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I hate when champion reworks turn into overhauls...

Hemulen Magi··4 votes·640 views

I see a lot of players who are terrified that one of their favorite champions will end up on the rework chopping block. I really hate it when the Riot developers go needlessly overboard in champion reworks. Sometimes a champion will have one or two problematic/outdated/boring abilities that could use tweaking (Poppy's old Passive + W+ R, Sion's old Q + E + AP Scalings, Yorick's Passive + E, Taric's E + R, etc.). But then this champion gets handed off to some overly ambitious developer with no respect for the champion's established playerbase who goes...

"Hmmm... I could just fix what's broken and leave this existing champion intact, but I got all these great ideas I want to use. Hardly anyone plays this champion we've deliberately kept dumpstered for years, so I'll delete their entire kit/role/identity and try out some shiny new ideas I've been saving. Maybe I'll even finally get to test my crazy, immobile, melee, bot-lane bruiser experiment... Mordekaiser"

NO! Be conservative with reworks. Respect the champion's established playerbase. The reworks should be designed to appeal foremost to the players who already like the champions, not to random people who will play the champion for 1 week after the rework then go back to whatever is the flavor of the month anyways. Alienating a longterm existing playerbase to mildly amuse an unattached crowd won't create lasting value.

If a champion has a broken mechanic that necessitates it being kept weak, replace just that mechanic. Don't go overboard and remove unique, balanced, fun, interesting mechanics like Yorick ultimate just for the sake of change. If the kit is boring (completely subjective by the way) then add complexity without subtracting from the core concepts of the original kit.

Shen's rework was quite decent because his kit/identity/team-role survived the changes due to his dash taunt and global reposition ult remaining unchanged. Less is more when it comes to reworks. Fewer unneeded changes = fewer alienated players.

Save your experiments for developing brand new champions, not at the expense of deleting something that already exists.

5 Comments

shyv2 votes

honestly if riot ever reworks another one of my mains im just going to quit league lol. i have almost no faith in their reworks. poppy's was good, imo, but.. shen used to be one of my mains and now i have no desire to play him at all.

i don't know why they ruin champs like that. he was perfectly balanced before and lots of people enjoyed playing him. i guess he needed some pointless fucking minigame though.

bbb1 votes

I totally agree with you over Mordekaiser, but other than that you're wrong in all aspects. Sion and Poopy had a great rework, theyre much more fun now and great. Yorick and Taric REALLY NEED a rework, I mean just look at Yorick, noone plays him because he's anti-fun, his abilities are ugly and suck. Great that they rework him. The same goes with Taric, i mean should Riot NOT rework a champion just for the max of 3 main out there who main Taric? No. Taric has the ugliest kit in the game, it doesn't fit ANY, I mean ANY TEAM COMP, he needs a rework badly. The same goes with yorick.

Hemulen Magi2 votes

The problem when it comes to public opinions on low play rate champions is mininformation. Most people face the champion once in a thousand games and know little to nothing about them.

Taric and Yorick don't fit on any team comps, eh? The gem knight's armor scaling and armor aura buff make him a perfect fit on an anti-AD team his reliable stun can help set up combos for your team against mobile opponents. He normally fills the support role, but he's actually a viable counter to certain solo lane champions, particularly Riven due to his armor stacking and his stun messing up her combos.

Yorick's ult makes him fit wonderfully on teams with vulnerable hypercarries like Cassiopeia or Kog'Maw. He provides a beefy front line to protect the carry and then gives them a temporary revive in teamfights if they get dived. Yorick is actually extremely flexible and can even fill a splitpusher role if he builds more damage than tanky since he can ult himself to use his revenant to help take down turrets. He can fill top, jungle, and less commonly mid and support. Yorick has even been played professionally recently on a few rare occasions.

People think that Yorick is still a lane bully, but he starts off the game building nothing but mana and statistically usually loses lane hard to actual bullies like Pantheon, Renekton, etc... His winrate by game duration curve actually shows him as a somewhat lategame champion, peaking around 40 minutes, which is due to his ult utility scaling with his team's carry champs.

It's sad that the people who beg for complete overhauls of these champions tend to be ignorant of what would be lost... I play both Yorick and Taric. Taric is somewhat bland and could use a Shen style rework. Yorick is actually quite balanced and is more interesting than most other juggernauts - at most, he could use a more interesting passive and a reworked E.

By the way, Yorick's current state has less to do with poor design and more to do with his original creator, Coronach, being hired by a different game studio right after Yorick's release. Almost every new release is a balance mess. Imagine if Xin Zhao's creator had left Riot, abandoning him in his release state until Riot was forced to pseudo-delete him because no other developer was willing to adopt the responsibility for post-release balancing.

TurquoiseYoshi1 votes

The problem with your analyses of the Poppy and Sion reworks is that you literally listed everything that was changed. Sion had his Q, E, and AP scalings changed, and his other changed abilities (Passive/Ult) just made him into a ball of stats battler. Poppy's Passive/W/R were changed, and the final changed ability, her Q, was another stat modifier ability rather than a true spell. Honestly, if you're working on either of these champions and thinking of giving them a rework, those abilities were major points of outdatedness in these kits.

Hemulen Magi1 votes

Sion's ultimate was a major part of his identity, making him into a lifesteal tank. The developers had actually originally hinted that the lifestealing and health scaling were the two core aspects of his kit that would be definitely kept.

I think the new Sion is fine in its own regard, the VU was good for sure, but his new passive is annoying for the Sion player due to its activation time and some sort of lifestealing + dueling mechanic should have been kept somewhere in the kit (probably shifted to the passive ability slot). Every idea that went into the new Sion was good, but it was at too much of a sacrifice of his old role.

I don't expect people who didn't play the old Sion to understand. It would be like reworking Amumu and replacing all of his CC with single-target damage. The new Amumu might even be a fun and balanced champion, but he would have lost his identity and role.

For Poppy, I can't really give an in-depth opinion since I didn't play her much. I did/do play the other reworked champs and every case went 1-2 steps overboard destroying champion identities except for Shen and Gangplank. Shen and Gangplank size reworks should be the model for all reworks. Both kept their identities and roles, which is the most important key to a good rework. Mordekaiser actually had rather small kit changes, but his rework was an abomination because it destroyed his original role. If it wasn't for Malicious Metal's efforts, Morde would probably still be a pile of shit in bottom lane.

I am most worried about the Yorick rework, since I don't trust that the developers understand him and what about him appeals to his playerbase. The developers also receive horrible misinformation from mostly ignorant feedback about Yorick, since most players see him too rarely to provide useful feedback. People still use the "Yorick walks into a bar..." joke despite him actually having clear statistic counters. Likewise, people still claim that he is a lane bully, when he actually has a mediocre early game that he spends trying to build up his mana pool. Players go up against Yorick for the first time in a thousand games, lose lane because they have no understanding of the matchup, then claim he was an unstoppable ghoul spammer... The last time I saw the professionals use Yorick, they took in the jungle because his laning isn't actually that great and blue buff helps manage his early mana hunger.

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