A recent update to Riot’s Public Beta Environment included files for what appears to be the next champion to join the league, Fiora. Fiora appears to be a fencer, equipped with a rapier and ready to do some stabbing. Her skill list is a bit…uninspired. Her ultimate is essentially Juggernaut’s ultimate from DotA. As for her other skills, she has a dash, a damage avoidance skill, and an attack speed/move speed steroid. Neato.
To me she sounds like an update Yi – not quite as reliant on Highlander to put out damage. You can read more about her lore and her skillset at State of the League.
I would never expect a decent LoL article to come out of a radio station, but I suppose as games gain traction in the media we’ll start seeing some decent content everywhere. A Grand Rapids station put together a quick list of 10 old mechanics in League of Legends that were (mostly) broken. It’s an interesting look back at the game if you haven’t been playing for more than 6 months, especially since the post includes video.
I’ll say my favorite “remember when” from this list is the old brush system. Dear god. Riot was one brush-crazed company back in the day. That shit was everywhere. Innervating Locket was also an interesting item, though several strong characters made it ridiculously broken. I didn’t mind it terribly much on Gragas, mostly because AP Gragas is so much scarier than pure tank Gragas. Locket Udyr though? That was broken. Pair Udyr, Sona, and Gragas, get them all to buy Locket and you have one unstoppable push comp. As annoying as it was to see that comp played, I have to say, it added some flavor to the game.
After reading Nautilus’ skillset, I thought he was OP. At the very least he had too much going on. Berseking was kind enough to point me to Xypherous’ dev diary for the League’s new champion, a post that broke down the design decisions behind the champion’s design. After reading through it I still think he has too much going on, and the method by which Riot might keep him from being OP–a crappy attack animation/speed and movespeed–are an unnecessary frustration. He needs a limitation on the number of things he can do, not a mechanical throttle on his power level.
I’ll be the first to admit that Xypherous and I have different philosophies when it comes to champion design. He does make some interesting champions, but at least in the case of Nautilus, he is willing to overload on mechanics. If you read his dev diary and watch Phreak’s champion spotlight, you’ll notice there isn’t much talk of weakness. Any talk of a potential downfall in his design is met with “so we gave him X.” Notice the following:
One of the strongest downsides to a self-only shield is that it is effectively ignorable by the enemy team. Unless you are threatening enough so that you must be killed on sight, defensive shielded targets are generally ignored as there isn’t a point to attacking him.
Which was preceded by:
However, if he’s left alone, Nautilus can contribute heavy damage to the enemy team.
This is one major design decision that I just don’t understand about this game. Why does a tank need to deal big damage? Even solid damage over the course of a fight? Isn’t the fact that he has four CC skills enough? Isn’t the disruption caused by his presence enough? Xypherous talks about Wrath of the Titan being a “soft-taunt” because it adds damage if players don’t attack Nautilus. Why does a character with four CC skills need a soft-taunt? This doesn’t make any sense.
What about this – what if the tank was designed to control opponents, either by creating openings for his teammates to get kills or preventing the other team from attack. He would have very limited damage, relying instead on CC to keep his enemies alive. His enemies would then have to make an interesting choice – attack the high damage people in the back and risk getting stuck in Nautilus’ CC or burn skills on Nautilus so that the high priority targets are vulnerable. Instead, Nautilus forces players to burn skills on him or suffer huge consequences. That’s not interesting. It takes away the opponent’s ability to make an interesting choice but, more importantly, it takes away Nautilus’ ability and incentive to make interesting, epic plays.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot as I’ve been playing DotA. I have a ton of fun playing support and tank champions in DotA, mostly because I’m not stuck spamming heals on my lanemate. I get to harass a lot. I set up kills a lot. Most of all, I get to make big plays during teamfights. Timing a stun for the perfect moment to save my carry from an enemy stunlock, using Force Staff to move my allies out of harm’s way, landing the perfect Shallow Grave to prevent death – these are all things I’ve pulled off or seen pulled off in ways that make me want to play support and tanks. Because those characters don’t often have big damage, they have a chance to move within a fight and have a serious impact on its outcome. Fights feel extremely dynamic because there is a constant target shift going on – players are trying to burn the big damage dealers while avoiding the crowd control of supports and tanks.
I can think of one character who has both big damage and big utility without any real sacrifice and he’s the most broken character in the game: Invoker. Pretty much every other character suffers from some setback, whether it’s mobility, lack of crowd control, position dependent skills, and so on. The game allows players to shore up those weaknesses through itemization, which obviously comes at a cost. On the whole, it’s the constantly sliding scale of damage, control, durability and mobility that makes a teamfight in DotA interesting. Only one character in DotA has all of those attributes without a truly godlike farm. I certainly can’t say the same for League.
