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Can we take a moment to talk about Master Yi?

Marshbouy··3 votes·720 views

"but why marsh would you want to talk about master yi?" That's a good question Mr. strawman that i created for the purposes of writing this. The reason why is because i keep seeing people talk about master yi being dumpstered after some changes to the game. Before discussing the changes let's talk about what happened before the changes.

Bruiser yi. Oh wasn't this a fun time. Build devourer, guinsoos, boots, a titanic hydra and tank items and you could shred team. It was a terrible time. The synergy between the items was intense. RIOT made changes to fix it. Guinsoos was reworked, master yi had the scalings on his E changes, and i think titanic hydra got some changes ( i dont have a great memory).

the largest issue with yi at the time was that he was doing far too well. He was a complete powerhouse. He needed the nerfs he got.

I keep seeing people on the boards post things saying that "master yi is dumpstered!" "master yi is a terrible pick". They are wrong. He is not dumpstered. According to champion.gg He is at a 49% win rate in plat (https://champion.gg/champion/MasterYi/Jungle). That's not a terrible win rate. The reason why its not higher is because his kit brings damage and snowball potential. That's it.

He is not a good tank, he brings no CC, he has nothing to fall back on if he gets behind except hoping to farm up enough to buy items. It sure as hell feels bad to get rekt by a kha zix and not be able to farm. Sure it feels bad to feed because you cannot do anything, but that does not mean he is dumpstered. When you pick master yi you have to accept that. You have to know that there is a chance you will get shut down and feed. At lower elo you don't have to worry about this, more bronze/silver/gold junglers don't know how to counterjungle or invade properly. At higher elos this becomes a serious issue. He is built to be a low elo powerhouse. He will never be picked in LCS unless his numbers are completely insane.

Finally, I'll go back to his winrate. It's 49%. That's not terrible but it's not good either. He sure could get a damage buff somewhere but would that really be necessary? Do we really want to risk bruiser yi coming back?

I for one sure as hell don't.

6 Comments

78060484_DEL3 votes

Lower the base damage on Alpha Strike and Wuju Style, make the scalings based on Bonus AD. Riot has said in patch 6.8/6.9 that they wanted Yi players to revert back to the traditional AD/Crit/Glass Cannon Builds. However, it seems that ATTACKSPD/ON-HIT yi is more popular than any other build.

Alpha Strike 25/60/95/130/165 (100%AD) -----> 10/25/40/55/70 (250% Bonus AD) - Significant nerf to his early game, but late game is where he outscales his old self. Though the math I haven't really thought about. Its just an idea. Lower base damage, change scaling to bonus ad. Maybe increase bonus damage to minions higher, so his early clear doesn't suck hard.

Wuju Style: 14/23/32/41/50 (25% Bonus AD) --------> 10/14/18/22/26 --------> (45%Bonus AD) - Again significant nerf to his early game, late game he outscales almost everybody. Early clears will be slower.

Not trying to gut yi, but if Riot wants to change the way yi players build and play, they must change how he benefits from building AD and defensive items. Punish those who build defensive items on yi, reward the ones who build yi strictly as a glass cannon assassin.

Marshbouy2 votes

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Sightless662 votes

Riot has said in patch 6.8/6.9 that they wanted Yi players to revert back to the traditional AD/Crit/Glass Cannon Builds. However, it seems that ATTACKSPD/ON-HIT yi is more popular than any other build.

That's not really accurate. If you recall, when rageblade was reworked, they said specifically that they intended for it to be a good item for attack speed on-hit characters like Master Yi. They said that they wanted him to build squishy, but they never said they intended for him to be tied to AD and crit. We can also see this in how his most recent buff increased his on-hit damage

As for your proposals: I actually think that would introduce more problems than it would solve, and it goes against past design decisions. A common problem people had with Yi in the devourer days was that he was strictly relegated to farming the jungle. He didn't have enough early game power to impact the direction the game was taking, but if he farmed and his team didn't feed, he became a god. This was annoying to Yi players because they couldn't make proactive plays, and it was annoying to everyone else because the guy who afk farmed all game got to be the strongest guy in the game. No one liked that. By changing devourer to bloodrazor, they gave him

Your proposals would reintroduce that problem. If I'm losing that much early game power, my only option is to afk farm. I'm not going to help my team, I'm not going to interact, I'm just going to sit in the jungle and pray that my team can resist the enemy jungler without any help from me. If they do, then I'm going to be stronger than everyone even though my teammates did all the work to survive long enough for me to get there. If they don't, I'll lose, and I won't have much of a chance to impact it. Fun and exciting gameplay, right?

