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[Patch 6.14] (2 Hidden Nerfs) Taliyah's W "Seismic Shove".

Oscar Senpai·7/14/2016, 12:40:15 AM·36 votes·19,643 views

I'm a Taliyah main, with most of my games on her, highest mastery, climbed to gold 3 with her.

I understand Taliyah's nerfs on her E because of the no lockdown from W. That makes sense.

HOWEVER, there are 2 hidden nerfs on Taliyah's W ("Seismic Shove").

  1. It is slower than before, as the spell starts only after a direction has been chosen adding a human input delay.

I remember the developer who originally designed this skill said that one of the reasons for W to have such a long pop up time was because the actual timer would start as soon as people clicked the skill.

THIS IS NO LONGER TRUE. So now we are stuck with the old casting time + the human input delay.

Considering your original purpose was to make her more accessible to more people, this change does exactly the opposite thing. If you don't believe me check for the % of times people actually land the W now compared to before.

  1. Max range casting is now very unreliable. It would never happen before with the old way, but now the ability can actually FIZZLE or make her walk before casting it.

This means that sometimes when casting it at max range it will fizzle out and i'm not even sure why it happens. I think it might be because I move out of range after i start the cast?

The solution I propose:

For SMART CASTING: Make the cast start as soon as you PRESS "W" wherever your mouse is at, in case the mouse is outside of the casting range make it cast it at max range from Taliyah's current position.

Basically having the cast start as soon as you press W at the mouse position (or closest to it in case of out of range) will remove the extra delay, releasing W will pick the direction towards where the mouse is pointing RELATIVE TO WHERE it was originally clicked at. this way people who want to pop up just have to tap it, while people who want to pop in a direction just have to press W, move mouse in the direction (past a certain buffer for the pop up version) release W.

For NORMAL CASTING: Make the cast start as soon as you CLICK the mouse. (the max range thing is not needed here because people actually want it to start where they are clicking it at)

PS: I actually play on the Japanese servers, so I have to use this low level account to be able to post on these forums.

55 Comments

Scouse7/15/2016, 5:11:32 AM7 votes

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE HEAR ME OUT.

I ended last season Platinum 5. I didn't think I would ever reach Diamond. I played Taliyah from her release and fell in love with the champion, her W being one of the main reasons. It was so refreshing and felt so good to land, sometimes you'd miss it but you felt like you were in control of it all of the time.

I've played the new W and let me tell you from someone who has 273 games on her and 60% win rate. This change is uncalled for, it is not needed. The new W results in me W'ing myself and the floor around me when I'm not even aiming it there. I don't know how to just knock a champion straight up in the air anymore. The W vector cast feels literally terrible, I have never had more problems landing one ability in the game more than this one. It makes no sense. It doesn't feel fluid. I've lost all confidence I have in playing this champion because of this change. How is that fair? Some people put in the work an the effort to learn this champion and now I don't even have fun playing her anymore. I don't even care about the damage nerfs, they are fine, nerf her damage if you have too. Just change her W back to the way it was cast.

Obviously the person who designed this champion knew what they were doing, to go against HIS thoughts and change the way a spell works because of the community saying that she's hard to play and her W feels clunky, they do not know what they are talking about. Why did you not get in touch with people who have lots of games on her who can truly give you some honest feed back.

Yes the E-W combo was a lot of damage, nerf it if you need to, but what's the point in nerfing her damage if you can't land the W because of it's weird casting.

I'm sorry Riot, but this needs reverting, otherwise someone I and not only me, people who put a lot of effort into this champion, will no longer player her, because you wanted to please everybody. It's absolutely horrible to use and I hope you do something about it, or just delete her from the game because it's terrible.

PeregrineTypeR7/14/2016, 3:45:21 AM7 votes

I'm so disappointed, I'm a lvl 7 tali main and I was really excited for these changes because the w always felt clunky. The w feels terrible and buggy now though, especially at long ranges, sometimes the W will go off halfway between me and where I placed it, or not go off at all. I honestly don't want to play her anymore until they make this feel better. I'd rather have the old tali back than this version.

I play with smartcast with range indicators, so not sure if that is the reason it doesn't work reliably, riot has been pretty notorious about not testing that input method when making mechanics changes.

D A V I 57/14/2016, 4:10:10 AM7 votes

I like that they made it vector, the double click made it feel so clunky to me. What i don't understand is why they took the circle out of the w, not seeing my circle size is what's throwing me off the most.

inplane7/14/2016, 3:01:38 AM7 votes

I thought the changes you suggested WERE the changes they planned. I didn't expect this lazy change they shoved down our throats.

