Why some archetypes are doomed to cause trouble - they just don't fit (Warning: Long Post Incoming!)

This is more the rant of a sudden idea of an impulse of a sudden "pling" in my coffeine-overloaded brain at 5 AM (edit: Six AM now it took over an hour to type all this lol), than anything actually thought out, but please bear with the wall of text that I am going to slap into your faces now. Who I am? No one cares. Am I qualified to talk about any of this? Not sure, but given the nature of this board I get the idea that it has never stopped anyone from making a thread. Is reading all this a gigantic waste of your time? I hope not, at least I'm trying to make it a somewhat _informative _ waste of time.

Day and night, night and day, this board flows over with complaints. And some with good reason, after all a game can be good, but I would never go as far as to call it perfection. So there is always a reason for the complaints, at least for some of them. Sometimes the reason is obvious. An overtuned number here, a bugged interaction there, you know, the usual stuff that tends to get fixed sooner or later. In some cases a lot later, which is also a problem at times, but these are not the issues I'd like to explore in this text. These are all things that can be easily changed, modified, or even removed within a few days - and without changing the game drastically. Oh sure balance might shift, the meta might be in shambles, but League of Legends will still be League of Legends, no matter what part of the champion roster currently takes the spotlight.

No, the problems I want to talk about run deep, deep in the very structure of this game. To some part they were previous mistakes, some have even been fixed already, and some are almost impossible to solve now as they are inherent to the MOBA genre as a whole.

Out of all ludic (meaning defined by mechanic and not by setting) videogame genres, such as "The FPS", "The RPG", or "The Puzzle Game", "the MOBA" is one of the most fascinating subjects for historical analysis. For one it is not an "independent" genre. Puzzle games and Roleplaying go back far far beyond the times someone filled a gigantic room with metal parts and called it a calculation machine, and the shooter has been there since the dawn of the genre, with the old "Doom" often being cited as the source of it. But the MOBA came later, a mod created from another game, a frankenstein-ish creation by taking parts of RPG and Real-Time-Strategy, but mostly RPG. That in itself is nothing new, genres in every medium tend to mesh, just look at the last 100 years of movie history. But in this case something weird happened: some of the core elements used were not suitable for a transition from Singleplayer or CO-OP to competitive Multiplayer - at least not suitable as the elements of the shooter or other genres were.

And this is why some mechanics and archetypes that worked perfectly fine in their "original genres" suddenly start acting up here or have to be completly removed - like the Dodge stat. Randomness was completly fine in RPGs and still is a massive part of them - after all every single Dungeons and Dragons session is still played with dice. And who's going to complain about it being unfair to play against? The monsters you slaughter on every run? Hardly.

Crit also falls into here, as it is a problem to why marksmen pretty much run this game since season one, but less about that now, I got a more important point to make:

But the even bigger problem is how entrie archetypes were taken over into this enviorment that is not suitable for them. I will now list three (there might be more to find) examples of archetypes that can only work in this game if they are massively undertuned and can cause massive problems if they are even a teeny tiny bit too strong:

1.) Damage over Time

Every single DoT mage has proven problematic. Cassiopaia? Reworked, then the Rework Reworked, and still an inaesthetical excuse for a lack of art and vfx ressources on her updates. Mordekaiser? Let's not talk about it, or Malicious will probably get PTSD or something. Yes he needed a rework, BUT NOT LIKE THAT FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE! Malzahar? Had his DoT power-budget removed and stuffed into the ultimate. And Ryze? Let's be real, at this point reworking him once a year has already become some sort of tradition. Can't wait for the next version.

The core problem with damage over time is that it has to be PERFECTLY balanced for it to work. Either you kill the enemy fast enough or you don't. Given that you play against burst-champions that means your DoT has to be "slightly slower burst" to be able to compete, which means that either you are brutally OP or you are absolutely useless, depending how the numbers are tuned. Or the numbers are so high that you might as well call it "burst per second", in that case you started playing a burst mage with a seemingly infinite rotation. That's the worst case scenario to so speak. The problem is that once you are not that strong or close to it, those champions feel so abysimally weak to play that they completly vanish from the game.

This makes balance a nightmare if you ever want these champions to be even remotely viable.

Technically marksmen also fall into this category, but for some reason here the solution is not nerfing it down but instead pumping up the damage of assassins and mages and melee carries so they can be killed so they need more damage to not be completly countered which needs more damage to... - and so on and so on, and here we get some fun damage creep in.

**2.) Melee Carries ** This is maybe a bit less problematic and potentially solveable, but the way it is handled now is... not good. The melee dps character is a staple in every good RPG, digital or on paper. The warrior, the barbarian, the berserker, etc. etc. It fulfils a certain aesthetical- and power-fantasy that mostly includes jumping into a crowd of enemies and smashing them all to pulp. And in the RPG or Dungeon Crawler world that is completly fine and without any problems. The only issue now is when it comes to a player vs player setting. We all know how nasty a strong Yi or Xin or Yasuo can be. And we also know absolutely shit they are to play if they are not on that state of power.

