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Compensation buffs are a terrible concept and are damaging your game

datfatguy·11/3/2019, 5:07:43 AM·2 votes·1,022 views

I’m pretty sure most people on the boards knows what a compensation buff is, right? When a champion is overly strong, Riot will nerf them, but along with those nerfs, they will give them some buffs as ‘compensation’ for making them weaker.

There’s a bit of a problem with this, however. When a champion is too strong in the current meta, you need to make that champion weaker, which is what nerfs are all about. However, when you come in with the compensation buffs, you are basically undoing the nerfs and keeping that champion just as strong as they would have been without any changes. Surely anybody now can see the problem here.

I understand that a champion like Riven is very popular, and if you nerf her you will receive a lot of backlash for it, but if a champion is over performing, they are over performing. Nerfing her doesn’t mean that you have to reduce the cooldown on her E, as this will let her stay overpowered. Sure you’ll make the Riven main community happy, but definitely not the rest of the League community.

So yeah, stop with the compensation buffs, as all they are doing is contributing to the power creep which has been happening for the past few years now.

1 Comments

DuskDaUmbreon11/3/2019, 5:16:15 AM8 votes

I’m pretty sure most people on the boards knows what a compensation buff is, right? When a champion is overly strong, Riot will nerf them, but along with those nerfs, they will give them some buffs as ‘compensation’ for making them weaker.

That's...not what a compensation buff is at all. Compensation buffs are for when Riot makes nerfs that would make them too weak, so they compensate with a buff to make it either power-neutral or at least not as strong of a nerf.

Generally they're only used in 3 scenarios:

  1. The champion is neither weak nor strong, but they want to power shift for some reason. A theoretical example would be nerfing Nasus's W to increase the resistances on his R.
  2. Riot's making a change that affects many champions, and they don't want to nerf that specific champion. An example would be when they nerfed Lethality items and buffed many Lethality users. Another case would be when the new rune system came out and they buffed everyone's base stats to compensate.
  3. The champion is strong, but the nerf Riot wants to do would make the champion too weak, so they put in a small buff to compensate partially for the nerf.