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Hexakill <3 Katarina & assassins early on in Featured Game Modes

RiotL4T3NCY·11/6/2014, 2:54:58 AM·40 votes·57,917 views

Heya everyone ^.^/ So we just wrapped up Hexakill: Twisted Treeline with the latest patch, and we hope you had as much fun playing it as we did. Those ganks. -_-

I wanted to chat about Katarina briefly. We often saw comments that she was “crazy OP” and “needed to be banned”. So we know that some players certainly believed this, as she was ridiculously popular. I mean, Katarina had a comparable play rate to the 10 strongest Hexakill: TT champs all added together! o.O However, looking at a variety of metrics we use to consider champion strength in particular modes, she was actually somewhat average (even accounting for mirror matches). Substantially less effective by comparison than champions like Sona, Janna, Soraka or Fiddlesticks. We saw a similar pattern emerge during Ascension where perceived strong champs actually turned out to be fairly average (or even way below average). So why are assassins so consistently popular in Featured Game Modes?

This feels like a matter of perception. Assassins generally thrive in chaos and a lack of ‘meta’. Each FGM brings a wild west in its first week or so, and when Assassins win, they’re flashy about it. You’ll notice when a Kat gets that Hexakill. You’ll remember her as the catalyst for victory. The comparatively low key nature of supports like Sona, Soraka, et al, aren’t always directly attributed to the winning moments in games, even if they were the enablers.

It's just one theory though, so what do you guys think?

185 Comments

ShadowKnight122411/6/2014, 5:45:32 AM38 votes

I feel that assassins thrive when they are given map modes that feature a lack of vision and disincentivise supports. The reason assassins are unpopular in SR unless they have mobility and either untargetability or prolonged invisibility (Zed/Fizz and Talon/Akali), is because SR is overflowing with vision and the support role is firmly cemented into the meta. An assassin's main weakness is CC and their main strength is the element of surprise. Vision counters their main strength and most supports bring CC to the table and are in charge of maintaining vision control.

Nothing is a greater show of power and control than casual murder, and assassins are the epitome of that. Therefore, assassins appeal to people who want to experience that power and control. Some players enjoy the attention this brings to them, and revel in being the superstar of the game, while others focus exclusively on the feeling of power and control that the archetype brings. If you hear players who love assassins talking about the archetype (such as Redmercy, for example), you hear them talk about being aggressive and dominating, about taking control of the game and feeling uncomfortable when things are not happening on their terms.

This is an extremely powerful feeling for anybody who feels disempowered in real life, so you will always have an enormous pressure from the playerbase (particularly younger players) to play assassins in every single game mode. If SR allowed it, you would see assassins in every lane of every match, just like you see in the FGM. Not because they're particularly effective, but because they deliver on an emotional experience that a large part of the playerbase craves (and it's a testament to Riot's game design that it delivers the experience so well).

Solidair311/6/2014, 3:08:41 AM23 votes

I just want to point out that the reason Katarina perhaps wasn't always prevailing is because people expected it and brought anti-katarina champs to the game. I saw this more than a few times.

Besides that, Katarina was unfun in another way, in that, and I don't know what data you're looking at, but in my games, Katarina almost always got 25+ kills, even when she lost.

My problem with this is it feels really, really oppressive, for every game to have the Katarina on my team steal ALL of the glory and take us to a win, or take every kill, fail to carry, and then get blamed for being bad.

Or the Kat on the other team for being so dangerous that she would kill us all before we got to make a single action. That's not fun. I'm not even convinced it's fun for the Katarina player to be so god-like no one can fight you evenly. Even if it is, is it fun for her team to go "Oh look, Katarina killed them all before I could do a single thing. Cool." Because I know I felt that way.

Did I play Katarina while we still had the game mode? Yeah, one time. But you know what? I regretted it. It was stupid. It was never a contest, they couldn't build enough MR to stop me, and I was taking EVERY SINGLE KILL. Other assassins felt much less restricting.

And as for the popularity/success of supports: they are never appreciated truly. They're not the ones getting all the kills, doing all the damage. They're just there to make sure everyone else can keep on fighting. Which is fine! This playstyle can be fun but it's not for everyone. It's a lot easier to get behind a gun rather than being the guy that hands the gun to someone else.

