@Morello, want me to explain, using design values, why Yasuo is hated? [x-post from forums]

Morello: People (who are understandably not armed with game design experience OR the values context)

Lets go: This will be a long (and well received) post.

League Of Legends is a MOBA. As is custom, two teams of unique champions take to a symmetric arena, and duel for a period before moving into a more grouped and team based fighting style.

The fights in this game operate around basic attacks, which can be considered to be a low range, targeted, costless low cooldown ability. In addition to that, champions have the option to skillfully use ability casts. These casts are limited by at least two resource systems in general.

Resource system one: Cooldowns. By using an ability, you have given yourself a window in which you cannot use it again. This penalizes poor use and opens a time where an enemy can engage you without fear that ability will be used again.

Resource system two: Secondary resource. This is a value which slowly recovers over time, and is consumed on any ability use. There are two parts to this. The first is that high levels of long term use of a ability should result in you being unable to use it. While cooldowns are a short term limit on maximum cast rate, resource consumption and regeneration enforce a longer term, often lower maximum cast rate. This is especially important in game senarios where two opposing champions are interacting with each others for a long period of time. The second part to a secondary resource is that be casting one ability, you lower your capacity to cast all abilities. This is a 3rd level restriction, not on the short term ability cast rate, not on the long term ability cast rate, but on the rate at which you can cast anything, long term.

Now we have established that an overriding mechanism in LoL combat is the management of these triple tiered cast rates, let us look at what these abilities can do on cast.

They can deal damage: Damage skills tend to have cooldowns which scale with range, but the overall philosophy is that once the damage skill has been used, it has a cooldown, so by using this skill, the player weakens themselves for a short period. In addition, because of the secondary resource cost, they have chosen to use some of their overall, long term casting potential to obtain damage. This is a weighted decision against the other kinds of abilities.

They can disable enemies: Disable skills have cooldowns which prevent enemies for being disabled for greater than a certain duty cycle. By using this skill, the player sacrifices their ability to impede enemy actions. And again, part of the long term cast potential is transferred into disable.

They can provide mobility: This is one of the strongest statistics in the game as it allows the entrance or exit from opportunity or risk zones, and places very high selective power in a players hands. Their cooldowns and costs are tuned so that often a player must choose to use the skill to enter the zone, or exit it, a balance value which allows the opponent to respond.

The final deciding factor in fights is the base stats and scaling of a champion. Essentially, this a gold->power conversion ratio determinable by the sum scaling of various stat ratios on an champions kit. Champions who have a high conversion ratio have a higher power per gp spent.

Now, let us look at Yasuo's kit. I'm not even going to touch on numbers, because it's not the numbers which need 'tweaking', the qualitative nature of the kit needs to change.

Passive: By obtaining doubled crit chance, Yasuo has an extreme nigh overbearing gold->power conversion ratio on critical strike chance. Combine that with the knowledge that critical strike is present on movespeed and attackspeed items, two stats Yasuo has a much higher gold->power conversion ratio for than most champions, and critical strike is present on high attack damage items, another stat Yasuo has a high conversion ratio for, and people can see that Yasuo gets much, much more out of less gold than almost all other champions.

This passive alone makes a mockery of the notion of a balanced item system. This passive abuses critical chance to the degree that say, Vlad abuses spellvamp. Items tuned for champions who do not abuse it become instantly overpowered on an abuser, and tuning for an abuser will leave other champions in the dust.

Q: This is a damage skill. It does not have a secondary resource cost. Thus, the only method of enforcing a cast rate is a cooldown. Unfortunately, this skill not only has a very short cooldown, but it scales down to a level where it might as well not exist. This skill does not force any decisions about long term casting rates, and with no window of engagement opened by the cooldown, there is no reason to not cast it as often as possible.

However, upon the 3rd cast, it becomes a disable skill, and since the cooldown scales down to such a low level, the disable duty cycle of this skill rapidly ramps up from a manageable level to 25% or more, a very high duty cycle for such strong CC able to be applied so often.

As one who is following can see, there is zero cost, trade off, or opening for using either the damage or the disable of this skill. This is direct contradiction to the established play balance of the rest of the game, where champions who obtain damage or disables pay a cost for it and / or open a meaningful engage window.

E: This is a mobility skill. It does not have a secondary resource cost. The only method of gating it is the presence of a target, and the sub second cooldown. For the purposes of gating ability use, and thus mobility and power, this has no effect. Thus, we look at the availability of targets. As LoL is a game based around interactions between both enemy team and opposing, much larger numbers of minions, in almost all instances where Yasuo might engage an opponent there will be a large number of targets to use this mobility on. Because of this, Yasuo has no restrictions on using mobility to enter and exit risk zones rapidly and often. There is no decisions about if damage or mobility is a more appropriate use of long term casting potential.

As you yourself have mentioned, LoL is suffering from mobility creep, a phenomenon where mobile champions, with the extreme power associated with selective engagement and ability to enter or exit risk / opportunity zones at will are objectively more powerful than champions with out. Even among mobile champions, those who can be more mobile, or have fewer limits on mobility are among the most powerful. Thus, Yasuo with no limits on mobility is one of the most powerful mobility champions.

Finally, R: This is a mobility + damage + disable skill without a secondary resource cost, but with a limited activation window. While I approve of limiting activation of this powerful damage + mobility tool to the result of a skillful application of abilities, allowing this to be activated when an ally, with skillless ability use triggers the condition makes a mockery of your entire attempt to balance it.

As an ultimate, the engage window for this skill should be very large, due to the associated power of it. Unfortunately, this skill has one of the lowest cooldowns for an ultimate, meaning that the real restriction on activate is creation of activation windows, a trivial task if an ally's skillless ability use can trigger it.

Having established that use of this skill is not in any way meaningfully gated, by cooldowns, no resource costs, nor skillful activation windows, the effects of this skill are to instantly move Yasuo to a extreme oppertunity zone, to disable enemy champions such that Yasuo and his allies have uninterpreted ability to damage them at will, and finally this skill applies a large amount of damage, then increases Yasuo's damage for a meaningful duration, often longer than fights last.

Morello:

The community at large is complaining about this champion because his casting potential is unlimited. The community is complaining because as a result of this high casting potential, he has a very high rates of mobility, damage and disable skill activation. These high rates of activation give Yasuo power far outside the envelope of existing champions, who are able to be exploited through their engagement windows, a factor Yasuo does not suffer from as he is not meaningfully cooldown limited.

Finally, the community is complaining because this champion has an abusive gold->power conversion ratio on several linked and already powerful stats, which simply exacerbates the problems of the above paragraph.

There, is that enough design based values context of why we despise having to interact with this poorly designed champion?

PS: After IronStylus effectively told the forum goers that they would be ignored I'm x-posting from here Maybe I'll get a real reply.

Oh, and as a final note, this editing system is absolutely useless for large posts. I can barely work with this, and it's a mere 1500 words.