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The Poppy Paradox: a player made rework

Jingerbeardman··1 votes·357 views

So many times I have heard that reworking Poppy into a working state is difficult. I dont know if there is a team working on her right now or not but I have been thinking about her as she was once one of my favorite champs to play. The solution I feel is not as difficult as it may seem, Poppy has all the tools needed for her rework in her kit right now.

!Warning! Wall of text
REVISED

I want to first make a list of pros and cons for Poppy to help better lead discussion: (If I missed anything you think I should add let me know)

Pros:
Massive single target damage
Great mobility
Great in fight utility
Strong duelist
extremely strong late game
Interesting kit passives and mechanics
(cute and fun to play)

Cons:
Terrible early and mid game
Horrid base health and mana pool
Poor farm ability
unable to stay in lane long because of poor stats
hated by Morello
confusing Passive limiting her potential
unless she gets fed can not keep up in pace with the game
unpopular pick because to difficult to work around her low base health and mana
confusing and difficult skill descriptions and mechanics

Poppy's limiters: I feel there are 3 limiting factors that are currently why Poppy is in the state she is in. As I am not a riot employee I cant say that these 2 are the only issues but they are pretty big ones.

Issue number 1 Poppy's passive: Valiant Fighter live version: Any damage dealt to Poppy that exceeds 10% of her current health is reduced by 50%. This does not reduce damage from structures.

This to me is confusing and the first of 2 reasons Poppy is in her current condition. It is interesting in the way it functions and how it can turn a fight around when you think you have lost but is the reason why poppy has such a terrible health pool. If Poppy were given a regular fighters health pool she would be able to out duel any one she fought with early on. this is because as her health gets lower her passive starts kicking in and cutting the damage dealt to her in half. At first you might think "heck yeah that is awesome" but let me point out some flaws:

  1. If the damage is not large enough to trigger her passive (insert damage over time effect here) you are simply left with a small health pool... You might say that there are other champs with low health pools that dont have poppy's passive that do well, so whats wrong with poppy? She lacks the CC or regenerative abilities those other champs do have. Poppy's cc puts her right in harms way and her low mana pool doesnt allow you to spam her W so you have the extra mobility to farm and harass with some safety.
  2. True damage doesnt get reduced by her passive. That means while you might be safer than most champs when they are low on health, you are still just as vulnerable to ignite though. That means you are still forced to back at low health anyways if your opponent has ignite they can use.

Issue number 2 Poppy's mana costs Poppy has some awesome abilities that are fun and unique... but they cost WAY to much mana. They definitely are powerful but you can only get about one rotation of skills out early on without buying some kind of mana item. Since most like playing Poppy ad there are very limited items you can get to make up for the deficit.

Issue 3 the big offender, her ult
I love her ult dont get me wrong but it does way to much and allows to much freedom to Poppy in late game team fights.

Now to a possible rework:
Right now Poppy is in a bad place, her kit is confusing to read and work with and her stats have been nerfed to oblivion because of how radically they can scale with her passive and current abilities. However I think it is possible to take what poppy has currently and reassemble her into a fun and working champ everyone can play and enjoy.

Passive: Valiant Fighter

take current passive and how it works but break the 50% damage reduction into increments of 5% and make it stack up to 10 times like Paragon of Demacia's passive tying the two abilities together in an interesting way.

Devastating Blow:
remove the damage cap at rank 5

Paragon of Demacia:
stays the same though it would be nice to see magic resist added onto the passive as well

Heroic Charge:
remains the same as nothing is wrong with how this ability works

Diplomatic Immunity:
This is where the real toxicity of Poppy's kit resides same effect but instead of stopping all CC except for the selected opponent, make her vulnerable to all CC but Poppy gains 50% bonus tenacity for the duration.

These are some changes that could be made to improve Poppy's game play that maintain her current play style and bring it up to date with the games current state.

6 Comments

ploki1221 votes

I was surprised to see a poppy thread in here... Also, I believe this belongs in the Live Balance sub (jsut add an header EDIT, and they'd probably be happy to move it).

Onto the main topic, my background with poppy can be summed up as playing him a bit in normals, and going Silver IV -> Gold IV (nearly, I stopped ranking for a bit, but i'm V ~87LP), with a >70% win rate (hanging at 70% and I re-started playing him I was already like 0-3). I also loved to watch Zekent and Opened play him at high level (Diamond).

