A defense of mirrors

There are generally two ways a champion can be overpowered. The first is by simply having raw stats that make simplistic abilities too strong. Mundo, when he's strong, and Master Yi are a couple examples. The other way is by having an ability (or multiple abilities) with a functionality that, regardless of changes to the champion's bases or scalings, is too unique, meaning there aren't other similar options to match up against or replace them. Yasuo's Wind Wall and Ryze's Realm Warp are prime examples of this. This second form is the type of overpowered I'll be referring to.

This type of overpowered is troubling because it remains a problem even when the champion isn't actually performing well. I chose Yasuo and Ryze specifically because they for a long time haven't actually been outperforming the competition, but remain high in ban rate and play rate in general and professional play, respectively. This is because they offer heavy strengths that are simply too unique to be replaced.

For a comparison, let's look at tanks. Generally, they simply provide beefy CC to a team. As long as they're fit for the role, you can swap most tanks out for each other because few have unique strengths tied to the functionality of their abilities. As a result, when a tank is overpowered it's normally because they fall into the first category of overpowered. That is, their stats are simply higher than the other options. These issues are relatively easy to fix with cuts to defense, CC duration, etc. But it becomes a problem when the functionality of an ability is what makes the champion overpowered. No other champion can fling enemies too far from a fight to come back like Poppy can, but to reduce that distance significantly would be to remove the functionality of the ability and render what was a unique strength nothing more than essentially a missing ability.

And we see this same problem with Yasuo's W and Ryze's R. For Yasuo, there is not another damage-heavy champion in the game with the ability to completely erase most auto attacks and abilities. The closest we have is a support whose similar wall is half the function (as it only blocks from one direction and still makes him take damage/cc). For Ryze, no his ultimate is such a powerful team-focused skill that even despite dropping down to the bottom ten at every single rank below Diamond he still remains a strong pick for those highly-coordinated professional players.

Now, there are several possible remedies for such abilities. One would be to simply nerf them, but a nerf significant enough to make a difference could only be so significant that the ability is rendered effectively useless. A Yasuo W with half the width and 1 second duration or a Ryze ultimate with half the radius and an 8 second cast time wouldn't work. Another would be to change the abilities entirely (We were just about due for another Ryze rework, right?). But that has to go through weeks if not months of testing, animating, retesting, and may end up no better than the first option. What I think is the best option, due to its ease of implementation and lack of drastic change to stats, is to allow mirror picking in ranked/draft games.

Allowing mirrors would change any strength that is too unique into one both teams have equal access to. That isn't to say that people will necessarily like seeing mirrors, but having them both on your team and the enemy team will give you even greater opportunity to study the strengths weaknesses of the champions overall.

I know it's a big deal to some people, with threads popping up that say, "I hate seeing [x] every game, pls nerf," even when the champion is underperforming. But I'm not asking that they remove bans. You'd still have full power to ban a champion if you don't want to see them in the game at all. But for situations where a champion has unique strengths that won't be removed any time soon, and even situations where a champion is the other kind of overpowered it's better to have the opportunity to have the better player on the same champ than to have to rely on them choosing a counter (something that's effectively only possible half the time because of pick order, and entirely up to chance).