I don’t peg all of this on Xypherous – that would be really unfair. He is working within a metagame and a design philosophy that obviously values Nautilus-style design. Personally, I wish Riot was doing more to change the game, but they’re trucking ahead with the current philosophy. For me, that has meant a serious decline in the amount of enjoyment I get from the game.
The S&M tribe that Riot has moonlighting as a group of artists did their worst to Vayne for Valentine’s Day. The Vampire Hunter was given her own version of the very tired stockings-and-corset costume. This will no doubt cause a flood of masturbatory spending from the 13-year-olds playing League of Legends.
I imagine the resumes in Riot’s art department are pretty short. How many different ways are there to say “I drew fantasy babes in stockings, thongs, and corsets every day.”
I’m not anti-sexy, just anti-lack-of-creativity. We’ve seen this skin one thousand million times. It isn’t interesting. At all. Not one bit. Nothing about it. Nothing. Not a single part.
Riot has released the official skill list for Nautilus and…oh…dear…god. He sounds insanely strong as both an initiator and tank. Unless he has utterly terrible stat gain this guy will be a force to be reckoned with. I would imagine he was designed to play as a bottom lane support, much like Leona, but that all depends on his damage. If he has even remotely decent damage, he’ll be a brutal jungler.
Let’s have a look at Nautilus’ skills:
Staggering Blow (Passive) – Nautilus’ first basic attack against a target deals bonus physical damage and immobilizes the opponent briefly. Staggering Blow cannot trigger on the same target more than once every 12 seconds.
Dredge Line – Nautilus throws his anchor forward. If he hits an enemy, he’ll drag himself to his target and his target to him. If he hits terrain, he’ll drag himself to the terrain and the cooldown is reduced.
Titan’s Wrath – Nautilus places a shield on himself that absorbs additional damage based on his maximum health. While the shield is active, Nautilus’ attacks deal damage over time to units around him.
Riptide – Nautilus slams the ground, causing the earth to ripple out in waves. Each wave deals damage and slows the targets hit. This slow decays over time. Multiple waves that hit the same target deal reduced damage.
Depth Charge (ultimate) – Nautilus launches a depth charge towards a target that picks up speed as it travels. This charge knocks up all enemies it encounters while traveling and explodes on impact, stunning the target and launching them into the air.
I think his passive will be the most binary of his abilities. If it’s anything .5 seconds or lower, it will just be a nuisance, good for interrupting the few channels in the game or maybe breaking up a running pattern, but nothing more. Any more time on the stun and that passive is among the best in the game, especially for a champion with an AoE slow, a line knock-up, and a hook. Holy hell. With Jarvan’s passive there isn’t a ton of incentive to switch targets for a little extra damage. If this passive is a one second stun there is a huge incentive to switch. Did I mention the AoE CC this guy has? Imagine the crazy stunlocks this could potentially create. Yikes.
His other skills seem equally strong – at least as strong as Leona, which is why I’d imagine we’ll see him running in bot lane. Putting him top seems like a complete waste, much like Sejuani. I really hope he isn’t capable of quick jungle clears. If he can jungle it will just be more cement around an already solidified and fairly stagnant meta. I’ll wait for his spotlight to pass more judgement than that, but my god, he looks ridiculously strong.
The next champion to join the League will be Nautilus, the Titan of the Depths. Again, I think Riot did an awesome job with his splash art. I also really liked the sneak peek comic. It’s simple, doesn’t try to do too much with a story, just shows off this drowned guy and he looks pissed.
I have to say, I still enjoy League’s art style a lot. It was one of the first things I liked about the game and, barring a few exceptions, I’ve been impressed with their overall style.
I’m willing to be Nautilus will be some kind of tank, though I suppose melee DPS isn’t off the table. Looking at him, though, I’d have to say tank.
This past holiday season Riot was kind enough to dish out 450 RP to any summoner who had not been the subject of punitive action over the course of November and December. It was a nice gesture, though the surprise gift didn’t do much to incentivize ongoing good behavior. Riot did mention that the gift was the beginning of a much larger project aimed at rewarding the kind and persistent.
That project starts…at an undisclosed time. Once a summoner reaches level 3, a staggering feat to be sure, he will be gifted 400 RP, just for sticking around. Yes, level 3. No, you don’t get it if you’ve been level 30 for the past two years. Apparently the 450 RP in December was for you…and everyone else over level 6. Honestly, these initiatives confuse the hell out of me and seem to stir up a real shit storm for the folks at Riot. Almost the entire first page of comments on that post fall in line with this sentiment, courtesy of GuardiansAngel:
“How about you start rewarding the guys playing thousands of games of league of legends before you reward the guys who play a few games and quit.”