So, let me split up your thread :

Pros:
Massive single target damage
Great mobility
Great in fight utility
Strong duelist
Extremely strong late game
Interesting kit passives and mechanics
(cute and fun to play)

I could hardly agree more here, I believe that sums her up pretty well. However, I believe her extremely strong late game isn't that much of a pro as she's toxicly good end-game (Ult and Q both are ridiculous).

Cons: Terrible early and mid game
Horrid base health and mana pool
Poor farm ability
unable to stay in lane long because of poor stats
hated by Morello
confusing Passive limiting her potential
unless she gets fed can not keep up in pace with the game
unpopular pick because to difficult to work around her low base health and mana
confusing and difficult skill descriptions and mechanics

Now, I used to think like you, that she had very few available tools to her and that she was extremely limited. However, she's actually at a much better status than most people make of her. So, yes, her AD is slightly low early on, but with right masteries and/or runes, she can farm VERY decently (I seldom lose by more than 15-20 in lane, and I'm more often than not at least tied). Similarly, unless you spam her spells (which are all insane early on), you won't really run out of mana. Only use Q to trade, and E if you can make sure to stun the enemy in a good spot, and you won't really lack mana. If yo uget a philo, it's even better.
About the poor mana/health pool, you highlighted why she requires low hp, and I highlighted why she requires low mana (her spells are all OP).
As for the unpopular, confusing and difficult parts, they're all really tied. The fact that yo ucan't spam spells on her, while I feels so good doing so, leads most players to run oom, and her passive means that you often fall low on hp, meaning that she feels weak. And once a champion feels weak, she gets dropped. The only reason she's myterious and confusing is since you never see her (the main reason why Urgot was so succesful for a long time, and the reason why Karma is also a beast).

All in all, I don't believe Poppy suffers from as many cons as you give her. I believe her main cons are :

  1. Clunkiness : Her E suffers from the Alistar syndrome, where movement and/or CC can simply break up her spell, which is a great part of her combo since it's her gap closer, her CC and part of her nuke. This also includes her incredibly long animation on auto-attack and the amount of noise created by her ultimate.
  2. Unfun mana costs : Her ability all feels extremely nice in effects (aka damage, buffs and stuff) and effects (aka particles, sounds, animations), but hse doesn't have the mana pool to really abuse them unless expresly itemized for that.
  3. Plain too strong : Her scaling (mainly thanks to ult) is plain too abusive, meaning she can't get buffed elsewhere. Actually, I feel only fixing the clunkiness would make her a common top level pick...

Those are my 3 limiting factors.

(I just hit character limit, continuing my huge wall of text in reply)

ploki1221 votes

Now about your 2 limitations :

  1. Her innate.

Like mentionned above, I believe that her innate is very strong, the problem with it is that it rewards her for a negative behavior : being low on health. However, it doesn't clearly convey it that way, and that's the troublesome part. Olaf gains Attack Speed the lower on health he is. Poppy gets reduced damage from anything hat hits strong in relation to her current hp. So yeah, wording's at fault. As for the True Damage, I believe they're the main offenders. the only true damage abilities I like at the moment are Twitch's/Corki's and Kog'Maw's/Zyra's, on top of items and Ignite. Anything tha deals a bulk of true damage is plainly stupid. The best way to show it is Irelia. People rarely build damage on her because she doesn't need it. You can build a few on-hit effects and live on your insane tankiness + sustain + true damage that is uncounterable. Basically, a champion should never have a good reliable way to deal True Damage (shame on you CertainlyTrue).

  1. Her devastating blow.

Once again, the main offender is the wording. In fact, at level 1, even gangplank (one of the most base hp) with HP quints and def masteries get hits by the whole 8% until level 4. At which point you should probably have level 2, and then you're good for another 4-5 levels. So the limitation actually only truly hits when you're behind and against a fed tanky solo laner, or if you're against monsters (as a quick cue, it's ~940dmg per level, reaching 4688 at rank 5).

As for the rework, there are a few key things I think are impossible to do :

  1. Add 5% dmg reduction to paragon : Plain too strong the fact that it is limited by her "anything that exceed 10%" means that it doesn't come into effect if you're much ahead and tanky. If you are already getting ahead and that you can tank the minion t get 50% perma reduction, they're gonna have a bad time.
  2. Add an AoE to her spells : In my opinion, she's meant to be a smiter, she's meant to simply cloe in onto her target and ravage him, unleashing the blacksmith's wrath diplomat's tact onto you. If you buff her AoE damage, not only will she be able to spam laugh in the middle of your team, but you'll be able to ravage them all.
  3. Leave her ult as-is : No matter how much I like it, it's plain too strong. Right now you can stop most baron attempts 1-2 vs 5, simply by annihilating a carry, then turning back on someone else to damage him too, before attempting to steal baron with you 1.0 AD + 200% base AD + 0.6 AP + 375 damage and a possible crit.
Jingerbeardman1 votes

what i mean by poor farm ability isnt necessarily in lane but after lane phase. her wave clear is terrible and that is somewhat important for a top lane champ.

