Boards›Gameplay

In Gameplay Thoughts Aug 29 Meddler admits what I've suspected about balance

Khristophoros·8/30/2018, 11:57:49 PM·5 votes·1,570 views

Riot wants to make mid lane more exciting for spectators by keeping specific champions strong. They wish they could buff Zed and Yasuo more, but they know it would destroy solo queue.

What he didn't mention is they will not be nerfing LeBlanc anytime soon even though she is probably the most toxic champion to lane against and has a high ban rate. And it goes without saying they won't be nerfing Zed either. Basically in general they don't care if a champ is absurdly popular and/or high ban rate if they deem the champ to be positive for the spectator experience. The spectator experience is taking priority over our gameplay experience.

If you ever really pay attention while watching LCS you might notice that mid lane doesn't get much attention from the observers. It's really boring, even when you get champions like LB in play. Riot's been trying to fix that with the changes to waveclear, cannon minions, and champion balance, etc... But it seems like nothing has worked. Pros still want to play safe and win, so even with high kill pressure champions in mid, they will still do their best to play safe and only go for "free" kills. They will pressure away their lane opponent and secure a big CS lead, which is ofc because the other team is very coordinated and their lane opponent is also a pro.

With the above perspective, in my opinion the attempts to make mid lane more exciting to spectate have all failed while damaging normal play.

I predict that mid lane will never be exciting unless champions who are supposed to be making plays are incentivized to make plays over securing a CS lead. If simply abusing their high kill pressure in lane to secure a CS lead is sufficient to do their job, then those champions will be played as such because it is the safe way to play, especially considering these champs all have the mobility to escape from all-ins and ganks.

30 Comments

haaaaaaalp8/31/2018, 12:24:36 AM2 votes

Not even sure why they want to buff so much, nerfing the top tier champions is better than buffing balanced champions into being overpowered.

The problem a lot of people seem to have is the inability to admit some champions in the game may be overpowered. There are 140 champions in the game, even if riot was good at balancing, we would expect some differences in power with something like 45 overpowered champions, 45 balanced ones, and 45 underpowered ones. They focus too much on well champion x may be a problem but champion y is more of one. In reality, they should be saying champion x, y, z all need nerfs as well as a few others that they haven't even thought of yet.

Madsin258/31/2018, 5:16:09 AM2 votes

League is the most boring thing to watch.

It is true that all this damage creep has made much more fights happen but doesn't change the fact it sucks to watch.

Dope Solo8/31/2018, 12:20:35 AM1 votes

This makes a lot of sense. I don't know who downvoted this thread and why, but I agree with almost all of it. The only exception would be that midlane isn't "exciting". As my preferred role, I often watch videos to see how the experts approach their lane. I think maybe riot just isn't aware that the people that play mid are into something other than the forcefed meta they've been trying to make happen. That, different roles attract different types of people, and they just don't 'get' midlaners.

Maybe if they made some map changes so that mid was more accessible, just a little more dangerous somehow, like narrowing the width of the lane 5-10% it would satisfy a different criteria, and be more interesting to watch, if that's really a problem.

Light Burner8/31/2018, 1:57:02 AM1 votes

Within the top 15 champs in mid lane 1 is an assassin and the rest are all mages yet players still complain about assassins being broken and mages are underpowered (plat and higher winrates). The only assassin is fizz and hes sitting at #14 with .03 percent better winrate than twisted fate who's #15 so I dont get why players keep complaining about champs like zed and yasuo when they're sitting at #32 and #34 in winrate. I really want someone to explain to me with some logical reasoning why they feel these champions are problems.