Damage Creep is a myth; however, there is a glaring problem with damage in this game..

And before you slam the downvote button because I'm not jerking commonly accepted beliefs here, hear me out because I don't disagree with the end result; I simply disagree with how we've gotten here and the idea that damage is the only thing that has scaled out of control.

The real problem this game faces is game pacing. Games pace way too quickly now. Seriously, just look at your games and think about it like this: how often are you knocking down inhib turrets pre-20 minutes? Even sub-20 minutes around 21/22 minutes is common. And that's absolutely insane. But how did we get to this point? Is it really because damage has gotten out of control or is it something more than that? I contend that it's something else entirely but it appears and feels like it's because damage has gotten out of control.

If you look at raw damage values across the board, they haven't gone up at all. In fact; values on AP have gone down and AD has virtually remained the same with an up/down cycle due to balance circulation - what I mean by balance circulation is an item gets nerfed and as it falls off, it's competitors get nerfed eventually leaving everything weaker resulting in a necessity for buffs to those same items down the line; this cycle continues, hence a circulation of balance. I coined this term, it was me. Let the history books show that, Marc Merrill.

Granted, resist values have gone down, too but it's maintained a pretty competitive pace with damage values; certainly defensive values haven't gone down enough to make defense useless but that's really not the point I'm getting at here. When damage values are going down in combination with defense values, you keep a relatively steady balance between the two and I'd contend one set of values hasn't gone above or below it's rival significantly enough to make a big difference. This holds true for damage steroids vs defense steroids with the only real exception being a favored bias towards damage steroids with all the %hp true damage being added - a trend that needs to stop because %hp true damage is actually a ridiculous concept that should've remained exclusive to one champion. Moving on to my point though...

AD Damage has remained at a stand still (AP has gotten slightly weaker) while defense has gotten slightly weaker. So with no exponential decline or increase to speak of on either rivals values, why exactly does damage feel so overbearing? I don't deny that damage feels overbearing currently because it absolutely feels that way. However, as I've explained, in terms of values, it hasn't really gotten out of control. At least, what I mean is, damage hasn't increased enough across the board in terms of items/runes/masteries/inherent steroids to explain the feeling of overpowering damage galore we currently experience.

This goes back to game pacing. Games pace so much quicker, global gold generates much quicker both innately and as a result of turrets and objectives falling much faster. Damage hasn't gotten out of control, snowballing and game pacing has and that makes damage feel absurd because when damage gets ahead, it always feels absurd but that's the very nature of damage. Let me illustrate this with an example. In the past when games didn't pace so quickly, a champion getting fed beyond belief and doing ridiculous damage might've felt like bullshit but you justified it because, well hey, he was fed as fuck. Now take this example and apply it to an entire team because they've gained so much gold because turrets drop like flies. And that snowball just rolls on down the hill within this scaling goes from what used to be a moderately paced increase to an exponential increase.

In short, because towers melt so quickly, because teams get ahead much quicker and because games scale so much faster, the stats on the front running team scale exponentially in accordance. Sure, you might notice that you've managed to acquire 200-300 armor in 20 minutes and die in 2-3 seconds but there's no way you've had the chance to acquire enough HP and simply having the advantage or neutral grounds of levels because you've gotten outscaled so quickly so that damage becomes extremely noticeable, on par with my example of a snowballing champion in past seasons. But it's easy to notice this damage and forget that the tank on the front running team is experiencing the power spike of a snowballing tank - he will seemingly live forever. You'll notice one tank dying in 3-4 seconds but meanwhile, the front lining tank is standing in the middle of the enemy team for 10 seconds and likely surviving. This scaling doesn't discriminate, everything is snowballing essentially but damage is much easier to notice.

The real problem is this game scales too fast and I remember pointing this out in the beginning of the season only for people to tell me I was wrong. But the real question is, what can be done? You could conclude the reasonable solution is to nerf the values of offense/defense across the board to decelerate game pacing but in reality that would just turn games in to wet noodle fights and make everything unnecessarily weaker. The real culprit here is towers dying to fast, gold scaling too quickly (first blood towers, etc) and as a result, snowballs becoming unstoppable. Adjust this, and you likely fix the very shitty expierence you have currently.

Thing is, I don't expect Riot to fix this. In fact, this is what they want. And this is where I draw a line. I tend to support Riot because I believe they're simply correct most of the time. In fact, they're correct now because they want faster paced games for competitive and they've done the necessary things to achieve that. So in that sense, they aren't even wrong about that. But if you don't like how this feels, you're met with this really shitty feeling of effacement.

Here's what's important: stop circlejerking behind concepts that are completely knee-jerk and lacking in both evidence and analytical process. Lethality is a perfect example of this. People are still complaining about it as if it's the problem, when in reality, it's just the byproduct of the real problem at hand. That's not to say lethality wasn't OP at one point, just likely anything could and will be OP and needs to be properly balanced but those elements are constant. That won't change. What needs to change is the game pacing and this truly is the big problem that explains basically every common complaint at its core.

I realize I'm saying don't jerk but jerk this instead and there's no way for me to avoid that hypocritical concept because I honestly believe Riot thinks the dissatisfaction we have is with current metas/items and not with the game physics themselves and if we don't properly convey that message, how can they actually evaluate that? And if we assumed that wasn't true and Riot was scum city and wanted us to not complain about game pacing and focus on other, less relevant issues, you'd still be holding them accountable for what's actually wrong with the game and either they'd have to come up with a really elaborate lie (which isn't likely) or actually address the game problems, which I believe to be the action they'd take because I don't picture these guys as these greedy, manipulative evil geniuses who are destroying this game to hurt your feelings. In fact, most of these guys are brilliant and deserve some credit and respect but ultimately, if you want to truly get a point across, you owe it to them and yourselves to address them coherently and with logic and respect, not with nonsensical, unfounded vitriol.

As usual, thanks for reading and there is no tl;dr. Don't come to a forum board expecting not to read some god damnit nappa.