To sum it up, I like the idea of rewarding Yi for building squishier, but I have two problems with your idea: First, I see no reason to link Yi to AD and Crit. He hasn't built heavy AD for years, and he hasn't built crit since back before the rework. Attack speed suits his fantasy much better, and should be more encouraged. Second, making him terrible early game is not a good idea. It's what Riot specifically tried to move him away from. Even Yi players were celebrating the ability to move away from afk farming, even when it came paired with massive nerfs. There is no justification for moving him back there. Yi players don't want it, and people who play with a Yi on their team don't want it. We can encourage squishy builds without forcing him to afk farm again.

APrinnyDood2 votes

the largest issue with yi at the time was that he was doing far too well. He was a complete powerhouse. He needed the nerfs he got.

Yeah, we know. Just like we know that he got overnerfed and needed the buffs he got following that. What matters is that he's mediocre now.

Do we really want to risk bruiser yi coming back?

Bruiser Yi never left. It's his only viable build. Yi currently builds Bloodrazor, BoRK, tanky. If he's winning, he can make that tanky AD instead of straight tank, but usually it's just defensive items. They never fixed that problem.

That's part of the problem. He's being forced to build tanky even though that's not what players want to do with him. I want Yi to be squishy and actually do enough damage to wipe out a backline again, instead of just being another autoattacking bruiser.

So, yes, we can talk about Yi. We can talk about how Riot just nerfed him down, took away his good build options, and left him in a bruiser-building without enough damage to actually build squishy like he wants to. We can talk about how they just slapped a quick fix on him to try to make him balanced and didn't give a single fuck about whether it actually felt good to play with. We can talk about how their solution to the bruiser builds completely killed any options for ever building squishy on him, and we can talk about how that makes him feel much worse than he ever did before this season.

The problem is that there are no good offensive items for him. He's been heavily tuned to only work well with on-hit items, and there are almost none of those that don't suck. You have bloodrazor, you have bork, and then you can suck a dick if you want more damage past that. You can't build squishy because there aren't enough items that synergize. He needs changes that actually reward him for being squishier.

Making rageblade not suck absolute dick for melees would be a good start. Scrap the AP, make it more stat efficient, and make it more effective for melee champions. That alone would make him feel so much better.

Marshbouy1 votes

I am not disagreeing.

I addressed why he is mediocre. He brings nothing but damage

you are wrong. His highest win rate build is item 1419 item 3153 item 3006 item 3071 item 3156 and item 3026 thats pretty high damage. Everyone has to build bruiser now. I'm talking about the old bruiser yi, the tank melting tank. If you don't build even slightly tanky, you get one shot. welcome to season 6.

scrap the AP? Do you know anything about what guinsoos is supposed to be? It's a mixed damage item. It brings ap and AD. Removing that would destroy it's original design.

APrinnyDood2 votes

His highest win rate build

Two things. First, of course his highest winrate build contains more damage items. You can't get away with damage items unless you're already winning. If I'm in a position where I might lose a game, I'm not buying cleaver. I will buy cleaver if the game is already effectively over, because building more damage is fun. That inflates the winrates.

Second, you should cast a very skeptical eye on any of champion.gg's "highest winrate" builds. They don't pull data from games that end too early. That fucks the reliability of their data to no end. That's why you see huge patch-to-patch variance in what their "highest winrate" build actually is. Their methodology for this piece of data isn't worth trusting.

I'm talking about the old bruiser yi, the tank melting tank.

What you're talking about was the exact same build direction as the current Yi, but stronger. You're just complaining about that raw strength of bruiser Yi that got nerfed away. I'm complaining about the shitty design that has persisted unchanged even after he got nerfed.

Do you know anything about what guinsoos is supposed to be?

Right now, it's competing between being an on-hit item, and a hybrid item, and that competition between roles is making it fail spectacularly at both purposes. As a result only viable on two champions (maaaaaaybe 3 if you really stretch to include Xin). One of those identities has to go, and since hybrid champions can by definition make use of AD, they'd still be served just fine by the item converting to a primarily AD item.

Removing that would destroy it's original design.

I do not give even a single fuck about its original design, I give a fuck about what the game needs now. Its original design is already dead, buried and purged with fire and salt. Hybrid champions aren't buying this because they're turned off by the phantom hit. On-hit champions aren't buying it because they're turned off by the AP. Kayle and Kog are buying it because they make spectacular use of the phantom hit and because they aren't harmed by the addition of AP, but their on-hit builds don't need the item to have AP. They'd be fine if it only had AD. Both of them have worked with AD on-hit builds before, and they can easily do it again.

It will serve the most champions as an on-hit item, and it will be filling an almost completely vacant niche. That's more important than any "it used to be a hybrid item" argument will ever be. We have to design around how the game actually is, not what it used to be a long time ago.

If the original design of rageblade is so important, then just change the name to something else and we can maybe make an actual hybrid item called rageblade later. Would that satisfy you?

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