Those posts have hundreds of upvotes while the actual announcement has less than 100. Now, it could be that the malcontent level 30 summoners are the majority of the players on the forums, but it could just as easily be that the people committed to the game don’t like to see new players get incentives just for being new.
I understand that this is meant to be a gesture, but here’s the thing: gestures are usually thoughtful ways to show appreciation, gratitude, or praise. Key word in there is thoughtful. Riot’s efforts in this regard have been historically careless, and feel much more like a marketing gag to get their hooks into new players than an actual gesture of appreciation. The 450 RP this December was the exception – that was a nice gesture. This, this is just a marketing gag.
I’m also curious, why level 3? Is Riot struggling with new player retention and, if so, is 400 RP at level 3 going to change that? I don’t believe that this is an actual strategy for keeping players around, but then why do it? Level 3 can be accomplished by winning two games – is this really something worth pumping RP into? Maybe the numbers simply worked out that when players are given a certain amount of RP, X percentage of players will double down and buy RP to bridge the gap for a more expensive purchase. If that’s the real reason this RP is going out, well, good for Riot I guess. I’m just so confused by the whole thing that I’d be happy with such a logical conclusion.
This is an idea that came out of my latest post about Morello’s meta challenge and I’m interested in what you guys think. I love the idea of shaking up the meta – LoL grew stale for me quite a while ago – but to me that will require some widespread adjustments to the game or a professional team to win several tournaments in a row with a different comp. Riot’s current nerf/buff strategy is to move slowly and make changes over the course of several patches, which I totally understand. They’re trying to produce a consistent service without dramatically breaking the game with an overbuff or a mechanics nerf. It makes sense. I think it has some unfortunate side effects for a genre known for variability and flux.
What if Riot put together a testbed queue aimed at trying some wild play options. The idea would be to allow for changes of greater magnitude to see how the players adapt to the changes. There are definitely some issues to be worried about here, not the least of which is whether players would participate, whether it would eclipse normal queues, and what to do if it did. It could alienate tournament players along the way as well.
I think it also has the potential to breathe some serious life into the game, and to allow people to get more for the money they put into the game. Buying champions every two weeks gets expensive in a hurry. The cost is even higher if that champion doesn’t have a solid place in the current meta (and yes, I’m mostly talking about solo queuers here). A more radical approach to changes could bring more champions into the mix on a regular basis.
Obviously the resource commitment would be monstrous – I don’t even know if this sort of thing would be possible in the current server/client structure. It is interesting, though, to think of what the game would be like with more aggressive changes to the way the game works.
It has actually been interesting to see the kind of discussion that has happened in Morello’s thread and more interesting still to see the way he has responded. A lot of the thread has been the typical “none of this will work” kind of stuff, which was to be expected. There are a lot of people who are willing to spout off on the forums but don’t have a whole lot of experience with the game. Morello has been mostly level-headed, though he did get a little rowdy with one commenter.
Here’s the original comment:
The thing is, this testing has been done over and over. I honestly feel like you are so out of touch with this game at times it’s ridiculous.
Whether or not Xin beats AP champs mid isn’t the issue at hands. Certain champs don’t fit into the game, period. Xin is just a bad champion currently. This is from someone who has hundreds of Xin games played on their main. His problem is he doesn’t scale for anything and his synergy with items is inferior to better tanky DPS (ie. Jarvan and Irelia). Xin doesn’t have a way to back out of a fight. Once he initiates, he is in. You force him to go glass cannon but don’t give him the defenses to stay up for more than a few seconds.
That aside, there are lots of times I have seen champions like Talon and Pantheon picked to hard-counter certain AP champs. So noting this in the OP isn’t something new.
If you want to break the meta, you need to focus on buffing champions instead of nerfing them. Stop the power creep and bring older champions back in line with newer ones. At times it seems like you guys try to do this, but you don’t hit their problem areas. Let me give you and example:
Ashe has the weakest base and scaling AD of ALL the AD carries. So you buff her HP and Mana? I hate to make this sounds rude, but that’s the only way it can come out: Do you even play this game?
I think this could have been said a little more tactfully, and questioning whether Morello plays the game or not is a little silly. Still, I think this guy raises some decent points, even if his argument is a bit…confused. This whole “who can beat an AP mid” discussion doesn’t really matter on a champion-by-champion level. There are counters all over the place. Unfortunately, without the other lanes changing, beating an AP mid with Talon or Pantheon won’t make the meta suddenly change.
