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cho needs some help

Sagiterios·6/12/2017, 3:48:55 AM·1 votes·249 views

The situation with cho'gath at the moment is a bit tricky. Mechanically, he does work. It isnt really a liability to have him on your team. But the past several changes on him have had a bad negative effect on his feel. Right now, he feels slow, clunky and fairly unreliable. He should feel like a titanic, debilitating wall. But right now he is just crippled by reliability issues, slow rampup and a lack of real threat.

This started when they changed the targeting on his silence. This was honestly a major hit to his reliability. It basically just became generally slower. This was ok for more predictive plays, but many of its uses, especially interrupting dashes, started facing reliability issues. Frequently fighting spam happy people like riven it feels like the silence does nothing because the dash is already halfway over by the time it actually hits. It used to be instantaneous, but by changing it to match the visual fx spread it really seems to have lost its status as his "reactive response tool". This was still tolerable, but it has now been compounded by the rework of his ult.

His new ult has potential. The concept of continuously stacking health from his ult is really cool. But the execution is flawed. After 6 stacks, you can only gain it from champion/large objective kills. This is problematic, as his lack of mobility can make it difficult to secure the kills away from your own teammates. And when you do secure the kills, you are basically just stealing them away from your carries, which feels bad teamworkwise. Also, the nature of the stacks is actually not very helpful gameplay wise. The cooldown, even though it is only 80 seconds, FEELS long. There is a kind of performance pressure to get it stacking properly. You feel like your buildpaths are restricted by the need for cooldown, and everytime you miss your ult or the enemy gets away, it feels like a hurtle to your ability to keep up with the rest of the game. Your ult is also a practical necessity to win most fights if you are building tank, as without it you really struggle to match damage with most other champs, so the longer cooldown really hampers your ability to fight, EArly, you likely dont have full cdr and will likely be using it on minions to get stacks, so it is very easy to find yourself in a situation where you lost because the enemy ult was focused less on scaling you into the lategame and more into just killing the other guy. Frankly, the idea was interesting, but the old version wgere it maxed at 6 and refunded cooldown was functionally more fun to play. Even the restriction of losing stacks on death felt less punishing than trying to stack up to a fantasy that frankly doesnt matter that hard bny the time you achieve it. Unless you are just steamrolling the game, by the time you have really become the unstoppable wall the ult stacks promise, you are likely at the end of the game.

got a bit ranty there, but basically the point is that the cho changes, while not mechanically crippling, have created issues with reliability and feel of play. Neither have been an improvement, and by comparison he is just not nearly as fun to play. the increasingly mobile game simply dances around him, his ult feels more restrictive than powerful, and his age and clunkyness is really starting to show.

1 Comments

Nahui6/12/2017, 4:09:43 AM2 votes

I feel like cho is intentionally clunky. He is meant to be -the- behemoth of League, much moreso than even Sion himself. His weakness is that he's slow and clunky, but can tear about anyone apart upon contact.

In terms of the ult, infinite health stacking is dangerous and I think gating it to meaningful stacks after a threshold prevents out of control scaling. Especially since it scales off health now and remains as true damage, the more you feast, the easier it becomes to feast.

I personally don't see any real difference in the new play style. It used to be just a race to 6 stacks and the only incentive they had to execute champs with it was a gimmicky "You get larger than minion kills" mechanic that I guess technically increased Vorpal aoe which honestly didn't matter. Now while the first 6 stacks still might be a race, once you achieve max you aren't delicately trying to preserve yourself to prevent losing any, but rather aggressively trying to get more. It also provides more thought to the ult after 6 stacks so you're not simply using it as a nuke at any point you want to. You still can, but there's a specific benefit to execution. Plus they added a neat indicator to help out with executes.

Other than that, everything he does gameplay wise feels the same. A lumbering behemoth that spells about certain death should he land his Q, specifically in a team fight scenario. Landing the Q, though, is more often than not a challenge in itself as a trade off, sorta like Morg's Q.