Does anyone remember when mobility and low cooldowns had a tradeoff?

ThurgotOfThunder··4 votes·272 views

Originally, the idea behind manaless champs was that they would have longer than average cooldowns to balance out that they have no resource to manage.

Originally, the idea behind high mobility champs was that they paid for it with lower damage/no cc. It's great to be slippery, but you shouldn't get to be slippery, have hard crowd control, have great defensive tools, oh and also is an extraordinary duelist and teamfighter.

Originally, you had to opt into damage to deal damage, and into tank stats to be tougher.

Now we have champs who have these huge steroids tacked onto their kit, crazy second, third, or fourth passives. Crowd control-mobility-damage-utility. Those used to be the pillars of balance. It's like they used to make champs with 25 points divided among those things. Maybe 10 on cc- 0 mobility- 5 damage- 10 utility. Now it feels like they just have to outdo themselves every new release, with a few exceptions. Damage, crowd control, spell spamming, and mobility are getting out of control. I still firmly believe that cooldown reduction is a huge player in this problem, particularly how easy it is to stack a whole bunch of it early on in the game, but it still comes down to kit balance and the distribution of power, which feels heavily skewed towards MORE POWER the longer this game goes on.

15 Comments

makkii3 votes

Pepperidge farm remembers

haaaaaaalp2 votes

I'm not really convinced riot ever valued mobility properly. When riven first came out, she was a pretty big problem. She had more than twice the health regen she had now and other top laners had much more restrictive mana pools so she was guaranteed to shrug off anything thrown her way during laning.

ThurgotOfThunder2 votes

Well, her release was garbage, but they buffed her hard, and with the advent of CDR not being a problem to get anymore, she has no gate on her mobility. She's always dashing, which means she's always dealing aoe damage, shielding, or dropping aoe cc on something, all the time.

Like, I understand some champs are going to be mobile, but there's no excuse for simply never being able to fight someone because it's impossible to lock them down. Playing a top lane as a juggernaut or tank vs some of these champs makes me want to eat glass.

SEKAI2 votes

Yeah, I miss when things were like TF's kit where each spell has a clearly defined purpose that can be summarised entirely in 1 simple sentence or 2; for instance, there's the Q, that literally just does (fat) damage in 3 lines and that's it.

A lot of times, spell descriptions are overly convoluted at this point, many champs these days have essays in their spell descriptions due to the sheer amount of varying stats, conditions, CCs, and other interactions or scaling, all packed into 1 single spell, which imo is a bit way overwhelming.

It's not that distinct and properly defined kits don't exist these days, Kayn and Ornn and a couple others do still have "good" kit for the most part (though Ornn having multiple %hp damage seems rather unnecessary), and Jhin to some extent once you get past the horrible wall of text that's his passive (like really, does Jhin really need all these hidden scaling?). But then, there's also kits like Camille and Zoe (especially her fucking E that required to be cut to like 1/3 of the original version. Who even thought the original hideously bloated horseshit was acceptable?) like holy fucking shit.

.......

EDIT: At least when if you have to stuff things into a kit, do it like Ryze. Sure his kit has a ton of issues, primarily to do with his mana scaling and ulti (I really don't see his W itself being a problem given it was made into a choice where it forces player to choose between fat CC or fat damage so I think it's k), and he still needs at least 1 final rework to straighten things out, but his normal spells imo at least get something right: Each component of Ryze's spell, outside of the "Rune" mechanic which can be a bit odd to try and explain, all come in very small in easily digestible chunks, they just come in a lot of pieces for you to go through if you have to know the details but at the same time you don't need that many of them to grasp its ideas; that is good, because the kit is well defined, is not overly confusing to try and interpret for both the player and the opponent unlike some nonsense about "this spell does X damage, does a 2-stage CC transition that can not be cleansed, gives a mark that amplifies the subsequent/follow up hits, reset on hit, goes into a trap if you miss, and-" (SHUT UP!), has different ways to utilise it but you have to make decision on which combo and doing 1 means you're temporarily locked out from the other options (hence while you can be a bit flexible, you're not flexible all the time. And Ryze is also not universally flexible even when played in its highest caliber given he still sucks in chases, emergency escapes, and teamfights). Ryze is really only a problem because of his ulti, which is the primary focus of his balance disaster (and mana scaling is his secondary issue); otherwise his kit mechanics in general, or at least QWE is concerned, are pretty well made spells that stick to imo good design logic.

