Well, unfortunately I’m going to have to push back some of the upcoming changes I have to the Champ of the Week feature, but that doesn’t have to delay this week’s Champ any longer. This week I’ll be playing Tryndamere.
If you check my recent games list, you can see that I’ve already played a decent number of games with the Barbarian King. I made sure to sneak in a few before the remake so I could assess what the changes have given to or taken from his viability. First, let’s talk some history.
Tryndamere has posed some fairly unique problems to the League in the past. For a while it was Cleanse that gave him some ridiculous killing power, back when it could clear Ignite and offered CC immunity. I remember some of my earliest games against Tryndamere being more frustrating than even old Eve games. Even after the Cleanse nerfs, though, Tryndamere has enjoyed insane power creep. He remains the one champion that has allowed me to come back from a game in which all of my buildings were down but the nexus. I got to a point quickly enough in that game that I simply could not be killed and I was able to 2-3 shot most of my opponents.
Tryndamere’s basic design issue is that he gets exponentially stronger as he loses health, but can remain at one health point – his strongest point in the game – for an extended duration thanks to his ult. The old Tryndamere gained crit chance as his health went down. As he crit targets, he gained stacks of Bloodlust that improved his crit damage and could also be spent for a sizable heal.
He caught a remake today that changed all that. Tryndamere is now a Fury champion, which means he gains Fury from attacking targets. Bloodlust has been reworked to give Tryndamere flat damage as his health decreases instead of the old critical damage but still allowing consumption of the resource for a heal. His passive no longer grants crit chance based on health missing, but requires Fury to give the benefit. The change has created a strange tension between his skills. For one thing, he’s heavily reliant on having creeps nearby to buildup Fury before a fight, especially in the early game. The Fury gives him extra crit chance, but in order to heal, he has to sacrifice all of it. Without extra crit chance he has a hard time generating Fury, especially 1v1.
The old Tryndamere could sacrifice his crit damage for a heal, but even sacrificing all the crit damage from Bloodlust, he would still have some crit chance thanks to missing health, which would in turn allow him to build more Bloodlust stacks. The new system is complicated, and not entirely clear, especially to newer players. As much as Riot wanted to make his power level transparent, Tryndamere actually still gains better damage from losing health than he does gaining Fury, which is a little bit silly.
I’ll be spending the week looking at how the changes have impacted his build, his jungle, and his lane presence. For now, I think the new Tryndamere has an unnecessarily complicated damage system that fails to address what Riot was really after, but I’ll save that determination for the end of the week.
