Garen/Bruiser General
TL;DR Below
I don't play league competitively. I usually play ARAMs when I'm alone, random stuff when I'm with friends. I don't really care whether I win or lose. However, that doesn't mean that I don't think your results in game shouldn't have a direct correlation to the effort you put into your gameplay. I'm not very good at League. When I play with my friends, I can rarely go even against players ranked above Gold. My mechanics aren't the best. That said, there are a few champs that I like, and have played a lot. For example, in the Marksman role, I can do well with Jinx, Graves, and Sivir. Now, theses aren't the hardest champions to play (I'm no Azir main), but champs like Jinx, for example, at least require you to be mindful of what is toggled, who is where, and what strategy to use. It's not Yi, who can just jump on the nearest squishy and win.
I'm going to continue with the Jinx theme, because I recently played an ARAM game where I rolled Jinx. I was pretty excited, because I've been maining Jinx for a while now. Now, in this game, I was an absolute monster for the first few minutes, to the point where I was starting to wonder whether there was something wrong with matchmaking, and I was being placed with less experienced players. Anyway, this game get s drawn out. At the 30 minute mark, I'm hard carrying my team, and can still duel and kill multiple members of the enemy team alone. However, our opponents happened to have a Garen on their team. Now, I knew what people have been saying about Garen, and bruisers in general lately. I knew that if I could kite him, we would win. I proceeded to do this, with some success. However, after he obtained his 400th point in armor, I started to struggle, even with Last whisper and Brutalizer. I actually started to do something I haven't done since before I hit level 30; I started to tryhard. I put a lot of effort into making sure every W hit at the right time, to make sure i always used my E to tie up their engage, or to save it so we could retreat. It didn't matter.
As is, Garen can do whatever he likes, while requiring minimal skill or effort to be very successful. To counter that effectively, in the ADC role, you need to put in a lot more work, just to hold your own. I understand that he is a 450 champ, and is supposed to be a way to get new players into the game without scaring them off with a learning curve. I get that it can be fun to be fed or op in a game and be able to do what you want with impunity. What I don't get is why Riot would balance the game so that players putting in the same amount of effort don't receive similar results.
I don't know why Riot did this to Garen. He was fine as he was. I played him prior to this buff, and enjoyed him. In fact, I was able to do very similar things then to what you can do now, it just required better communication and planning. Now, he can do whatever he wants without much more than an on my way ping.
Worst thing is that Riot won't do anything about this. I know they won't. As someone who usually plays a tank, tanking is a lot easier than playing higher skill cap assassin. It is a good role to bring more players into the game. More players is more money. Also, they don't seem to care about game balance outside of the professional scene. This is understandable from a business perspective. They get the most money out of professional play, and the rest of us are unlikely to leave if we haven't already, so they don't really need to put a lot of effort into maintaining their player base.
I don't know what I expected by making this thread, because, as I've already said, Riot won't do anything about it. I just hope, even if they don't change anything, that they realize that continuing with this style of tank meta does nothing but make the lives of everyone not playing a tank much harder. It's not actually balanced, it's just a facsimile. Success should scale with effort, teamwork, and skill, not armor and magic resist. Lastly, it saddens me that the company with one of the biggest player bases ever has decided to neglect the very people who made them billionaires.
Tl;dr: While I don't particularly care about the outcome of games, I can see that the current meta is unpopular. In my experience, it doesn't reward the things that Riot claims they support (communication, teamwork, and skill), but instead rewards whoever can build armor first. As much as I want them to change, I know they wont.
