Yet Another Farewell Thread

I think, after all this time, they got me to actually leave this game. Not that I haven't tried, and I suppose it may be too early to say I won't come back, but I can actually see the light at the end of the tunnel this time around. I officially feel like I don't have a purpose in this game anymore. Creativity is wasted on champions because they are so binary, and I can't have fun anymore. I tried, but I just don't. Item builds have been generally cemented across the board. I even try some of these reworks out to see if something else will work for me, only to find that the concepts, while maybe thematically good, aren't actually fun to play.

This game was fun because it allowed anyone to play as anything, and have some fun out of it. You didn't have to play Riven top, or Sona support, or Elise jungle, you could switch things around with a little creativity. The creativity just isn't there anymore. The champion reworks have lost the flavor they once had, and don't get enough from their changes. I work so consistently with the underdogs of League to try to get them working... Skarner, Elise, and Urgot very much so. Skarner, back in his very first rework, was a slightly fast meatball who could use his autoattacks to charge up his power. Now he's centered around being so fast and strong with CC (Okay, his original slow was toxic... but why not simply adjust that?), his autoattacks don't even matter. Elise was and still is pretty good, but now has to build MPen to be viable, whereas it was only next-to-necessary before. That sucks, because she could really use a flighty pair of boots, like Mercs or Swiftness, but she has to go for Sorcs just to be less-easily countered. And then Urgot... Well, he's been questionable forever. And he is sitting on the sideline while people who don't need changes drop like flies. I had some luck with him as support, actually. Zeke's Harbinger pretty much killed that off.

Then, aside from that, I played me some atypical builds on less-underdog-type champions: Support Gangplank, AD Fizz, and MF Mid. However, all 3 have had drastic changes to them thanks to their primary builds. Support Gangplank (and no, I don't go surprise Critplank on it) had some atrocities happen to him before he got reworked. I had a Tankplank and an AP-plank variation to the build. However, Tankplank saw his demise with the item changes that started showing up... AP support items became stronger for the AP support clientele, and Tankplank had trouble keeping up, especially losing its key item, Zeke's Harbinger. While AP-plank still was decent with the AP items, he got boned in the rework. He lost his auras, but that wasn't even the worst of it. He doesn't have Gangplank's new strength in Powder Kegs, as Trinity Force and Iceborn procs on Kegs, but Lich Bane doesn't. He also doesn't have magic damage on his passive anymore (goodbye, Morellonomicon), and his ultimate, which is basically Supplank's bread and butter, was halved in wave speed, and requires minion kills to get any better. I know Supplank was generally dropped from focus in the rework, but did they have to outright work against it that harshly?

AD Fizz. Well, surely you've seen that by now, as it's all but swallowed Fizz whole. However, I played it at a time it wasn't so big, and once again, it got reworked heavily. It's not non-viable by any means, but it's also not fun because they didn't bother to actually change his kit around his problems. He still had heavy reliance on his W passive and his E base damage, and essentially, that's what Fizz is, AP or AD. However, when they reworked him, they decided his Q was going to be even weaker, and his W was going to be essentially entirely AD focused as well. Also, W and E became even more keystone because R was giving both of them heavier damage. So yeah, they made him more binary than he already was, so I hopped off that ship immediately.

And then there's MF Mid. Now, to be fair, most MF players think it's her most recent rework that ruined her, but I think it's the one before. She had decent AP power in mid before, and she played as a somewhat tanky, bruiser-type mid with high HP thanks to Rod of Ages, and high inherent burst when teamfights broke out. However, with the first rework, she's mostly spent on AP damage after she uses her E. Q didn't help anything. So, I decided to keep the build in mid anyway, but swap her to AD so that I could utilize her actual burst damage combo (E has always been jack... It just held the enemy in place while you AA-Q-AA, then ult in their face). So, this lasted a while, and did pretty good, but I did get flamed heavy with a questionable mid, as expected. Heck, I even hated it because it resembled an ADC build by the end, but it was at least slightly fun. And then the AP changes happened. Or something, because suddenly magic mids were all the rage. Zeds and Talons seemed to die off, too, though they had more safety than MF, so they did fall back on something. She always had an uphill battle early-on in order to be effective late, but that switch just isn't going off anymore. She just goes flat while other (typically Luden's Echo) champs dominate and never let up.

So yeah, I'm sick of it. I just want to play the game, and play it my way. I'm sick of this game defining the pieces to the point that they have no flavor. I feel like the game is going back to its "Chess roots", and by that, I mean that they're taking a handful of unique pieces and pitting them against each other because we like beating down Riven vs. Riven over and over again. A knight will be a knight, and the only real variation to that is that you can stack a crap-ton of Armor or MR on the knight to surprise your enemy, but the build variation stops there. Why is that? Why are these champion choices being left so binary? I don't care so much that one pick is favored by the community over the other, but a ton of them are being thrown out to the point that nothing fun can exist in that direction anymore.

...

I'm gonna miss the crap outta this game.