Why do mages seems weaker now.

Hello everybody,

Notes about the writers : I am a juggernaut main. Mages is one of the class I hate the most in the game, just after ADCs with lots of Mobility. My champs usually crush with relative ease Assassin. I can pretend to have some objectivity on the topic that will follow.

The first thing that came to mind when we look at the mage update is that, a contrario to the Juggernaut update and the Marksmen update, the winrate of the updated mages are a lot more disparate ( http://www.leagueofgraphs.com/champions/stats/middle/all/by-winrate ). For the big 6, We can see Malz being the top winrate, with Brand and Zyra following not too far away. Vel'Koz is at 50 %. And then we have Cassiopeia and Vladimir at surely one of the lowest winrate that this game has ever seen. For the little 8, Annie, Viktor, Kennen, Ziggs and Veigar seems all to be performing fairly well while Xerath, Anivia and particularly Swain seems to struggle. When you look at it that way, on the 14 mages that received changes : one is overpowered, 10 seems balanced and 3 are clearly underperforming. It is still a progress compared to the ADC and the Juggernaut update.

Before getting to the point, I want to point the way Riot works when it comes to class update. They look at the class, asses what the class do and reward champ differently based on what the class do. In the case of Juggernaut, they assessed that the class should be great at long fights when their tankyness would give them the upper hand. But they couldn't give them consistent High DPS. So, they choose to give them window of power where they would have this high DPS under certain circumstances. Darius' Noxian Might (5 Hemorrahge Stacks/Kill with Noxian Guillotine), Skarner's Crystal Spires (Particular places you need to capture), Garen's Criminal (High DPS only on one target, the one who recently got the most kill), you get the idea.

In the case of ADCs, what the class do as a whole is : they auto-attack to deal high DPS(Grats, Captain Obvious). The Big 6 of the ADC update all received change to their way of auto attack to enforce a playstyle around it (Cait's traps Headshot, MF's Double Tap, Kog's Bio-Arcane Barrage, etc...).

In the case of Mages, they did the same. If I point out the fact that ratio have been nerfed across the board but gave an recompense for landing successfully spells on your opponent (Vel'Koz's R True Damage, Brand's multiple explosion, Cassiopeia's empowered E, Vladimir's R heal, Malzahar's E refreshing timer if your land Q or R on your target). They globally have given more access to CDR, nerf the MR part of MR item, nerf the damage of spells but lowered their CDR at the same time. That is absolutely true for everything, but that is a constant. Make Mages able to cast spell more often is fine, since the upgraded ones are reliant on landing multiple spells to be effective.

Despite all of this, people tend to complain about their mains having been nerfed/feels weaker than before. There is a reason to that. Before, mages tended to have powerful spells with long CDR. They were most of the time oriented to a burst Damage pattern. Each spells was rewarding to land. Now, you can cast more spells in the same frame of time, but you need to land more to be rewarded. That change seems like nothing, but it feels a lot more frustrating to miss spell, because you can miss most of your damage by not being able to hit one spell.

This point is further exacerbated by the Defensive Triangle of the game. Champion usually have a way to help them getting their job : Survivability, Range, Mobility. This form a rock-scissor-paper relationship that goes that way : Range beats Survivability, Survivability beats Mobility, Mobility beats Range. The Mages tend exclusively use Range, with sometimes a bit of Survivability and/or Mobility, but not that much.

This lead us to some problems :

• In League of Legends, Mobility is a lot more present than the two other. Furthermore, Mage is the most lacking class in that domain.
• Range and Survivability that require preparation to be effective (How much damage can I take ? Where should I be to deal the more damage in the safest way)(Skirmishers and Support are the only classes that can use Survivability in a reactive way, but for the first, it is usually short, and for the second, it is not for themselves), but Mobility can be used with preparation or with reaction, even for very agressive mobility, like Akali's R (using it on a creep, for example). This difference reinforces the fact that Mobility beat Range, while also stress the fact that Range is harder to use.
• Why ADC don't suffer the same way of Assassin than Mages ? Because their damage come from auto-attack, a reliable source of damage. Damage of Mages come from spells, which are most of the time skillshot, a less reliable source of damage, which is particurlary well countered by Mobility, one of the most present thing in this game.
• For Range being an effective defensive tool, you need to be good at kiting (if you are not, it is actually useless, unless you are Xerath/Ziggs/Vel'Koz), which is one the harder mechanics in this game to master. Also, to be really effective, you need to deal damage (We showed previously that it was already more difficult for mages.

You can say " Not all mages show bad performance right now ". Not all mages have the same level of difficulty. Malzahar is quite accessible for newer players (For the mains : I said easy to learn, not ** no skill no brain **) because he is more reliable than his peers, and, on top of that, he is actually overtuned. Once Brand get his Rylai, it becomes harder for the enemy team to split when he throws his AoE, so it is normal that he happens to be high in the list. Zyra can easily spawn a lot more plants than before, which counterbalances the lower DPS of each plants and makes her harder to approach.

But let's take a look at the three worst performing mage of the lot : Cassiopeia, Swain, Vladimir. They seems really undertuned, according to their winrate. Since they have shorter range than most other mages, they are harder to play. You will ask " If this is that hard to play these mages, why simply not buff their numbers to make them really rewarding ? " Because it is hard, not impossible. Because they are people who are able to kite, to foresee how the game will happen and to act accordingly. What do the three lowest winrate have in common ? They are all very short-ranged (for mages) and are heavy reliant on these kiting mechanics I am speaking about. Furthermore, they all have ways to heal themselves in their kit (not to the same extent for each one, but still) and are designed to be exceptionnaly strong late game.. If they had been overtuned, I don't think it would have been visible for players of my ELO (silver), but for higher tiers, Diamond and higher, they would have clearly been overpowered. That is why Riot didn't want to give them too high number. Against an opponent that know how to land the spells of a champ and that know how to properly kite, it would have been impossible to beat them. That is how strong kite is.

That concludes my explanation.