Thoughts on Season 8

I've been playing off and on since season 2-3 (not sure) and very consistently since the end of season 6. Generally I've enjoyed league as a game. It's fun, the champions are diverse and interesting, and the graphics are extremely good (especially compared to the nintendo-esque quality pre season 6 lul). And I still enjoy it now. But as a number of people have said, season 8 is by far my least favorite season. There's several things I don't like about it:

• Zoe. Legit I think this champion could be removed tomorrow and like 3 people would be sad about it. Her gameplay is very toxic, it relies almost entirely on long ranged oneshots and a 'sleep' which can be very annoying to play against. Yes, she was nerfed so she's way less oppressive than she was on release, but that doesn't mean the champion itself is OK. I wish Riot hadn't added her in the first place, but y'know LeBlanc's been in the game for years and the sky hasn't fallen. So toxic champions like Zoe aren't exactly unique in that respect

• Runes reforged. When this happened a lot of people were complaining about it, how it was literally going to DESTROY League or whatever etc. etc. etc. obviously that didn't happen. Runes reforged was and is a pretty creative blend of the old runes and masteries from seasons 1-7 and it's introduced some neat mechanics with Fleet Footwork, Aftershock, Glacial Augment, Spellbook, and Predator (to name a few). That said, way too many of the runes are either focused on damage, involve damage, or are just too impactful in general. Some examples:

Aftershock. Rune that literally makes you unkillable for the next 2.5 seconds (+70 armor and mr lvl 1 lol). How is that not broken? You also get adaptive damage which is stupid because if you ever get a good engage as a support (I'm a threshmain) you can easily pop squishies with aftershock and ignite - as the SUPPORT. Alistar and Leona engages on ADCs are good examples of this

Dark Harvest. Yeah it's a meme rune but the fact that you can do 5,000+ damage with a rune (say out of 45,000 damage total) always seemed silly to me. That's 12% of your damage from a rune, btw

Second wind. It's doran's shield passive in a rune. The passive healing you get from it, on tanks or tanky supports, is absurd.

Triumph. Completely counters ignite and can give 2-4,000 healing per game (more on tanks). It becomes silly on champions like Garen or Irelia, as long as they get kills they can rampage through your team killing everyone while getting last second heals from triumph.

Conqueror. Riot's way of introducing even more true damage (which was apparently needed) into the game. Why are champions like Yasuo, Fiora, Jax, and Tryndamere doing (potentially) thousands of true damage over the course of a 30-40 minute game with 1 rune? Don't they have enough damage built into their kits without this?

Stupid tank runes like triumph, second wind, and (especially) aftershock exist because it's the only way to deal with the enormous amount of damage in the game. Want more AD? or AP? Just go Gathering Storm or Eyeball Collection for free stats. 30 AP with eyeball collection and another 80 from Gathering Storm (in a 40 minute game). Also more true damage from Conqueror, Cheap Shot, Infinity Edge, and Ignite. Poggers!

• Base stat bonuses. It used to be that you could run certain mastery pages and take whatever stats you wanted, separate from that. I thought this was a fun, interesting way to incorporate more player creativity in the game. With runes reforged your base stat bonuses are tailored strictly to the runes you picked, which is disappointing because it limits what you can do. But apparently Riot is bringing some form of this back in preseason for season 9 which is pretty neat.

• Damage. The damage is way too high. Ignite deals 80 true damage at lvl 1 and 105 at lvl 2. That's 1/5th of an squishy's health bar at lvl 2, from a summoner spell. Why? Miss Fortune can deal half your health bar with 1 Q, to a squishy, even if she's not fed. Why? Stormrazor (an item whose entire design caters to oneshots) exists. Why? Lethality was increased on duskblade in favor of less oneshotting. Why (why not just nerf the item, with no compensatory buffs)? Mortal Reminder now grants 25% total armor penetration instead of bonus armor penetration. Why? Armor and MR runes were removed from runes reforged. Why? Infinity Edge does 10% true damage. Why? Infernal drakes give a 8% global damage boost to your team. Why (i.e. why not say, a 4% damage boost?). Base AD's were buffed, across the board, at the beginning of the season. Why? And can we please revert this?

