Playing against a multikit champion feels like the game is playing favorites

Prometheus856·2/3/2015, 7:51:31 AM·5 votes·1,025 views

Seriously, it's not too often that I actually tell someone to learn to play, but when I face against someone like Gnar, Reksai, Jayce or Lee Sin (so that is to say, literally every game) it legitimately feels like they're being given concessions because they don't know how to play. I'd throw Yasuo onto the list, but he's been nerfed so many times now that it just feels like the person who's playing them is handicapped and doesn't get concessions for it.

There's no one thing that their kits do well, no one central weakness to exploit, no real meaningful counterplay except to ban them out at champion select. There's just a hundred thousand things that the champion does, and if they don't do it right the first time, eh, that's ok. There's no resource management, no gated cooldowns, no real way to capitalize on a mistake because they have a dozen different things that they aren't using while the one thing they missed comes back. To compare, look at someone like, Iunno, Riven. She suffers from a lot of the same problems, but she's still balanced. You can still learn her play patterns and capitalize on her misusing her barrier, her ult's CD, her missing her stun, etc. - and, more importantly, if you lose a fight to her, you can absolutely 100% see what it was you did wrong/she did right. Her kit works. All of it's abilities have a point. If she's unbalanced, it's a pure numbers issue - shave a few points of damage or add a second or two onto a cooldown and she works fine.

But what about someone like Rek'sai? Oh, she missed her ranged poke, that means she won't trade favorably, right? Wrong! The ranged poke is just there, it doesn't actually fit into her combat strategy or trading at all. Same thing with her passive. Even Tryndamere, arguably one of the most simple and mindless champions in the game, has to consider something so complex as "do I press Q to heal and lose the next trade, or keep it and lose the potential health?" Rek'sai faces no such qualms, besides receiving bonus true damage if she Es at the end of a fight. Once again, it doesn't fit her kit at all. It's just there.

Same with Gnar, a champion I want to love but can't over his pile of unnecessary steoids and lack of weaknesses. Great, you dodged his boomerang! Eh, he still has a movement speed boost and an escape that literally takes him across the lane, even assuming that he didn't catch it. Why does his triple strike have a ratio to begin with? Why does it do AP damage and %health damage? Was it really imperative that Gnar not only win trades, but be impossible to build against? Oh, now he's at full fury. Well that's interesting, you dodged all of mega gnar's damage-packed, CC-overloaded abilities and his base steroids still won him the trade? Huh.

I could easily go on for an entire page about how just about every ability on every multikit champion does things that it doesn't need to do, but ultimately, the message is that they're mindless. Somehow, they're supposed to have a high skill cap but you would have to be literally fucking retarded to do poorly with them.

They're completely spoiling my League experience, and it's safe to say that if another one is released, that will be the end of my league career. I'm just too tired of losing a fight because the other guy just does more than me. Riot, if you're reading this, I have a call to action for you. Figure out what it is that these champs are actually supposed to do, and turn off the stuff that they don't need. Yasuo can keep his shield at what it used to be, but he doesn't need his double crit chance and it's weird recharge-on-ult. Gnar can keep his dual-mode weirdness, but he doesn't need three movement-oriented abilities and the ability to kill literally anything in addition to that. Also, why does Lee even have lifesteal and spell vamp?

Thanks.

10 Comments

DisasterSola2/3/2015, 8:06:34 AM2 votes

Rek'sai is rather balanced o.O Like vel'koz.

At least rek'sai and Gnar have reasons as to why they have additional skills.

Things like lee sin have no excuse.

SEKAI2/3/2015, 8:01:50 AM1 votes

Some people like to claim having more stuff in their main's kit is hard to play, but i WOULD LIKE to have MORE stuff in my guy's kit so I will never need to worry about counterpick, counterbuild, team comp and viability AT ALL anymore, unless got nerf clubbed in the face tho.

It's astonishing really, how a company can misinterpret reward with brokeness, and reward the low risk instead of otherwise.

I mean, how much wrong can you be?

ImHerVoice2/3/2015, 9:07:55 AM1 votes

the word your looking for is depth. They lack depth. Its not mindless. its depth. Mindless would mean even an Ai could play the kit to its relative full potentional

DanofDemacia2/3/2015, 8:26:33 PM1 votes

Jayce has to manage his mana cost and no one who has two sets of moves can just transform all silly nilly dude. It does take time to get to learn them and they are higher skill cap usually cuz they arent effect in just one form . Except for rek and gnar.