I’ll leave you to read Morello’s response on your own. It’s a spicy one. And don’t get me wrong, I don’t think he’s out of line. I think he addressed most of what the guy said fairly well. I just want to highlight one part of Morello’s response to this part of the discussion.
What did we do to change the meta in the US to the EU one? Why are Ezreal and some other AD’s the standard mid in the China metagame? Why does Korea excel at AOE comps? Is one of them superior to all the others? Are they representative of different styles? Do players from different areas practice different primary skills?
It could be any of these, but I’m pretty sure “the current way the local region plays is the best way to play” isn’t true, especially with as often as we do change things.
I think this is where Riot needs to be spending a lot of energy. There are most definitely reasons the meta has developed as it has. There are reasons it has remained the way it has for months now. I wish I knew more what he meant with the “as often as we do change things” bit. From my perspective, the game hasn’t changed very much over the past six months or so. Part of that is certainly meta-driven, but developmentally the game looks very similar to the game in July. Riot is pretty mild with their buffs and nerfs. The one major change has been to the mechanics of the jungle, but even that didn’t shake loose a stagnant meta. Certain champions rose and fell in popularity, but the way people play the game has remained the same.
I would love to see a focus on much bigger concepts regarding meta. Why is safety such a cornerstone of the current gameplay. Why did support/AD bot become such a big deal. Where does sustain fit in to all of this. It would be simple enough to add a new queue that has a more volatile system of buffing and nerfing, and I think that could be really exciting. I’ll be keeping an eye on more discussion about this. For now, results are hugely inconclusive, and I don’t think this forum thread will get many, if any, people to play the game differently than they’re used to playing it.
For a while there, I was thinking Riot was happy with the current metagame. It looks like they might like to see a little more change than has happened over the past six months, so they’ve turned to the community for ideas. Morello started a thread called “Morello challenge: bust open the meta (AP mid edition),” hoping to stir up some new ideas for changing the current meta.
I like the idea as whole – I think it would be great to see the community come up with new ideas for changing the game – but I think he’s asking the wrong people. The current meta didn’t just evolve naturally. It came from tournaments. It came from the pros. It came from livestreams. Those are the people we need to have pumping out new ideas, but unfortunately new ideas don’t really fit with what they’re doing.
The current meta evolved for a few reasons, but I think the basic theme is consistency. Pro teams were looking for a way to maximize map control, farm, and objective contest power while minimizing the ability for the other team to influence those goals. Perhaps the one wild card in the current meta is the AP mid, but the AP mid is mostly there to provide burst and control in fights, both of which can be overcome in the late game with a farmed top lane and bottom lane carry. You could say the jungler is a wild card, but the evolution of jungling into yet another tanky DPS is just another move toward consistency. Pros want reliable performance, and they’ve found the best way to get it.
Feedback from the rest of the playerbase is going to be mostly anecdotal. For starters, there is very little consistency in skill between games. Every game I play has a wild swing in either the positive or the negative. I sometimes play with very good players, I sometimes play with very bad players. In either case, this is obviously going to have a serious impact on whether a selected champion can beat out an AP mid. I’ve taken loads of champions mid and been very successful – anyone from Talon to Kayle, Shaco to Sona – but that isn’t going to bring about a shift in the meta. In most cases these matchups come down to player skill, and it is that variable that inevitably thwarts most attempts to shake up the meta.
I’m not trying to say that you can’t play outside the meta and win. You totally can. But doing so on a regular basis requires a level of coordination that most players just don’t get in their average game. You certainly aren’t going to see it much in solo queue. This is why Morello’s thread puzzles me – he’s asking a group of people that really have no influence over the meta to come up with ways to usurp the meta. Do you think M5 is reading that discussion thread thinking “omg gaiz, we should totally put Taric mid?’ They aren’t. Even if they are thinking that, they sure as hell didn’t read it in that thread.
If Riot really wants to break up the current meta, they need to do a couple things. First, incentivize top players and streamers to try new things. If those guys aren’t doing things outside the current meta and doing it on a highly regular basis, no one else will do it either. The best way to incentivize this kind of play is to make it viable for winning games. That’s number two on the “break the meta” to-do list. Make more options viable. Return some of the experience to champion kills. Stop the diminishing gold returns on killing players. Encourage teamfighting. Release some strong pushers. Encourage players to use spells thoughtfully instead of spamming them for farm and big harass. Return creep damage so that players have to think before engaging in a lane fight because they might actually lose health.
Those things will break up the meta. They will probably require some significant balance tweaks if implemented, but they could actually have an effect on the way the game is played. Asking players to rethink a method that has been advertised to them by top players for a year? That’s not going to cut it.