• ADC Item & Champion rework. ADC was in a terrible state for a few weeks/months after a bunch of crit changes happened that 1) made Essence Reaver irrelevant (on every champion except Lucian), 2) gave Infinity Edge a ridiculously oppressive build path (2 BF swords into a 1100 gold combine cost -- forcing everyone to build Stormrazor), 3) made Infinity Edge irrelevant as a starting item, 4) charged 600 gold for a 10% crit item, and 5) introduced Stormrazor, 6) nerfed half the ADC base AD's to something equal to or lower than most supports (i.e. Thresh has a higher base AD than Miss Fortune)

Let's talk about Stormrazor. It's a bad item. It's a bad item because it's existence is entirely focused around oneshots. Riot has tried to address this by nerfing it 4 times since release (AD decreased from 75 to 60, 1st auto crit lowered from 160% -> 140%, %crit damage lowered to 0.5% per 1% crit instead of 0.75%, and attack speed temporarily nerfed from 35% to 25%). This has not changed the nature of the item, which is that it's main benefit and purpose is to amplify first auto damage and therefore encourage oneshots. This was not the case with infinity edge. Infinity edge, while built too often as a first item, only had 1/5 chance of giving you a massive crit on your first autoattack. Stormrazor has a 100% chance of doing that, provided you haven't autoed within the last second or two.

• Towers. As many people on the Boards and elsewhere have said, towers are very weak this season. I remember a game where me and my ADC got ganked and died in botlane, lvl 5. Their bot and Rammus jg proceeded to take out our tower in ~20 seconds for a 9 minute first tower bonus. Like, why is this a thing. It's particularly fun if you play toplane, you must babysit your tower 24/7 (unless you're way ahead or have extremely good waveclear) to avoid losing it pre 15 minutes. This has become harder with the existence of Rift Herald - which was recently buffed to do way more damage on its first tower hit (although the Herald dies faster). Get Herald, group with 3 of your mates and you've got a free tower. That is the state of the meta right now.

This is not to mention Inhibitor Turrets which, for some reason, are just as weak as tier 1 and 2 turrets. I'm not suggesting that Riot bring back the infamous laser turrets, but that they be changed so it's easier to defend the base and important objectives like the inhibitor. The same goes for Nexus turrets, which recently saw their health regen halved.

• Baron. Baron got a large health buff (6,400 -> 9,000 base health) but also saw its damage and attack speed (0.75 -> 0.625) nerfed. Now the risk of dying to it is, more or less, the same. It just takes slightly longer to kill it. Although the risk has barely changed, the reward for killing Baron is much greater:

Bonus AD increased from 26-40 to 24-48 Bonus AP increased from 26-40 to 40-80 50% damage reduction for empowered caster minions Empowered caster minions (used to not be a thing)

So in addition to squishy towers we have bonus damage from Infernal drakes (8% per drake), 1st hit 1500 true damage (from Herald) to turrets, Baron empowered minions & much higher Hand of Baron stat bonuses, and more bonus damage from Mountain drakes (10% true damage to turrets per drake). All that free turret damage seems excessive, tbh.

• The client. The new league client is extremely laggy, demanding, and bad. It looks pretty and modern but I'm not for that it if takes forever to tab in/out of my games, lags when loading my friends list/chat boxes, lags when loading the shop, lags when I'm in champ select, lags if someone dodges (and I get kicked out of champ select), lags in the loading screen, and takes a solid minute to load post game statistics. The lag is more pronounced on my laptop than my PC, but the new client is SIGNIFICANTLY slower and buggier than the old one. Low spec mode does not help, it only makes the post game stats take even longer to load.

Speaking of bugs, could Riot please fix the random instances where users cannot load into the game, close the client, and are then forced to 'update' to the current version of league, all before they can rejoin their game (which may or may not occur). Also it would be nice if the client didn't take up 14% of my computer's memory while running.

**What I'd like to see changed as season 8 winds up and we move into season 9: **

• Less damage. Revert ignite buffs, revert heal cooldown nerf, remove damage from tank runes (aftershock), and reduce it on most other runes in general. Also nerf tank rune sustain & stats so we don't have a repeat tank meta. Less/lower true damage would also be nice

• Revert more of the ADC crit item changes. 120% crit with 2 crit items and an Infinity Edge is very unsatisfying

• Buff towers and massively lower or otherwise change rift herald 1st hit damage.

• A lot of fixes to make the client a means to play League, not an impediment.

Thanks for reading