IT is my belief that Kalista's nerf on the PBE will exacerbate her problems

Because nerfing Kalista's Auto Attack Range just makes her incredibly susceptible to poke and harass while simultaneously not nerfing what makes her effective in higher tier play actually makes no sense in an objective sense, I really should be studying for HS finals but this is just complete bullshit and seeing this nerf on PBE just tells me about how arguably terribly designed Kalista is, a champion that has not even been in this game for 4 years, and that Riot has no ideas beyond gimping her for both Solo Q and Competitive. This nerf will echo the issue that Riot created in 6.6, and making it more apparent that they have essentially made no progress on her as a champion. As practice for my IB History Paper 3 which the format will be utilised on the final, I will construct a singular question using command terms to construct a comprehensive argument with critical analysis as to why this issue

"TO WHAT EXTENT is the balancing of Kalista between 2015 and 2018 a successful response by Riot Games that showed their efficacy of response to the issues presented by her design?"

The "To What Extent" prompt directly implies that there are multiple sides to this question, which one should weigh up before formulating an argument. So we'll analyze this from both sides of the argument that they balanced Kalista both correctly, and incorrectly.

I'm slightly cheating on this because you are given no references or encyclopaedias during the examination, but I digress.

The balancing of Kalista during the mid to late 2010s was defined by a period of nerfs and some buffs that was further compounded by meta shifts and changes that would ultimately trigger problems with her overall kit design. In an effort to protect the overall balance of the game, Riot was impelled to adjust other numbers in an effort to preserve a delicate series of game balancing and reworks that affected Kalista's balance state as well. In an effort to battle the problems presented by Kalista's design, the Riot balance team implemented a series of balance changes that were to nerf her overall effectiveness in the competitive scene while making her enjoyable to play for the average user. These measures, along with the other balance and mechanical changes made to the item and game structure, worsened Kalista's state as an overall champion to the average user and highlighted Riot's tendencies to perform poor band-aid fixes to the various problems caused by her design.

The balance changes directly to Kalista were supposed to be grounded into a series of changes that would make her easier to pick up but hard to master. On a post made on Ghostcrawler's tumblr, the Lead Game Designer for League of Legends, with prior experiences in both the Age of Empires and World of Warcraft franchises, highlights what their balancing philosophy in terms of higher skill floor champions are in direct reference to Kalista and Azir, “Watched your /dev on Successful champs. There is a problem that is kind of recurring and yet covered by none of the Pillars: Some champs are impossible to balance for a wide range of MMR. Azir, Kalista… Bad thing, but doesn’t contradict any Pillar. In fact, it’s due to very high “Skill expressiveness”, at least dexterity-wise, so they probably score high on the Pillars DUE to that problem. So, anything planned to solve this issue, or do you think it’s not a problem for a “successful” champion?”

The best strategy we have to tackle problems like this has to do with skill floors and skill ceilings. A skill floor is the point at which you can effectively play the champion (meaning you don’t lose every game) and the skill ceiling is when you stop getting better with the champion. We typically measure this in terms of win rate. When does your win rate stop getting better with subsequent games played on that champion?

Some champions are easy to learn. We’d describe these as low skill floors. Some are very hard to learn. These have high skill floors. As you can guess, the skill ceiling then refers to whether they are easy or hard to master.

The problem with champions like Azir and Kallista (sic) is, while their skill ceiling is very (very) high, their skill floor is also really high. You’ll have to play a lot of games (possibly hundreds of games) on these guys before you can even hope to compete.

Lowering the skill floors without touching the skill ceilings should make them easier to learn without removing their being hard to master. There are a lot of ways to try to lower the skill floor. You can increase the window of time in which to pull off a challenging combo. If you make skill shot projectiles faster, they are harder to dodge, which makes landing them easier. If you lower mana costs, especially in early game, it’s more forgiving when you misuse an ability.

These are just examples, and you can imagine how easy it would be to remove too much skill expression (making these champs too easy to master) if you’re not careful. This is the reason we haven’t been able to just quickly get Azir and Kallista into the right spot."

The response above seems to indicate that Riot has the desired effect of lowering champion skill floors so that players could easily pick up the champion and try her out, but allowing mains to perform exceedingly well on her. This would allow Riot to lower her numbers in a meaningful way so that she would remain viable in a Solo Queue environment but allowed her to not dominate the competitive scene due to the tenets of her design. However, previous nerfs have indicated the overall design viewpoint that Riot has towards Kalista, the above statement can be seen as a contradiction, and evidence that the Riot Balance Team does not follow its Lead Game Designer in regards to the sensitivities of their own champions. This can be most clearly seen in the effects of the nerfs in Patch 6.6, which greatly increased the skill floor of her as a champion, making her inaccessible in both normal and high elo pro play. In addition, the patch currently present on the PBE doesn't even really have the effect of hitting Kalista where she's good at in competitive, her ability in competitive is derived from her ability to secure objectives, control teamfights, and set up her initiators. Nerfing the attack range would simultaneously read to make it very hard to abuse her strengths for both low elo players and others within Solo Q, and a result raise her skill floor in opposing philosophy outlined in the previous post.

Kalista has also been the product of meta changes that have simultaneously broken her as a champion in pro play. This can be clearly seen in the Ardent Meta, where Kalista during Worlds faced a 100% contestion rate, being picked or banned in the play-ins, and 100% red-side first ban for the remainder of the Group Stage while maintaining a 50% winrate in regular solo Q. The sensitivities to such a meta change exacerbated her problems as a champion, and further indicated that she was too sensitive to them during her dominance as a champion. On the opposing scope of things, there are people who argue that the resulting meta changes that had occurred from 2015 and 2018 have been naturally occurring that have in general allowed Kalista to see a balanced form for most of those years. Unfortunately, to that extent, these measures have only been temporary and at the longest, she has seen a full 6 months of being reasonable to play in Solo Q, whilst not being overtly overpowered in the competitive scene. She has single-handedly broken initiators, such as Rakan in Season 7 or Alistar in Season 5 because of how broken Fate's Call is for setting them up or disengaging them from a bad engage. Nerfing her self-sufficiency has and will still have the effect of making her good in competitive and complete shart in solo Q, and will only serve to exacerbate the problems in terms of the discrepancy between low elo and higher tier play.

As it stands, she's P/B in LCS, while simultaneously one of the worst performing ADCs in Solo Q as her ability to make solo plays is essentially countered by an ADC with Infinity Edge and Statikk Shiv right-clicking her a couple times. The sort of difference in power that makes her so successful in pro play while absolutely mediocre in normal play and reveals a sort of dysfunction in the processes of the balancing Kalista.

Sorry if this came out as complete shit, I still have a Maths Final to study for. See you later.