The ranged high damage dealers of the game usually also have weaknesses, mostly in a lack of mobility, a lack of defensive tools, or with their main damage being gated by cooldown and ressource, as well as mechanical skill required to utilize it. HOWEVER, a melee damage dealer needs survival tools and mobility to even be remotely viable, or he will be kited into oblivion. But with an inherent weakness of the core-design removed, that can only lead to problems.

Again an archetype that worked wonderfully in the world of PvE, because even when they were strong you didn't need to play against it.

3.) Dedicated Healers

This here is more of my own experience. I'm not sure how often you broke my poor banana-goat's back with the nerf bat, but apparently it was not enough. I recently have more than a 100 games with her, she is my highest mastery champ, and most of these games were played FULL AP TOPLANE. Oh and I also hold a good winrate with her that way. This is not for bragging (ok maybe a little bit. Scrap that. A GIGANTIC BIT. I'm proud of my goat.) but to make a point: Dedicated Healing as a core mechanic of a champion's design is borderline gamebreaking and and absolute pain in the arse to play against, and that's not even accounting for the boring botlanes she tends to cause. Never before have I seen enemy teams self-destruct that hard when losing against a team that was pretty much immortalized by me.

For all the Magic Players here, imagine playing against the nastiest counter-deck you can imagine. And now imagine it runs infinite counter-spells. Everything you do, everything you try will just be negated, even your biggest team effort, as long as it does not insta-kill my entire team will be negated by me just pressing "R", and that's not even accounting for the normal healing.

Just as with the "melee dps" the healer is a core element of every good RPG. Mostly because you don't really have to play against it.

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The biggest problem of the game appears the be its "historical baggage" that runs deep in the game, and it all crosses over with that a champion is supposed to be: a POWER FANTASY. Those are exeptional characters, they are like the superheroes and super-villains and super-grey-characters-that-meddle-somehow-and-are-relevant of this world. So no matter the archetype, you want to feel powerful.

And in this highly competitive game there is no room for a weak archetype. Healers want to heal death away, Warriors want to smash and claim victory against even the craziest odds, and DoT players want to see their enemies health bar melt away. The problem is that the moment they no longer do it against an NPC-enemy, and just for their co-op mates but also against other players, they are not allowed to be strong, because even in a weakened state they can throw an entire game upside down once they can even build the tiniest lead and play out their strenghts, which is a massive disortion of game balance.

And in a competitive game of power fantasies, none is going to settle with a "weak archetype". You can't just nerf the problematic ones until they CERTAINLY don't cause trouble. You'd have to break them down so far not even the most crazy die-hard mains would dare picking them into a ranked game anymore. Either it's useless to play or frustrating to deal with, a sign that it just doesn't fit into the game, no matter how you twist and turn it - at least not in these iterations of the archetype. At the same time this game is much less of a "teamgame" than a Co-Op RPG. As much as Riot wants to push teamplay, organized team esports, and so on, in SoloQ and generally we are usually lone wolves, and if we fight in a team then more in a way that five individuals charge into the same direction by coincidence, not because they are a "team" of any sorts, even if we all give our bests.

The Result: The "empowerment" this game givies is primarely on an individal level, not on a team scope. That also makes it harder to tune archetypes down and just point at the "teamplay"-aspect - because the majority is not going to play a champ that requires others for them to unlock their fullest potential.

I think the most important thing people should realize that a MOBA like League of Legends follows radically different design-rules than the rest of the gaming world. Just because you know Dedicated Healers exist in all other games doesn't mean they will work here, and the same applies for other archetypes. They don't really belong into the game in these forms, they are baggage from the very origins of the genre. A genre that was not defined by a groundbreaking, well-thought-out game, but rather by dozends of people mashing around with map-editors and then slowly building up from there more than a decade ago.

These are the spots you will have to aim on if you want to change this game for the better.

I am not saying that we should remove these archetypes all from the game completly - nono don't be crazy. But they all need a massive overhaul from the ground up, properly re-defining the principles those champions stand on in this kind of game.

The problem is not Yasuo's stupid Windwall, or Lee Sin's stupid Ward-Hop, or the stupid burst of assassins, or the stupid whatever the borderline-insane-yet-also-astouningly-stupid-at-times-boards-hivemind will find to complain and circlejerk about.

The problem runs deeper, and it needs to be adressed if this game is supposed to evolve in any way.

I hope this made any sense at all and thank you for your attention.

[slayer-jinx-catface]

(There really needs to be a proper sticker for this, like one that bows to an audience or something like that - this one feels a little silly in this context, but still is the only one that remotely fits <_<)