ThurgotOfThunder3 votes

TF is a great example- no mobility, single target stun, almost no utility. Blue card is a tradeoff to sustain mana where you could be dealing aoe damage, landing a stun. Sure he has his ult, but it's one of those 2 minute abominations, and it's also basically entirely reliant on having teammates. He doesn't tp behind you, knock you up twice then execute you with % missing while shielding himself and dashing backwards.

Dead flag blues2 votes

Since Yasuo 's release, I feel like Riot is trying to release more and more champions who overcome the weaknesses of the class :

Kalista ranged + mobility + slow + hard engage with R

Ornn ranged engage + damage + tons of stuns + a dash

Zoe (even if I love her) burst mage with long range + hard cc

ThurgotOfThunder1 votes

See, I think Ornn has been dealt an unfair hand. Sure he has lots of cc and whatever, but it's telegraphed, and his dash is slow as balls. He got buffed obviously too hard after release, anyone could see that, but I haven't seen one in game since the last round of nerfs. His cc is extremely conditional, which is a great counterbalance to having ALL THE CC.

ViciousSummoner2 votes

The year is 2050 Ryze is seeing his 900th rework. Q: Active: Ryze fires a nuke destroying all enemy structures in range creating undead soldiers that attack all nearby enemy champions within 10,000 units slowing them over 3s and stunning them over the duration and any champions slain by this ability will leave behind a ghost that can be controlled by Ryze lasting 6 hours or until Ryze decides that he wants to activate the second effect of this ability that allows him to warp all units on the current map onto a different map of his choice. Passive: This unit is a flippin' ninja.

Vekkna2 votes

Remember when 4k+ hp meant you were a tank and not dishing out 1k+ true damage nukes?

Timethief491 votes

I like how you explain all this on examples. So many examples. WOW.

ThurgotOfThunder4 votes

Yasuo has no resource, is extremely mobile, has a long range aoe knockup on a 3 second cd, has double crit chance (lol) gets armor pen from his ult, which is also a knockup suspension, has a pretty sizeable shield, cooldowns lol what're those, and obviously, does an absurd amount of damage.

Riven has no resource, is extremely mobile, has 2 aoe hard ccs, has a shield attached to a dash that scales with her ad (lol), has extremely short cooldowns.

Orianna has relatively low cds, and while she has "mana costs" those are pretty trivial after one item, she has an abundance of utility (huge shield, speed boost, slow, ult pull), but she's also an aoe control burst mage.

Zoe, lol.

Now compare their cc to a tank, someone who is actually supposed to crowd control people. Sion- telegraphed, pretty short range, and while he cd is short for an aoe knockup, it's really not all that short. Ornn, basically all his cc is conditional. Zac, his kit is just cc, he isn't allowed to deal damage anymore.

Why do people think some of the old school meta tanks like Amumu, Shen, and Malphite are so out of style? They have these great high impact abilities on 2 minute cooldowns, or more. Why bother when Yasuo can aoe crit knockup a team 30 times in the cd of Malphite's ult?

This isn't to say all these champions are OP or UP, it's just an observation. CC, mobility, damage, and utility used to be balanced against each other.

redniwediS1 votes

To be fair Riven hasn't changed much since season 2, back when the ideas you're talking about held weight. The game has changed around her, and in a very favorable way, but she is mostly the same.

ThurgotOfThunder2 votes

I can specifically remember Riot Xypherous, one or one of the people who designed her, expressing regret about her kit and wishing he could change it. When the Rioter who makes a champ is frustrated by their creation, and she was really the beginning of the avalanche I feel, that should probably have been dealt with 5 years ago.

Orange Caramel1 votes

Which champions are you tAlking about?

ThurgotOfThunder1 votes

Not any specifically, but I replied to a comment above with some examples. It's not really about specific champs, but about balance as a whole. Kits are just more and more overloaded as time goes on because they want to compete with the other kits that are overloaded, then they make a new kit to compete with that one.

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