The Unfixable Issue of Anti-Fun and Balancing it
Lately I had a terrible playing experience. Now I could rant about how certain things are underpowered or overpowered or blaw blaw but honestly, there are already enough posts talking about this so I probably wouldn't add anything new to the discussion.
The topic I want to talk about is certain champions being straight out unfun to play against because of the nature of their kit. I for my part had to play toplane against a toplane graves, a quinn, vayne and countless Dariusses ( is that even a word ) and it was just not fun compared to what it used to be.
Now the thing is, I think Darius has actually a fairly balanced kit. You have extreme dominance over your lane and you are great against immobile combs and in disengage combs BUT you can easily be counterpicked by kiting champions or poke combs. The issue is because of the fact that his playstyle is based around not being able to directly fight him no matter what it's just a pain in the ass to play against him. You have to choose between farming under your tower or trying to fight him, which is impossible for almost everyone, the only success I had was with Olaf. Same thing with all the Marksmen in toplane - you dominate lane but you have tradeoffs - they are still a pain in the ass though and after all League is supposed to be fun.
The problem is - what do you do against that? You could just take the Yorick approach and basically don't let those picks allow to exist by nerfing them to the ground, just like with old Darius and many others. Is that fair though? With that you would literally eradicate the main champions of several people and dedicated players. With Yorick this could be easily done because there is next to no mastery to his kit and he's generally boring but with Darius and all the toplane marksmen you actually have a lot of tactical and mechanical depth and a dedicated playerbase. Reworking would create a simular problem.
At this point I'm just clueless to what can be done against that. I hope Riot finds a fair and possible solution, maybe champions and changes that counteract that kind of playstyles but still remain the balance of them - which to me seems to be a near impossible challenge. I really just wanted to make a statement and raise awareness for the issue because right now it seems to be seemingly ignored.