The changes you listed are perfect IMO. I just want some way to allow her W to knock people vertically upwards again instead of being forced to knock in a direction.

RiotZenonTheStoic7/14/2016, 9:33:09 PM6 votes

Hi!

You're spot on about both of these things: there is now a human input delay to how long it takes you to draw the arrow and release your mouse, and out of range casting is no longer clamped. These are both tradeoffs that come along with the concept of vector casting.

We could change these; arguably we could even do exactly what you propose (although clamping a vector cast is not trivial from a "read the player's intention" point of view: if you draw the arrow at an angle that's not 0 or 180 degrees and we transpose your origin point to be closer to you, do we transpose the displacement vector or do we adjust the angle such that the target still goes from the origin point to where you drew your arrow to? That is to say, do we conserve DIRECTION or TARGET POSITION? There is no correct answer here and either way someone would feel the game screwed them). This would be a decent amount of technical behind the scenes work (the game has a very limited number of targeting types and making a new one is a fair bit of work), but more importantly, one of the secondary goals of switching Taliyah W to vector cast has been to reduce the number of different spell casting paradigms in the game. My Taliyah 1.0 W casting paradigm was "vector casting but not really"; one of the big gains we made toward learnability of the game as a whole in 6.14 has been to reduce that down to just vector casting. If we did "vector casting but it's clamped and the delay starts with your first input" we'd be going back to "vector casting but not really".

You're also right in that this change makes Taliyah harder to learn and master, which was not our goal, but at this point we're talking about an overflowing sink on the Titanic. Sure that's a problem, but we've got much bigger problems that ALSO cause there to be some water damage. Between her Q, her R, and the pathing required to optimize P she's just a super hard champion to learn. I'd love for that to change, but there's always a hundred things you'd love to be the case for your champion, and in this case, wanting more players to be able to play and enjoy her at all was the more important consideration.

In summary, I hear you on your concerns and we will continue to listen and adjust as necessary. I think the W change has showed that when we're wrong, we'll admit we're wrong and fix things as best we can. Please continue trusting us that we have the best interests of our players in mind here.

Borbland7/14/2016, 10:34:25 AM5 votes

Personally, I tried her new W in a bot game, and it felt better than before, but can understand it's hard to aim with at first (Played tons of Viktor before).

The fact you can E while the W is an enormous buff, before I nearly never did E then W because W hits too rarely, and doing both for nothing would've been a huge mana waste. Now it's quite nice

Astôlfo7/14/2016, 5:58:52 AM5 votes

You forgot to mention vertical knockup is gone.

xTropicalPenguin7/14/2016, 2:19:15 PM4 votes

Hey man dont worry theyre nerfing her again because fuck you if you main her

Poro Princess7/15/2016, 4:52:30 AM4 votes

I still don't understand why her original W was changed at all. It was perfect. Easy to understand, easy to get the hang of, and extremely fun to play with despite not being able to do a w->e combo.

I went to play Taliyah today (Im level 7 mastery with her and Ive fallen in love with her gameplay ever since she came out) and I just flat out couldn't play her. I couldn't cast my W, it would either not cast at all or cast multiple seconds later in delay. I would constantly miss my combos or not be able to use them, constantly had to flash instead of use W to push enemies off of me.

The game was so incredibly frustrating that I cried over how much I was struggling to play the champion I loved.

Why was she even changed in the first place? I went from level 7 mastery and possibly one of my mains, to never playing this champion ever again.

Dolodin7/14/2016, 10:07:18 AM3 votes

I agree.. the amount of times I've tried to cast it and ended up casting it at my feet or miles away from target is SO frustrating..!

Aych Pii7/15/2016, 12:28:09 AM3 votes

Everything about the new W feels awful to use. I use smartcast with indicators and I usually press the button down before lining up my cast and hitting go, so being essentially forced to play like smartcast where I'm commited to a point the moment I press down the button is horrible. Talyah was going to be my midlane main and now I'm thinking about quittingher altogether.

Chris the Frank7/14/2016, 9:59:13 AM3 votes

The patch has been out only hours And you've already made up your mind?

I actually went into a custom game to test this, and I don't want to say the contents of this post are a lie, but they're close. I was relieved to find her W is now faster and far more intuitive, it's so much less clunky than her old W. I bought her on day one, and got used to her W as it was, but this really is an improvement. Please play more games with her before you make up you mind about something like this.

TR107/14/2016, 2:00:15 PM2 votes

I made a post about this too before the patch even came out. It's like they aren't listening

Dominick Destine7/14/2016, 12:57:02 AM1 votes

Apparently these changes were intentional.

Taliyah was overperforming... I always found her to be pure garbage, shrug.