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The Poppy Paradox: a player made rework

Jingerbeardman·10/19/2013, 12:47:13 AM·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

ploki12210/19/2013, 2:55:48 AM1 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)