Raz al Ghul11/6/2014, 3:40:06 AM10 votes

A few points on why she wasn't fun to have in games (for either side):

  1. She has the ability to do massive burst instantly and repeatedly so she'd end up getting the kills more often than not, which frankly, when she's already up 10 kills on every one else, isn't fun and is essentially kill-stealing. I had games where the Kat would be up around 15 to 20 kills and the remaining 5 champs wouldn't have reached 10 kills aggregate yet.
  2. Her resourceless abilities on a fairly low cooldown and being AOE allows her to farm the minion waves better than just about any other champion in the mode. Consider that allowing minions to whittle each other down isn't what happens in most games of Hexakill and you have a champ who can clear an entire wave and push herself farther ahead in gold allowing her to continuously deal all the killing blows to minions and other champs.
  3. On the enemy side, once she's ahead, her combo is capable of killing a squishy in like half a second. It's so fast that a lot of the time you can't react or once you see her closing in, it's already too late for cc, even targeted cc like say a Taric stun, to prevent a death as she just does her burst, is stunned and then has cooldowns back up as soon as the stun wears off. At best your team gets a 1 for 1 out of it.
  4. It's a fun mode and players want to play fun champs who aren't always the best picks or most rounded picks for the team, so you end up with teams that may not have a huge slate of cc to stop her, and then you're just out of luck and she kills everything. If you could just ban her, it wouldn't be as big of a deal. If the mode was draft you could also pick accordingly.

So in conclusion, I don't think it's necessarily that players found her to be an automatic win, thus warranting her being banned if it were available. I think they wanted to ban her because other players had much less fun in games she was involved in.

Hellioning11/6/2014, 3:00:56 AM10 votes

I assume so, but I have to ask:

Have you accounted for almost every game I've been in and many others being Kat vs. Kat? Whoever wins, Kat's got a 50% win rate for that game.

Other than that, I think it's because assassins are incredibly popular when people don't know what they're doing, and no one knows what they're doing on TT besides the 5% that plays it.

4nth0l0gy11/6/2014, 3:23:34 AM9 votes

I just played Maokai every game. Kat doesn't do things when Maokai exists.

Get outta my forest, dagger lady. Maokai

MrBuffington11/6/2014, 3:07:52 AM7 votes

I'd carry my games as Braum, but did anyone appreciate me? Nope, all they cared about was the Yi who would dive their team 1v5 and pick up a double anyways because Master Yi; Lucian was even talking smack about me getting a triple on him #carrylogic #supportlyfe :P (In all seriousness, our Xerath also did work that game, yet no one remembers him either :/)

Cuix11/6/2014, 3:23:06 AM6 votes

One of the reasons Soraka and Fid do so well is because most of those Kat players don't even think about their engagements, just "how soon can i go get my big numbers fix again?". When a silence/fear is dropped on them all of a sudden, it's an easy teamfight victory.

Darth Pixy Misa11/6/2014, 8:26:04 PM6 votes

I would like to know how Akali, Eve and Rengar did in Hexakil. I was predicting that with no wards that these 3 would cause much more chaos than Kat.

Padagi11/6/2014, 3:40:39 PM5 votes

Thanks for the thoughts L4T3NCY.

I didn't play any Hexakill, but it sounds like the win rate on Katarina is lower than expected for a champion with so much buzz entirely because everyone seemed to be building teams to counter Katarina. Just Katarina. Not Talon, not Fizz, not Zed. Katarina. So the reason you see an average or below average win rate in these cases (at least in my opinion) is that everyone is playing to beat Katarina.

I don't believe that is the intention of your Featured Game Modes. You don't intend it to, but it very quickly turns into who can build the best team to counter X champion, and who can execute on shutting down that one champion better.

Definitely feel like just looking at her numbers overall and not looking at the amount of effort the community puts into shutting down certain champions because of the situations is a little short sighted.

Earl Eulrich11/6/2014, 9:41:37 AM5 votes

I think you should maybe take a closer look at Sona, as her winrate always goes through the roof as soon as she´s in an environment that allows her to be on comperable gold-lvls than everyone else without needing her to solo-lane (and even in current SR she´s still above 50%)...and yet she´s really underappreciated. Sth. is absolutely wrong there.

And for the Assassin-Thing: You naturally remember more vividly how you got blown up within 1,3sec from full-health - while you surpress memories of how you almost had this great engage and then janna randomly blew you away, shielded her carry for what felt like 1,2k and healed him back from 40 to 100%. It´s just even more frustrating than just getting blown to bits, but it allows for the illusion that you could have done more against it (thus making it more frustrating in the end).

Trading Aces11/6/2014, 7:54:33 PM5 votes

"Substantially less effective by comparison than champions like Sona, Janna, Soraka or Fiddlesticks." Obviously because they work well vs Katarina - the most popular champ in the mode. I went Fiddles and Alistar just for Kat - and you know what? I did well.

RogueDarius11/6/2014, 7:07:16 PM4 votes

Can we expect Hexakill to come back? It was my favorite custom game mode by far. I did not play the flashy assassins as this thread discusses they were highly overrated if played against correctly. Hexakill got me excited for League of Legends again. It showed the amazing potential of every champion in the right setting and I felt like it could be a thriving game type for the community to enjoy. Hopefully we will see it again!

