How to Balance?

CainRising·7/26/2014, 7:31:17 PM·4 votes·2,132 views

I was wondering when you create a champion, how you make him or her balanced. For example, is the AP always approximately the same for every champion? For example, Zed. Why didn't you make his q and e less powerful than a normal skill shot so that his shadow and two q's do the same damage as one skillshot? To me that would make his damage balanced compared to Lux or Ezreal.

I know a lot of work goes into every champion, and it takes a long time to actually balance a champion, but how does Riot do it? Its quite interesting. Especially with every champion being different, it seems difficult to make most of them equal.

My questions are, "What is the process in ensuring a champion is balanced without being boring? What do you change to make him or her balanced (e.g. AP/AD/Movement Speed/AS/Cooldowns/etc.)?"

19 Comments

Linna Excel7/26/2014, 8:28:27 PM3 votes

You don't.

You try your best, but you only have so much time to test a champ. Champs are rarely perfectly balanced, usually riot has to settle for good enough. Lately they've been putting more time into it so champs aren't as bad as they were on release. Still riot's doing a good job when they don't listen to the QQers too much.

Worgslarg7/26/2014, 7:39:25 PM1 votes

Time and testing.

Without any real knowledge of the champion design process ,these are my assumptions of how it works.

When riot is creating a champion, they would assign a general value to things like damage on the skills in the champ's kit, should the champion be hyper mobile, cc heavy, etc. With lots of testing and trial and error, they would nail down a general idea of what numbers and ranges they want for the new champ. Then it moves to the pbe, where player feedback and larger scale testing allows for fine tuning of the numbers

Nyhver7/27/2014, 2:18:22 AM1 votes

You give them everything you want, try to adjust numbers accordingly, let it go live (since apparently PBE isn't very effective for data, at least in some ways) and then something can be reduced or increased in strength by numbers. A champion can have the most overloaded kit in existence, but if they have abysmally small numbers, it won't matter what they have in their kit.

skippersd7/27/2014, 7:51:21 AM1 votes

Since there are multiple champions that have already been established, you pick a few that are similar to your new one. Let's say you want a new burst mage. You take a look at Syndra's, LeBlanc's numbers, and use those as a base line. This is the starting point, then comes in the testing, when they adjust these numbers. (ie: your new champ's Q is a weird skillshot that's really hard to hit, so you buff it, or it's ult does too much damage too easily, so you nerf it a bit.)