A few questions from a Dota 2 player about game balance
A bit about me, I started playing League in open beta years ago, and for about 5 years it was by far my favorite game. I still occasionally come back to the game and play just enough to get a rank and then quit again. In the last year or so I've been pretty much exclusively playing Dota 2 and maybe it's that but after coming back to league again for 10 games or so the game feels a lot worse than it did. I was wondering if the community could shed some light on a few things for me.
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I'm a support main in both dota and league and generally play full supports like Soraka and Nami, with defensive secondary runes. Is it intended that burst ADCs like Lucian can almost one shot soraka with a combo at level 3 with no items? Or is Lucian just in an overtuned place right now? As a Dota player pretty much everyone does a ton of damage, including supports, but even in Dota you actually have to have items or levels to do that damage.
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In the games I played early snowballing almost guaranteed the win especially from assassins like zed or rengar, which happens in Dota as well to a lesser degree with heroes like Tinker or Storm Spirit, but in Dota a support has a lot more agency to help prevent this snowballing (porting in to counter gank, ganking mid yourself, etc.). In league a support is pretty much tethered to their carry until the end of laning phase by design, so the only person who is really in a position to preventing the snowballing is the jungler. My question is, am I doing something wrong as a support not being able to prevent this snowballing, or is this just the state of the game right now?
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Burst in general seems really high in league in comparison to Dota, things hit hard in Dota, but you rarely get one shot by something (even playing a support) unless the enemy team is REALLY fed. And even then the plethora of items with activated abilities gives you a chance to save yourself, there is even an item called Aeon Disk that literally makes you invulnerable for 2.5 seconds when you would drop below 75% health to prevent people who are really fed from auto killing you. It seems like half the champions I played against in my recent league games could 1 shot me with me having little to no way to prevent that. It is simply more viable to play champions with high burst right now? Such as Brand, Zyra, or Lux, instead of Soraka or Nami?
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Out of the 10 or so games I played, not a single time did the games feel close. Either my team was dominating until we won, or we were getting stomped until we lose (this does happen in Dota on occasion but only maybe 20% of the time, and you at least feel like there is something you can do). In both cases the games had no sense of apprehension or excitement. Are games generally much closer than this and my games were just outliers? or are games generally so one sided right now? My logic used to be "Never surrender, they are going to screw up eventually." but that seems less true now.
Thanks for taking a look. I used to love league, but in comparison to Dota it just feels poorly balanced and swingy. I could be wrong though, so if anyone can shed some light on how I can fix this in my games I would really appreciate it.
-Thanks
is either really good or really bad. If Lucian is pick/ban, the champion/game isn't balanced correctly due to his movement and solo kill potential. Right now critical strike carries are pretty bad, so that opens up Lucian as being a viable pick since he doesn't rely on the critical strike items to deal damage. Pair him up with a 
and they're pretty much unstoppable.
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) so Riot likes to keep them viable for "entertainment purposes" since watching league is more important to Riot than the actual players playing the game. They're likely going to be nerfed now since the pro scene is in offseason right now, but new champions will rise and stay busted for a few months and eventually fall over the course of the new season like always.
. Since infinity edge got pretty much gutted, ADCs that don't rely on crit have a great advantage in the early/mid game compared to other ADCs. Also, items that are not crit based have way more utility to them, so it makes them that much more efficient on carries that can build them. All ADC items just give crit and auto attack based buffs, while items like 
give way more interesting side effects.
always feels like more of a powerspike than let's say 
, that brings nothing but an active. Supports have some nice AP scalings, you can give so much MS with nami and heal for much more if you go AP rather than support. The utility you lack in item actives, you make up for it by having actualy usefull spells. Support items have been kept mediocre stat wise because if they are good, other AP champions can use them too (wich is bad apparently).