Wertilq11/6/2014, 7:59:31 AM4 votes

EVERY game I played of Hexakill had a katarina getting fed. Each and every game, the team that got the fed katarina won the game. She might not be the one that got herself that fed, but if rest of team served her up on a silver platter, and spoon-fed her, well she would snowball.

This is why the game felt like it was so heavily about her. Get Katarina fed and you win. If she doesn't get fed you doesn't win. Many of the games contained katarina mirrors as well.

Even if Katarina is balanced in win%, her snowballing and complete stifling of teamfights when fed overshadows that. Her burst is too fast, and her ulti deals too much damage even if you CC her, mix that with resets and you get unfun teamfights. Her winrate is probably lower because she is popular and not easiest champ to play (assassins as a class is not). And the champs that are strong against katarina have high winrate as well.

To me whole of Hexakill felt centred around feeding katarina.

Naelarstrasz11/7/2014, 4:50:39 PM4 votes

You know how you could have solved pissing off players into not playing hexakill? Ban phase.

Der Lindwurm11/6/2014, 7:04:33 PM4 votes

However, looking at a variety of metrics we use to consider champion strength in particular modes, she was actually somewhat average (even accounting for mirror matches). Substantially less effective by comparison than champions like Sona, Janna, Soraka or Fiddlesticks.

I feel so very vindicated now. I had been trying to point out the whole time that while Kat might have benefited from the relative plenitude of potential targets at any given time, so did most other champions, many of which have tools that allowed them to take advantage of the same situations far better than Kat could. I used Fiddlesticks as an example many times and was roundly ignored.

Kat is my favorite champion and at first I was excited about a game mode where I could pick her without igniting a firestorm of controversy because other people want mid and Kat doesn't normally go anywhere else, but I quickly stopped playing her when all the whining about her began. By then someone else was always raring to play Kat anyway - often getting a lot of kills, usually dying as often as they got kills if not more often, probably believing that, after everything they'd heard, they could jump in and R for an instant Hexakill, not even understanding how Kat's R works.

But as a result I played lots of Morgana and am getting a lot better with her.

I died less often with Kat. I was a lot more of a problem for the enemy team with Morgana if assists say anything.

Katarina 10 games (7 wins), 99 kills, 42 deaths, 119 assists (9.9/4.2/11.9) Morgana 14 games (9 wins), 105 kills, 80 deaths, 294 assists (7.5/5.7/21.0)

Aryzyra11/7/2014, 6:01:43 PM3 votes

Played about 40 games of hexakill. Never saw a hexakill. 75% win rate (18-6) as Fid. 90% (9-1) as Teemo. Kat is a good choice for the mode. Several good and bad choices. Good player with a good choice can easily carry a team. I don't think bans would change the actual game results much, if at all, but they'd probably make people feel better.

BastionKross11/10/2014, 2:49:19 PM3 votes

As far as the game mode, I found AoE champs like Chogath and Morgana to be the big winners. Lots of targets in a small area? It was difficult to NOT land their Qs.

As for why assassins were perceived to be better than they were, they're geared towards finding and eliminating enemies who venture out alone. The game mode was on a map not a lot of players know, with twice the chance of an enemy champ to be waiting in any bush. The "wild west" meta where anything goes is glorious for people wandering around and getting caught out. People had to be careful about pushing top lane while the enemy was bot (and vice versa), because it was only a short walk to gank town. No warding really helped people get taken by surprise. Players were running around making bad life decisions left and right, and that's what assassins love most.

and when Assassins win, they’re flashy about it. You’ll notice when a Kat gets that Hexakill. You’ll remember her as the catalyst for victory. The comparatively low key nature of supports like Sona, Soraka, et al, aren’t always directly attributed to the winning moments in games, even if they were the enablers.

Of the four champs you mentioned being low key, three were supports. (And I don't agree with Fid being low key. When he ults into your team, you notice his contribution REAL fast) I think this is a symptom of a greater problem. When Kat resets like a madman and gets a hexakill, there's a banner and the voiceover lady goes nuts. When your screen goes grey and you see that banner and hear the announcer, are you going to think Kat did well, or that the Sona on her team set that all up by starting the teamfight with a beautiful flash ult that caught all six of you and enabled that hexakill to happen.

Enabler champs get no fanfare. Everyone is going to pat Kat on the back, but no one is going to line up to shake Sona's hand. Some players are okay with this, being the silent helping hand; but most aren't. They want their skill to be praised, their team to slap them on the back, and the enemy team to curse their name. There's no glory in being an enabler, and that's why most players want to be the one enabled. Hence the support role often being the "booby prize" for last picks or longest queue in team builder. Supports generally don't get noticed by senpai.

GundayMonday11/8/2014, 1:13:40 AM3 votes

Agree with the OP. #NerfSupports

Aroha Mai11/8/2014, 6:20:25 AM2 votes

If Katarina is getting nerfed because of hexakill then that's complete bs and needs to be addressed also.