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Twisted Treeline has become as stale as it gets.

Austinodood·1/11/2018, 12:01:03 AM·6 votes·737 views

A little about me: I've been playing this game since season 1 and has always been a huge fan of twisted treeline. I've reached diamond in several different seasons and queues, whether it be solo 5's, team 3's, or flex 3's. I used to play quite a bit and posted on the old forums a lot but I took about a two year break from the game once I began taking more time-consuming college courses. I started playing again around last November and was able to reach diamond in flex 3's in about 60 wins.

Let me start off by saying that not all of the changes I've noticed in the game are bad. Just to name a few good changes, I enjoy the new honor system, the remake match mechanic, ranked flex 3's, and general client functionality. And of course, I am aware of the several current issues of the game, such as the new currency system, insane snowballing of matches (and matches ending very quickly), damage creep, and imbalance of champion viability. The purpose of this post is to focus purely on the effects that twisted treeline game play experiences as a result of the current state of the game.

I was playing 3's with my friend the other day and I asked him if Riot still balances champions specifically to that map. He actually laughed at me and said, "I'm surprised you would even ask that. Everyone completely forgot about this map." I'm not sure when Riot quit balancing champions for treeline, but I can definitely say that there is a MASSIVE champion imbalance on this map. It's reached the point where if you don't pick -and- ban god-tier champions, you are going to have an extremely difficult time winning in mid to high elo. IN MY OPINION, the god-tier champions on this map are Anivia Chogath Darius Garen Graves Illaoi Kayle Kayn Malzahar Maokai Morgana Ornn Poppy Sejuani TahmKench Taric . I'm sure anybody who's played lots of treeline will agree with me when I say these champions are deeply contested, and very often outclass other champions of similar roles. Oftentimes, you may even get flamed for NOT picking one of the 16 champions above. That's right, only about 12% of champions are considered viable in mid to high elo ranked 3's. Personally speaking, I main Ekko and have firsthand experienced this great imbalance when playing versus champions like Anivia Malzahar Morgana Chogath . I may win laning phase, roam, win in cs and kills, and still lose to the opponent simply because they outclass me as an AP champion on that map.

The support meta on 3's is another aspect that makes the game extremely stale. For those that don't know much about treeline, the classical meta has generally been a jungler, a bot laner, and a top laner, which in my opinion allows lots of diversity between champions. An example is JarvanIV jungle, Renekton top, and Brand bot. Nowadays the most prevalent way to play the game is by having an AP mage bot, and a carry/tank support in both top and the jungle, so then one person can receive most of the gold resources on the map. An example is Graves carry, Taric support, and Malzahar bot. This is antifun to play against, and can only be dealt with by playing support comp yourself. The only other way to win versus support comp as jungle comp is to win very hard against them early before the carry scales (which serves to be very difficult considering they have a tank cc support following the carry everywhere). The thing that makes playing versus support comp frustrating is that the carry scales VERY quickly. Imagine a jungle vs support match that remains relatively balanced for 20 minutes. Kills, deaths, and towers are even. However, the carry of the support comp has 250+ cs, and can now practically 2v3 with their support because of how strong they are now. One may think the support will be weak because of this, but this is not true either because the support is always a champion with lots of hard CC and is not gold-reliant (although they do have gold from support items, the root of the problem). If the game runs long enough, the support comp will win, because the carry will be two or three full items ahead of everyone else. It is absolutely ridiculous and antifun for the jungle comp to play against. Even in support comp versus support comp, the game isn't fun because the match turns into a huge farm fest and that's all there is to it.

In short, it wouldn't be too difficult to rebalance twisted treeline. In my opinion, all that it would require is champion balance changes specific to the map and nerfing the support comp. I think it would be interesting if there was a way to nerf support comp, but still allow for it remain a legitimate strategy without having it be actually overpowered. Thank you for anyone who reads this post and let me know your thoughts! ~Austinodood

1 Comments

Aeszarck1/11/2018, 2:03:55 AM3 votes

I agree, support comp vs support comp is one of the most boring things that could happen. It's just non-stop farming.

I'm happy to be an unskilled player because at my rank, I actually see most people playing jungler comps, and even when people do a support comp they don't execute it to perfection like at higher ranks, so a jungler comp against it works okay. I almost just don't want to get better because I know that I'm going to see boring support comp after boring support comp, and the same Champions too. Then power disparity between the best Champions and the others is pretty astounding. If a Champion on Summoner's Rift was as overpowered as Anivia or Taric are on Twisted Treeline, the Champion would be nerfed in the next patch substantially. However, Twisted Treeline players instead just have to hope that some change makes Anivia or Taric or any other amazing Twisted Treeline Champion overpowered on Summoner's Rift and Riot has to nerf them. I dislike how long Riot has left these terribly overpowered Champions in Twisted Treeline. Summoner's Rift never had such a stale set of overpowered champions that were just so far above the competition that it was unreasonable to pick anything else.

I really hope that Riot is not going to just leave the mode to die. It's fun, but the champion imbalance is incredibly apparent, the support meta is a big problem, the way the map is completely ignored in missions is frustrating, and the fact that one cannot earn Mastery Tokens on the map is another big discouragement to me.