Designing a Champion: for Dummies

After seeing a lot of the same mistakes over and over again, I felt the need to drop this here.

tldr; Check your combos, make sure the scaling makes sense, don't overload, make sure counterplay exists, avoid bad mechanics, and please do your math.

When proposing your new idea to the community, it is important to keep in mind a few things when designing your kits in order to avoid simple, stupid, mistakes.

Part 1: Design

1: Base Scaling: Almost every ability will require you to have numbers, whether they be durations, damage, heals, or cooldowns and over the course of the game, these numbers need to scale adequately in order to make an appropriate power curve for the character. Having an ability that does 100 damage would be absolutely monsterous at lv 1, but absolutely useless at lv 18, thus, appropriate scaling is needed to bring the damage in line. Base values are a good way to allow a champion to scale in a certain way, without forcing the player down that build path. For example, a champion with higher base values would be a lot more forgiving and favorable for utility and tanky builds than characters with lower base values. A general good starting point is 60-80 damage at rank 1, and 200-300 at rank 5. These are not exact, but it is a good starting point. Another thing that will likely need to scale is cooldown. Generally, an ability can be very powerful, even overpowered, if given a certain cooldown in the laning phase, but that cooldown will likely be too long when late game constant teamfighting rolls around, so you will need to scale it down accordingly. Most mobility type moves have around 20 second cooldowns that then scale down by the end of the game. Most ulti's will have around 100 second cooldowns. Another thing to keep in mind are free stats and conversions. Giving free stats relieves the need to itemize a certain way whereas conversions add free stats somewhere else for stacking something unrelated. Free stats have historically been problematic with the game as any considerable amount gives too much hidden power to a champion, making them overpowered (see old Olaf, the nerf he recieved to them was the source of the term "Olafing" or "Getting Olafed")

2: Ratios: If your ability does damage or heals, it will probably need a ratio on it. Ratios are boosts to effectiveness that incentivize certain stats over others. Higher ratios encourage more glass cannon builds whereas lower ones or ones with alternative scaling such as health promote alternative builds. Generally, the higher the combined ratio per second (based on the cooldowns) the stronger a champ will be late game. Most champions have around a 2-3 combined ap ratio on all of their skills, with most individual skills sitting in the .4-.8 range. Another thing to keep in mind is that adding a small ap ratio here and there on an AD character incentivizes the use of Triforce, so pay mind if that is the direction you want to go. More utility you add to a given skill, the lower the ratio should be in order to balance it. It is also important to know what role your character plays when deciding between the kind of AD ratio, whether it be base, total, or bonus. Base ad scaling allows the ability's damage to scale over time with levels, but will not increase with items. This is good for keeping a champion's damage relevant, without incentivizing combat stats. Bonus AD scales mean the damage goes up exclusively with items, runes, and masteries. This is good for skills on more offensive focused characters as it forces them to build combat stats in order to get more use out of the ability. Total AD is a mixture of the two, as it will both scale with levels, and include other bonuses.

3: Costs: Most characters in the game use mana as a resource, higher manacosts specifically hurt the early game of a champion by hitting the ability's availability if spammed in lane. If you have some other resource your champion runs on, make sure that the cost of the ability realistically lines up with how the resource is gained.

4: Utility: Utility is probably one of the biggest things that give the champion their identity, a lot can really bring out the personality or usefulness in a character, whereas too much could make a champion overloaded and require significantly lower numbers in order to remain balanced. Make sure that the utility you are adding makes sense. A lot of mobility is great utility to add to more close range characters as well as assassins whereas more CC is better for tanks and control mages. Huge displacement or CC skills are very tempting, but are generally reserved for ultimates, but there are a few cases where scaled back versions have made it onto other kits, such as Diana E and Orianna Ulti, or Lissandra W and Amumu Ulti.

5: Toxicity/Frustration/OP Mechanics: There have been many mechanics in LoL's history that have been nerfed or removed from the game due to their frustrating or overpowered nature. Globals back in season 1 were incredibly overpowered because they could effect any lane at any time. In order to balance them, Riot intentionally made the champions that had them a little bit weaker to compensate for the fact they could effect the game far away from where they were. The global ability was also given a much longer cooldown in order to prevent its regular usage in turning fights. Global jumps are a very tempting thing to put onto a character, but they need to be restricted. Every global jump has been nerfed or had limits placed on it in order to prevent players from traversing the whole map and completely deus-ex-machina fights without warning on a regular basis. Twisted Fate and Pantheon are big examples of this as their formerly global ultimates now have strict range requirements. Some other frustrating mechanics to avoid include: -RNG based dodge (see Jax rework) -Large area proximity effects against the enemy (see Twitch rework) -Long duration stealth with the ability to get right on top of enemies (see Evelyn rework) -Reliable Permaslow (see Skarner and Gangplank reworks)

Part 2: Cohesion

1: Theme: Do the individual abilities you created really promote the sort of playstyle that fits with the character? For example, adding a flat AD bonus on hit to a big bruiser character may seem like a good idea, but something like that will only incentivize stacking attack speed which would be unfitting for them (hi pre rework Sion ).

2: Combos: You have to think about how the abilities will work together, and I don't just mean interactions you put into them, I mean how is a player going to realistically use them in combat? For example, if you had a long range ability to close distances consistently, alongside some point blank high damage ability, chances are you are going to use the first, leading directly into the latter. Problems with this normally occur in more character driven kits where the creator is thinking about each individual skill exclusively and how it would be cool to have the champion do that. For example, putting an on hit damage buff, which would incentivize stationary or limited movement play to continue getting that extra damage, whereas putting something similar to a Singed trail on the same champion would incentivize not stopping at all.

3: Math: Make sure the numbers you choose for your kit realistically make sense when scaled up to max level 6 item. Things like that can get out of hand very quickly if you lose track of your numbers. For a good idea of where the kit stands, most late game mages have around 700 AP, tanks have around 200 armor/mr and 3500 hp, and ADC's have around 1.75 attacks per second. These numbers are just estimates, but they are useful for gauging how strong something may be. Another way math can catch people off guard is with DOT effects. You have to make a DOT deal a realistic amount of damage over time, so an easy way to make sure of that is to focus more on the total damage, not the damage per second. As an example, a champion has an ability at lv 1 that deals 10 (+.1 AD) damage per second for 10 seconds. At first it looks reasonable, but then you realize that it deals 100 base damage and a 1.0 ad ratio, most have around 70 ad at lv 1, meaning this ability does 170 damage just from 1 hit which is way too high for a lv 1 skill.

4: Distinction: There are a lot of characters in the game so far, so it can be a tad difficult to create something completely new, but not impossible. It may also be tempting to have a lot of customization levers for the player to use, whether they be different kind of level-ups, variable utility, but putting more than a few small things just ruins the identity of a champion. Is the champion supposed to be one thing, or another? Why make this champion a mutating jack of all trades when you could just make that alternate playstyle into its own standalone champion?

5: Counterplay: Are there sufficient weaknesses to the character? Are there ways to play around them that allow the player to outplay or get outplayed? Does some utility overcompensate or make another piece of utility somewhere else too powerful? Some of the most basic counterplay mechanics include: -Skillshots that stop after hitting an enemy: this allows bodyblocking and hiding behind minions to avoid damage. -Hard CC or damage tied to windup times, long cooldowns, and or skillshots: This makes landing the CC or damage a lot more important and rewarding if you do. Tying CC or damage to something like this will allow you to safely buff the CC or damage itself without being overpowered. -Telegraphed Ranges: Characters like Azir and Heimerdinger have these visible to the enemy so they can stay out of reach from any free damage coming from their opponent.