Her passive is a bigger culprit than you give it credit. Dont get me wrong because I like what it can do, I just dont think it is healthy for poppy to have it working 100% of the time. This is why her health stats are incredibly low. It would open more counter play by moving it to the active of paragon and it also allows you to activate it when it will be most effective.

I dont consider the wording on Devastating blow to be a limitation but rather that it is confusing, her mana pool and costs are the limitation. as for the actual damage output if you watch closely enough it is in fact capped at 75 at level one for the % health damage portion, it can be a bit hard to catch as you have to factor in your attack damage base damage and mitigation. while yes at early levels you wont potentially reach the height of the cap but to new players this is confusing as heck.

The aoe possibilities would only be to put her in line with other top lane champs and their wave clear abilities. if they were found to be unnecessary they wouldnt be included.

I dont particularly agree that her ult is to strong as it has its limitations. if the target you choose your ult for dies you lose the protection. If you dont attack the target you choose for your ult you dont deal the increased damage to the other enemy champs. this is why id like to see outside cc sources effect her during her ult and just give her extra tenacity.

The main goal of the changes i Highlight is to try and open up areas to redistribute her current strengths

ploki1221 votes

For the wave clear (I think farming is misleading), I don't believe every champions should require an innate way of exploding minions. If we compare with other tops, Shen has no AoE, Irelia only has her ult, Gangplank has "none", Xin Zhao, Wukong and Warwick also all lacks any real AoE clear and so does Fiora.

The thing is they usually have something to counter that. Shen has a global teleport, Irelia has everything else, Gangplank has anti-cc and huge health, Wukong has AoE CC, Warwixk has ginormous sustain and XZ, like poppy, screams "If I get onto you, I will murder you". I actually believe that the main offender are Tryndamere and Yorick. I believe that Yorick's main weaknesses are covered by his insane pushing abilities, an I believe that with tryndamere's dueling ability it's stupid that he canpush so well (like Zed).

If you just wanna have clearign speed on Poppy, itemize for it. Buy Hydra, buy Mana/MP5 to spam that Q, buy sunfire, buy Shiv. That's how most champions do it.

As for her pasive, making it activable solves nothing, if it's kept as-is, activating is will mean that you're in neck-deep once it runs out. Also, I don't think having low health is that bad if the passive makes that health better. It's only confusing... The only problem with low hp high durability is, like I said, true damage (DoTs can be countered with pots and life steal).

The relative mana cost (cost/max mana) is indeed high, it is a limiter, but I don't think it is a downside. Basically, Popy mana pool and costs screams "Do not spam spells until you bought mana", which is fair for the power they offer (with blue buff, you probably have by far the best level 3). As for the wording, like I said I grant yo uthat it's confusing, but I still believe that the "cap" isn't a restraint. The only thing I would agree to do is change it to 80/160/240/320/400 so that it's obvious it works up to 1/2/3/4/5k hp, instead of some obscure numbers (937 per slice).

Well, I always look at top lane, hoping for those "fighter nerfs". Basically yes she isn't up to par with most top laners, nd requires mor skill to win the lane than most top laners. But once a few of them lose their high free stats/clear, she will need a nerf.

As for her ult, I don't see how 3s of free dive on a melee carry is not OP. Tryndamere has 5s on I cannot die, but he can still be kited and cc'd. If you choose your targets wisely on poppy, you can usually kil osmeone by the end of your ult. First of all, you can ult the carry, and deal +40% damage to him, you can ult their initiator, and get free harass in the bot lane, you can ult the support and peel for your carry. You can even just not ult to keep the "ult pressure" up...

All in all, I feel that diverting her from the melee carry role is killing her.

Jingerbeardman1 votes

I agree with what you have to say now. I have been having success playing her now that i found good runes for her. If her mana pool and costs were made comparable to the other fighters I think she would work fine with the current state of the game. I can see why it is a challenge to bring her up to date. her kit isnt all that bad except for her ult. Perhaps that is all that really needs to be worked on. Removing the damage cap on devastating blow at rank 5 should be done though.

ploki1221 votes

You will rarely see champions with more than 4.9k hp anyway, so why remove that cap?

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