS certainly hasn't found it and I'm doubtful Riot will find it either. When you remove the RNG of crit on Autoattacks you're making it so now there's this unavoidable source of damage that's now 100% predictable as well as 100% dependable (as opposed to mages who miss like half their skill shots). What this means is you either have ADCs that snowball incredibly easily because once they get the smallest lead they're just going to utterly shyt on the other team, or you have ADCs that take so long to scale in you might as well play any other class.
TL;DR Riot keeps telling us what to do and this old timer doesn't like it.