Taliyah Discussion

Taliyah is a pretty good champ aesthetically. I think an earth bender is a good character to add to the league roster, even though she is like the most bland earth bender character ever I still like her aesthetics and earth style. However, after messing around with her a bit I am actually quite confused with her from a gameplay standpoint. Her passive, Q, and her ult all encourage taliyah to roam around the map to catch enemies and gank them unexpectedly. And this would be an ok playstyle for a champ to have, but her other two abilities, her W and E, are both very defensive control mage esque, and this directly goes against the play style that the other abilities incentivize. The result is probably the most awkward champion I have ever played in league ever.

Taliyah already seems quite messed up from a design perspective, and won't feel good to play until she picks a side of her gameplay and sticks to it. Want her to focus more on the roaming? Simply lower the cast times of her W and E and nerf other areas to compensate if she's too strong because of that. Want her to actually be a control mage? The passive and worked ground mechanic need to be scrapped or changed completely, imo. When I first looked at Taliyah in her reveal, I was kind of refreshed at how simple she was compared to the other newer champions, but her kit feels more akin to pre rework sion in the sense that sion has both ap and ad ratios in kit, making his playstyle rather unclear, but pre rework sion is better in this regard because you could choose either ap or ad and focus on that, and that changed the playstyle completely through scaling alone. But in Taliyahs kit, you can't just be a control mage or a roamer, you HAVE to be a roaming control mage, because of how the abilities are all designed.

I've watched many people try to gank with her, and have tried it myself, and it's just plain unreliable. Landing her combo takes such a big cast time, and aiming your Q when you're right next to your opponent (because your ganking them) is awkward. I've found it's very easy to go in for a gank with her and really feel like you aren't contributing anything to the gank aside from the wall depending on how you aimed it. When you go in for a gank it's probably easier to simply ignore trying to knock the enemies into your rock field, and simply knock them into your team, and then setting the rock field in their way. I really think she would be a much healthier addition to the roster if her clear focus was that of a control mage, instead of that of a roamer. As a control mage, players get to appreciate the utility her ult provides, instead of it simply being a lesser version of a tf ult.

Taliyah is in need of substantial changes to help her differentiate herself from the other champions. The roaming parts of her kit don't feel good to play with in combination with her other control mage abilities, and a full fledged control mage is something that league really doesn't have that much of, with the only champions really capturing that fantasy for me being Orianna and Azir, both of which I love playing greatly. I think the saddest part of this for me is that I know I would love a Taliyah that has a different passive and different worked ground mechanic (keep it in some form but in a way that rewards being in those zones, instead of rewarding being out of them, and adjusting the time they are there and how frequently you can create them accordingly), but I know her kit isn't going to recieve any gameplay changes other than numbers for years :L.