What makes a champion bad balance/low counterplay

Not to be mistaken for poor balancing. If you want to know the difference Arcsecond made a really good video on poor balancing, which I'll post below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34Jq1U9tw2U

Bad balance essentially falls under bad design. I see this thrown around a lot on boards and I think the definition is lost among a lot of players. Bad design doesn't mean uncreative design. It doesn't mean something you can't avoid (targeted abilities) either. Bad design essentially means that the champion's play pattern is one where the level of interactivity is almost nonexistent.

Here's the catch;

1. This applies specifically to high elo because using waves to contest your opponent finally becomes an important factor in interactions.
2. This does not apply to counter lanes as you generally can't do much in these lanes until you know where your jungler and the opposing jungler are.
3. Having one low counterplay spell does not make the entire champion bad balance. It's more important to look over their whole kit/playstyle and how it impacts a wide variety of champions.

is the biggest example of #1. Ryze scales into a monster and his waveclear is salt on the wound. Through waveclearing early, he makes it nearly impossible to jump on him, gains priority long enough to get a Tear, and continues this pattern until he's strong enough to fight. Attempts to interact with him are shrugged off because he also has a shield, MS boost, and good DPS. This means only a select number of champions can fight him and he can usually run away from those champions.

In example #2, lets look at vs. . If Darius gets a freeze off, there's nothing Jax can do. Jax cannot walk up to interact with the wave as Darius will out-trade him and if his jungler is present, it will likely end in Jax's death. Does that make Darius a poorly balanced champion? No, because this is specific to a single matchup at a single level. If you look over the roster of top lane champions, there are multiple champions that can contest this wave and even do the same to Darius. (p.s. if you want to complain about a poorly designed champion is pretty decent right now)

EDIT: friend told me this is how the matchup played. He was wrong. And bad.

Finally, for #3 we're going to look at 's Pick a Card. A targeted stun seems particularly low counterplay, but if you look at his kit, you see that it's obvious (and timed) when he's picking a card, it's obvious (and timed) how long he has to throw the card, and you know he has thrown the card, so you have 4-5 seconds to fight him when his stun is off cooldown. A better example is, again, this monster . On top of having top tier waveclear and good escape opportunities, he has an instant point and click root so you're sitting still and unable to do anything while he's outdpsing 90% of the mid roster and running around at 600 MS.

If you want more examples of low interactivity among mids besides me suggesting we should take a 6th stab at a Ryze rework, here are examples. - Good orb pickups from minions make her impossible to duel on a number of champions, if you can duel her odds are she's just going to afk waveclear shove because you'll be at your tower. If you can match her shove, she'll have priority meaning you have to have vision set up by your jungler or you simply can't enter the river without risking inting. - very interesting kit, weaknesses defined as the game goes on, but his laning phase is one where he's going to eat one or two spells from you and heal it up with his Corrupting Pot and then shove the wave harder than anyone else for the first 4 levels. Again, enjoy tower-farming. Don't worry boards, you're definitely right about one champion being bad design - . Yasuo's kit has so many tools that stomp on skillshots you're generally discouraged from interacting with him.

Hope this helps put things into perspective.