Thoughts on Champ Design Direction in Relation to Items (Warning: long)
Recently there's been a few posts from Morello, Ghostcrawler, and co. talking about increasing the strengths of champions and creating more identifiable weaknesses. I'm extremely happy to here this (I think it's the perfect direction to go), but I'm not sure if just increasing champion strengths and weaknesses is enough on its own. Your champ is composed of multiple parts: the champion kit, items, runes, and masteries. Increasing strengths and weaknesses provides greater interaction between the kit and the other three (a champ who has increased scaling gets more out of AD). If we just increase the strengths and weaknesses of a champion kit, they won't be able to take advantage of those changes without the items to support their strengths.
If we want to open up champion variety and strategic depth, it needs to happen with items as well. I've become concerned at many of the changes being made on the PBE to items, as I believe they are going in the opposite direction they need to be. Let's list them quick before I get to discussing it:
Banshee's Veil -Spell shield passive increased to 40 seconds from 25.
Deathfire Grasp -Unique active cooldown increased to 90 seconds from 60.
Rylai's Crystal Scepter -Health decreased to 400 from 500. -AP increased to 100 from 80.
(NOTE: I know PBE changes don't necessarily go live. What I'm concerned with is the direction behind these changes, not necessarily the specific changes themselves.)
The problem with the first 2 changes (to Veil and DFG), is that they are nerfing what makes the item unique and powerful, placing more emphasis on the generic stat value of the item. In a similar vein, the Rylai's change does not adjust the uniqueness (the slow), but instead attempts to make it more attractive by adjusting to more desirable stats. Here's the problem, **most items are reduced to being overly dependent upon raw stats to be purchased. ** This causes a couple of problems:
- Viable champions are reduced to largely those that scale well with stats, as opposed to specific effects.
- Item builds are stagnant.
Let's address point 1 first. When every item provides a lot of stats, champions that scale well with stats are the ones that get picked (they get the most value out of their gold). Let's look at Deathfire Grasp for a moment. Ability power is by far the most commonly available stat, and therefore provides the least unique value to the item. If a player's main goal was to gain ability power, they would opt for Rabadon's Deathcap instead. Likewise, cooldown reduction is also available on other items, even in combination with AP. The main draw of DFG is the increased burst potential it applies to your champion, yet the majority of its value is tied up in AP. By increasing the cooldown of the active, we reduce the frequency in which this unique draw is valuable, and increase the dependence of the item to be purchased for its raw stat values (AP and CDR). When items are dependant upon stats like this (and not unique effects), the champions that need their unique effects to be useful are harder to pick, and the champions that scale better with their non-unique effects are stronger picks. If we want more champions with high burst damage but poor AP scaling to be successful, we need to increase the value they get from items like DFG, as opposed to the value it gives to champions who don't particularly want it because they scale better with other options (high AP scaling heroes).
Onto point 2. **When items don't have as clearly defined strengths or weaknesses, it's harder to balance them with one another. ** In this case, the one that's a little more efficient generally gets the edge (it's easier to say one item is more powerful than another, because the stats are very similar). This becomes a problem because the champions with the items that have the edge also end up having the edge. When you focus on non-statistical bonuses on items, the balance becomes a lot hazier and more situationally dependent (how good is a slow active compared to a movespeed active?).
The cool thing here is that it's a 2 way street. If you make item strengths and weaknesses more defined, then you can design heroes with stronger strengths and weaknesses. A pretty simple example is Executioner's Calling and Morellonomicon. Although we don't see these items purchased in actual games, it's perfectly acceptable to design a champion who has massive amounts of healing that can't be handled by ignite alone because these items exist. We can use items not only to help niche champions come into their own roles, but give champions more unique/impactful (read: overpowered) stats/abilities since we have the items to deal with them as well.
I wouldn't be doing the argument justice if I didn't leave you with a caveat though. If you go overboard on these kinds of changes in the realm of counter items, you run the risk of countering a champion too hard with something that's available to everyone, making them completely unpickable. Therefore, **we need to be careful when creating items to limit their power against strategies to only bring those strategies down to earth, not cripple them. ** So what would I do? Here are some examples of changes I feel would be in the right vein:
Deathfire Grasp -AP reduced to 80 from 120. -Cooldown left at 60 seconds and the damage amp is increased to 25%.
This makes DFG better for champions with poor ratios. Because the damage amplification is applied to both the base damage of a skill and it's ratio, champions who don't have great AP scaling can still increase their burst by opting for a DFG. However, to make sure this is more balanced for champions who can burst and also have high AP ratios, the overall AP value is lowered. This is an example of role clarification of a current item.
NEW ITEM: Gummi's Gap Closer Ruby Crystal + Mana Sapphire + 2200g -150 Health, 200 Mana -Unique Active: Champion lunges 400 units in the direction of your cursor. (20 second cooldown) (3000g total)
What's interesting about this item is that it does something very powerful. It gives the player the ability to perform a dash. However, look at how few stats it gives. Because so much of the cost is in the active and not the stats, not many champions can afford to spend this much money on the effect, even though it is very powerful. A marksman/mage would be significantly delaying any sort of damage pickup they could make by a significant margin and would likely be useless in the midgame. Most tanky champions would not have enough effective health to make any use of it since they would die almost immediately upon entering the fight. So who would this help? Initiators and melee damage dealers without a gap closer. For these champions, the significant increase in mobility would be worth the lack of stats despite the price. Take a champion like Alistar. The ability to get into combo range or dive the enemy team easier would be well worth the price, and he can afford to buy fewer tanky stats because of how strong his ult is. I would describe this as an example of an item used to highlight champion strengths.
EDIT: Edited the item cost to what I think is an unreasonable number for clarity, since I guess I wasn't real clear about it. The idea was less of a serious item suggestion (although I do think it could work), and more of a proof of concept that you could have an overpowered effect on an item and have it still only purchased by a relatively small number of heroes. At a 3k gold total, it further emphasizes the point, because I feel like a few champion's (namely Alistar) could afford to go for it, but nobody else would.
That's about all I have for the moment. I'd be happy to hear any feedback from you guys about what you think of the current state of items (or if you think I'm way off base) for some discussion (I'm an amateur game designer and love this stuff). I'm excited about the direction League seems to be going, I just wanna make sure it's going to work.
