"Our design approach doesn't go '1. Think about how something might impact Morde"-Meddler
Let me preface this by saying that I have nothing but respect for the man. He's the head of the balance team and a lot of frustration at the game is being directed towards him because he represents the game's balance. And he still manages to keep his cool and keep the players up to date on the inner workings of the balance team.
Yet this little statement towards my apparent outrage about an Anti-shielding item being introduced to league left a bad taste in my mouth, and let me tell you why:
Of course the balance team doesn't think about how stuff impacts ONE out of 138+ champions.
But I as a Mordekaiser MAIN does. As do other mains of their champions.
We're fanatics that love our champions and every change, be it little or large, is one we'll see in relation to our mains. New Runes introduced? Of course everyone's going to be looking at THEIR champions. Items being nerfed? Who do you think is the first one to go on how the changes are bad and how it'll impact some champions negatively.
Mains exist for a reason and the one thing they have in common is playing the game for these characters and wanting them to be good and fun to play. Do I care about champions like Ahri, Jayce, Riven and co? Not so much, only if I'm facing them. Does that mean they're worth less than my own champion? Nope.
But they're the same as me since the mains of these champions are also going to see changes in relation to their main champions' state in the game.
The balance team can't do that because they balance the game around ALL champions. They can't play favorites but just going as far as to tell a Morde main what he already knows just feels like a slap in the face. Yes, I'm VERY vocal about Mordekaiser but that doesn't mean that my view on things is worth nothing in the big picture.
This game is an ecosystem of over a hundred champions with each and every one of them being able to potentially make or break a game, in their favor and at the expense of other players.
In the end it just felt insulting that a Morde main is being criticized for reacting to a change that could spell the potential doom for his champion as it's an action being taken in response to a Shield stacking meta that Mordekaiser himself had no part in. So yes, excuse me for being overly sensitive about a change that seems so haphazard like introducing items to combat a symptom rather than changing the fundamentals of how shield stacking works.
In the end these Items aren't even final and they're going to take some time to be balanced out. Who knows, maybe they'll be total garbage for the most part and maybe Mordekaiser is going to have a convenient bug where Iron Man isn't going to be counted as a shield. It's all in the future and crying over something that's not even in game yet isn't going to help at all
Tl;DR: Some perspective on how opinions on new changes work in regards to a person's main.
