Why directly lowering the DMG output of the game will NOT improve the game and a different approach

Yes we all know the game is very bursty currently and many champions can instagib many other champions but the problem is with a few exceptions not the game itself, rather it is the options to counter such not being properly used. I truly believe if certain issues were tackled properly the vast majority of the game can be as it is now and if the counter measures to burst are used it will be a balanced state between burst and other strategies.

A background of myself, I have studied software engineering at a technical university and I have spent the longest part of my life with gaming while secondary being competetive in sports for around 6 years. For most of my time I have been competetive in gaming too. I have developed my own games and custom versions of games (also known as hacks for most people) as well as helped with building private servers for games. I also worked in a balancing team for a private server to ensure better balancing than the official server.

Ofc I have my own subjective feeling into it and nobody ever can stay perfectly objective in a matter of how a complex game should be played. I try my best to stay as objective as possible with it and giving every playstyle a chance to be effective if played well as well as mentioning the issues and pros of the recent changes to LoL.

My personal opinion about how strategic skill based games should be played not only mobas but combat games in general:

Good proactive play should only be counterable by better reactive and defensive play as else it would always be the best move to let the enemy make the first move which in a perfect game would result in an endless staredown in defensive position and cause equal skilled opponents to always lose when they start attacking. Of course there are counters to it when proactive plays are not the way to go but my statement was for the majority of cases. An undesired case is when most matchups in a given lane are staredowns while farming up a storm, unless this is what both players want to do. Example: Zed is clearly countered by Lissandra and Kayle due to obvious reasons so him going for a proactive play under circumstances of both players being very good at the champ and the matchup might mostly not be correct choice in lane, but when a Zed has to farm vs an Aurelion Sol because it being the higher% winning play it is bad for the game.

What Riot did over time to adress burst(buffs and nerfs to it), big impacts since end of season 4:

Morello became the prime Manasustain item over Grail -> less MR making mid lane more snowbally and easier to oneshot through earlier powerspike and less defense options. The main difference it made was that AP junglers could more effectively gank mid lane early on for 2 reasons, not first base MR and snowballing mid lane was more rewarding. Also giving AP Mids a better item to rush against AD Mids if defence was not the prime need.

Removal of DFG and the begin of the tank meta through cinderhulk:

DFG was removed due to it being unhealthy for the game and having too little counterplay(reasoning by riot) as well as giving tanky junglers a better item to itemize, making them tankier and having better clear and overall dmg in general.

I personally feel DFG was not a bad item, it had clear disadvantages and counters but they were mostly not used. DFG was an expensive item to rush especially for not having a small spike within building it as well as giving up Mana and 10% CDR for having a better chance at picking a single target. If my enemy rushed DFG I would get an Abyssal Scepter which had a bigger 1v1 laning spike, as well as being cheaper and helping out other magical DMG dealers of my team too. Also I could just go with Mercs into Morello to have myself more Mana to play with and more CDR to control the wave and win by surviving an all in and striking back with lower CDs. Or if confident I could just build the same and outplay. If you are worried about what ADCs can do about it, it was a time where ADCs were usually going for 4 dmg and 1 defensive items, so either banshees or GA would directly counter all out combo bursters.

Now onto Cinderhulk: It started off with a real tank meta even in competetive leading pros to playing cinderhulk tanks with smite TP on top lane. The DMG it caused to soloQ was bigger than most people would think off. It made AP Assassins a straightup bad playstyle while leaving AD Assassins due to higher DPS the only kind of Assassin that would stand a chance and also they were mainly only viable due to being strong laners and thus having a good chance to get an early lead.

Ludens as a replacement for DFG: The issue I see with this is that it gives extra burst more often in trade for smaller burst, which made snowballing much stronger as you would have your oneshot available way more often. Also after turning into a CDR item much later it was pretty much just a better DFG as it gave mana 10% more CDR and half of the burst as multitarget with very low downtime.

