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Balancing champions for multiple lanes

Ghiefelstein··1 votes·658 views

Champions like Annie, Morgana, Lulu, Maokai and Alistar moved to different lanes in season 4. Instead of ‘enforcing the meta’, Riot decided to balance them for their new positions. A great decision that encourages experimentation and discovery of new things. As long as these champions are not oppressive, they positively influence the diversity and flexibility of the game.

However, there is a problem with how Riot balanced these champions. They toned down the oppressive strengths in the new lanes, but did nothing to compensate the old lane. As a result Morgana mid is weaker than support, Lulu is stronger as a top laner than a support and Maokai is a better top laner than jungler. That is not only disappointing for people who played those champions, but also bad for the game as a whole.

This would be the ideal situation: Someone first picks Lulu. That gives flexibility to her team, because she can go top, mid or support and fits in many teamcomps. It keeps the enemy team guessing what they are going to face. But in reality you know that Lulu is going top regardless of team compositions. Similar for top lane Alistar or support Morgana. Technically they have options, but in reality champions are almost always played in their strongest positions.

Riot already makes very specific balance changes for one lane. For example, they buffed jungle Shyvana in patch 4.21 without affecting her top lane much: Shyvana Q - Twin Bite: 10/9/8/7/6 seconds ⇒ 9/8/7/6/5 seconds W - Burnout: Burnout now now deals +20% bonus damage to monsters

I want to see more of those changes. Champions should be balanced for each lane individually, not just nerfed to keep their strongest lane under control. That brings more flexibility and strategic diversity to the game as a whole. Make champions truly viable in multiple lanes.

1 Comments

Terchio1 votes

Your examples show characters that earn their advantage in their position because of oppressive CC. Annie slid to support because she had powerful damage mixed with crowd control, is incredibly reliable in both, and has inherent tankiness thrown in for good taste.

Ali, while somewhat good as support, generally did better when he turned a 2-on-2 into a quick 3-on-2, especially if his bottom lane laid back and warded your bush for a surprise teleport. 2-on-2, not so great, especially once bot became so heavily powered.

Morgana always had oppressive snares and magic shield, but with the shift into a more aggressive lane, Morgana's skillshot fits right in as support, and as a bonus can shred a high amount of magic damage, which is more typical of new supports. The change from MR Shred to missing HP on E just reinforced the "tag-on" damage effect from her ADC.

Maokai has high burst and fair sustain, plus incredible team presence and CC. It's really crazy he doesn't fit into every comp anyways, but since he has a heavy lane presence, he can often hold back toplane assassins that might wreck regardless of his massive team potential, so he found a good niche there. Just not the same effect from the jungle.

And Lulu is just oppressive in general, it's just that none of it actually pins an enemy down, and toplane Lulu doesn't mind that as much. With Lulu's kit, she can shut down an enemy a little bit as support, but she can only polymorph one of the two, and then the slow doesn't have as much effect on ranged characters on bottom. On top, however, the slow might as well be a stun at its strength against many characters, and the polymorph can be quite devastating on top of it.

So, in essence, Riot didn't pick these characters' lanes, just as they hadn't when Midlane Riven was running rampant. These characters just found a better niche once their unique CC found an opening, and they rode it for a long time until Riot decided that they'd keep the character's identity be retaining the CC, but try to skim in other ways to keep them from being oppressive in their new role. The only exception is Annie, whose stun was cut back a good bit early game, but she still should be nearly as useful as she was before as a mage. For the most part, that hasn't changed at all.

My only beef with Riot is the remakes that tend to change a character's identity into something that hardly fits what it once was, if they even get a new identity at all. Sion's too new to decide for sure on, but Skarner, Viktor, and Kog all 3 ride the least popular list consistently, and a number more find themselves at a quite low win-rate. Only Sej has consistent power at the moment, and I'm sure she'll be nerfed back down soon enough like the rest. For whatever reason, Riot feels comfortable doing minor adjustments to overpowered champions, like Lee Sin, Lucian, Tristana, and Riven, but then takes a huge leap on these other characters that could have used some minor love much earlier. Riot associates being underpowered with needing a total revamp, but overpowered characters should be as much on the table, if not more. After these revamps, these characters have variable power levels, yet still end up scalped to nothing in the end. The only exception I can think of is Maokai atm (and maybe Master Yi), but their kits remained somewhat in tact while they transformed (Kog a little too, but that Q skillshot is ridiculous).

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