Boards›Live Gameplay Balance

Tuning the power of a disable around its avoidability is impossible.

Critkeeper·4/26/2014, 11:54:47 AM·3 votes·645 views

It is fine to balance a morgana snare by very slow projectile speed to make it easy to avoid in a solo lane or a laboratory setting for example. (I'm not complaining about morgana btw, this is just an example)

In this "laboratory" setting the punishment not avoiding morgana's slow projectile is a long duration snare, which is a fair punishment.

But what about outside of that context? What about a real game?

In a real game the punishment is not only a snare, but also a stun and probably any other CC the enemy team wants to put on you because they know you can't avoid it. In fact, Morgana doesn't even need to "risk it" by throwing out her slow snare on a moving target, she can just wait until someone is stunned with a targeted ability that can't be dodged, and then she can snare them while they can't move.

The point I'm making is that "slow projectile speed" in a real team fight in real games is an artificial weakness. It may be a real weakness in a solo lane, but with the prevalence of unavoidable crowd control it can't even be called a weakness in a small skirmish-- someone is bound to have a targeted snare or stun or wide area disable or 80% slow.

In other words, crowd control makes the execution of follow up crowd control trivial, and trivializes the weaknesses associated with particular execution those individual spells. It takes the "skill" out of "landing" a big important spell because the enemy champion / team cannot react since they already failed to react once. This removes opportunity for continual reaction and therefore it removes opportunity for interaction.

Being snared for a precious couple seconds in an important team fight for being hit by a slow moving skillshot is fair and the skillshot was balanced around that case. Being unable to avoid the even slower moving even longer lasting stun that was sent at you without being able to react to it BECAUSE you are snared isn't fair because the slow moving snare wasn't balanced around the idea that the punishment would be a snare followed by a stun.

Cleanse and QSS as a design aren't a good approach to preserving the skill and interaction in the game because it just leads to a path in which the team with "More control" wins. The first round of disables is just to force QSS and cleanse to be used and the subsequent rounds are used to actually create a disable. The fact that crowd control is so prevalent that it can be doubled up without much issue means that the power of QSS for "fixing" a mistake is trivialized, and even cleanse isn't sufficient.

The biggest offender is targeted crowd control followed by slow moving long lasting skillshot crowd control. Something needs to be done to prevent edge case abuse. I do not think that the game can be balanced around the idea that each control spell will be followed up with another control spell, because then each control spell would only last a fraction of a second in duration and leave it feeling horrible outside of this edge case.

We need something that just targets the edge case abuse and nothing else. Something that makes chain disabling a single champion very inefficient / ineffective. Tenacity isn't the answer, because it has the same power per spell whether hit by one spell or by 4 spells serially.

What is actually needed is a systems change that makes it impossible to crowd control someone who is already crowd controlled or has been very (within a fraction of a second) recently crowd controlled. This would make it so that each control spell can be balanced around its own power level rather than the power level of the average control spell, because landing a slow moving projectile is no longer an artificial difficulty-- its a real challenge, since a target that was just stunned via a targeted stun cannot be snared during the stun. In other words, you can't just keep someone locked down who can't react to your choices.

You have to wait until the little user interface control bar beneath their health meter displays the indication that "CC invincibility frames" are done. It could be something like the flashing invincibility frames of smash brothers or megaman or any other game in which the designers value the ability for the player to react to serial threats which weren't individually balanced for serial application.

8 Comments

Kaine4/26/2014, 7:19:43 PM2 votes

Downvote.

You have two seperate arguments you trailed into eachother:

  1. In teamfights skillshots are harder to dodge

Your tank line shouldnt care about being caught and your back line shouldn't be anywhere but in safe behind your tank line. The stun you mention specifically is the very slow Morgs stun, which is blocked by everything and whose wide bounding box makes it almost impossible to shoot through minions or allies.

By making the skill shot like Morgs, what riot can do ( and have done in my opinion) for balance have carefully made it not opressive during the laning phase(because it is both easily dodged and blocked by minions) while still mking it VIABLE during the late game ( due to synergy with her teammates and a much wider variety of targets in range.

  1. In teamfights, stacked CC effects can determine the outcome of the fight

Champion synergy should not be a punishable offense, nor should teamwork and properly coordinating skills. Most CC skills are gated by long cooldowns, and as such can be baited before a teamfight. Many tanks initiate alone specifically to blow the enemies team crippling CC on themselves so that their back line can follow up at zero risk with most of the enemy power budget blown.

Morgs snare is not very powerful compared to many champions kits (Syndras AOE line nuke stun, Lux's two person snare etc) and her REAL dangerous combo of Flash -> Ult-> Zhonyas means her Ult AND Flash AND Zhonyas are down, leaving her either defenseless when Zhonyas ends or without a huge amount of her power budget for a long period of the game.

If you want CC invincibility get Tenacity and Cleanse and QSS...

Or better yet pick Morganna :)

the Anarchit3cht4/26/2014, 7:50:33 PM2 votes

So basically, if you are under the effect of some sort of CC whether it be a stun, snare, low etc. it makes it easier to get put under another form of CC? Well, of course! That's sort of how it works. If you can keep an opponent locked down by launching multiple forms of CC on him, then kudos to you. The real question is what that one guy is doing that allows him to get caught by all these forms of CC.

1.) If he is by himself and diving into three enemies, he's a dead man anyway. Why make such a bad mistake? 2.) If he is with his team, then it's up to his team to react to that situation and prevent him from being locked down if he is their ADC or APC. If he is a tank, he probably jumped in the way of the CC to prevent it from hitting a high priority target anyway.

The reason that preventing crowd control against already or recently crowd controlled opponents is not a good idea. For one, certain champs have synergy like Kainel already mentioned. When you have a high burst Assassin like Fizz or Master Yi lets say... and you got of a team fight and your carries are on low health and he tries to dive in to kill them, then... YOU PUNISH HIM HARD. You lock him down and kill him before he can even think twice about the mistake he just made. Secondly, imagine this scenario:

Lux and Morgana are a on a team. They launch their snares with just the perfect timing(accidentally, of course) so that they both hit at around the same time(the second one hits before the first one expires) is it right to just negate the second one? No, because then they would only be locked down for the duration of the first. The thing about it tho, is lets say(for easy math) that Lux's lasts 1.5 seconds and Morgs lasts 2.5 seconds. If Lux lands her 1.5 second snare and Morg lands her 2.5 second snare at the same time--they are only locked down for 2.5 seconds as the lock down effect occurs at the same time. In stead, it's a much better strategy to time it so that the second round of disables applies just as the first round ends. It's strategy. And while the first round of disables might be to draw out "cleanse" type moves, that is also strategy. You should learn their play style and not burn your "cleanse" on the the first round of disables, but instead use it on the second round when you know they are going to be laying in the heavy hits. Or you have someone else dodge in front of you and take the first disable so that you can still use your cleanse for the second one.

All you are suggesting is that Riot removes what amounts to a huge aspect of strategy simply because you aren't willing to devise a strategy to counter it.

utDOOM4/26/2014, 4:26:40 PM1 votes

What if there was a stat that made it so that if you get cced, the next cc within a certain amount of time is weaker, and then the next cc is weaker, ect.