Duskblade: After calling out DFG having not enough counterplay bringing an AD burst item to make AD Assassins not only have higher DPS and defence than most AP Assassins they also make them have higher one combo burst was kinda interesting to say the least. I always felt sorry for people who loved the magical assassin playstyle cause it was literally a double kick into the balls for them. AP Assassins nerf due to not enough counterplay while buffing AD Assassins. The various changes of Duskblade had their pros and cons but ultimately it made AD Assassins just more of a main to deal with than AP Assassins ever were in the first place.

ADC changes allowed for more aggressive playstyle in other lanes due to ADC not being the most important member in the team anymore after the start of "tank meta" in season 5.

There are many more important changes but I want to focus more on changes that can make the game healthier.

First a few reasons why generally reducing the burst would be straightup bad:

• Champions who now have overkill damage would be straightup buffed by a huge amount, they would be the only champs who could oneshot and that would be very valuable in a non oneshot meta
• Snowballing would be buffed especially for champs who are good at snowballing as less power means less chances of shutting them down once they are ahead
• Resetchamps like Darius Kata Pyke would skyrocket in winrate especially for players who know how to utilize them well as a single kill would give them the chance to do the same as now while other champs can't oneshot them anymore
• Juggernauts would be WAY harder to kill and thus become a huge problem
• % DMG champs would skyrocket as well as DPS champs as well as conqueror being even stronger than now
• true DMG would be way more effective as less burst means people would itemize so they can't get oneshot in edge cases
• sustain would be buffed insanly, due to being countered straightup by burst
• hypercarry ADCs would outclass lane bully ADCs because finishing games in the mid game is very much linked to bursty powerspikes

Now let's look at issues with current burst:

• Offensive Mobile Bruisers(irelia lol) can oneshot or close to oneshot even with just 1 or 2 DMG items for most of the game
• Conqueror is a keystone good against tanks that also encourages prolonged fighting resulting in providing you effective DMG for building defensive.
• In many scenarios AD Assassins can easily oneshot while building defensive items while AP Assassins can not oneshot anything but a glasscannon if they build defense themselves
• Some bruiser types of champions are very frustrating to play against, cause they deal very big DMG while being tanky and having gapclosing abilities at the same time. Urgot Kled Irelia etc
• ADCs with bursting abilties and/or good selfpeel outshine DPS ADCs by a lot in the vast majority of games. Kaisa Xayah Ezreal Draven Tristana MF while some of these even have good DPS while being selfpeelers or bursters.
• Champs who can abuse gunblade as they get more burst which lets them itemize more defensive which scales with the sustain of gunblade

What can Riot do in order to tackle the issues of the game while making sure the problems of straightup burst reduction would not dominate the game.

The main word is: POWERSHIFTING

So what do I mean by that? Essentially it means that if Irelia wants to oneshot the entire game she will need more than the offensive stats provided by Trinity and defensive AD items. Give her better Scalings but reduce her base DMG, make her DMG reduction scale with defensive stats. So people who want to stay in the fight for longer can itemize for that while people would want to dive the carries can also itemize for that with going for more AD.

In my opinion it would be best to remove conqueror but just removing the true DMG would already help a lot. As you can see most of my issues are linked together for some champions which are exactly most of the champions that are a big problem currently.

ADCs should not have 3 of the main strengths an ADC can have: Burst, DPS and selfpeel. If you have 2 of those there should already be a downside to it, like with Vayne who has low impact range but has decent burst and great DPS and selfpeel. But being strong in all 3 of those things should not be a thing.

Hexdrinker is about to be changed so I am not going to complain about it but it would have been on this post too as it is too good of an item in most cases to be that cheap compared to armguard.

Doing what I mentioned in some examples for powershifting to many champs will not reduce the oneshots drastically but they come at a higher payoff. Which is exactly what I feel is the right approach, if you execute the oneshot perfectly it should be possible, but you shouldn't be able to be a mobily defensive oneshotting CC monster bruiser with true dmg DPS sustain resets and so on. All has to come at a cost and thats why oneshot is healthy for the game, good players can accel at their plays and not be held back by the limits of the game while players who are not able to pull it off as cleanly will have to settle with a saver option.

Obviously a simple post can not contain all the needed scenarios but I hope I could get my point of view across. You can discuss this in the comments but stay respectful and if a Rioter appears to look maybe use this base to discuss in the balance team and try some stuff out.