Category: Champions (Page 31 of 43)

      The case against mindlessness

      November 8, 2010 /

      sona-difficulty

      I’ve written a lot of posts recently about the overpowered toons in League of Legends and I realize several of them may have come across a little whiney. I often have emotions around a given aspect of the game before I’ve really sat down to put the words behind those emotions, so you guys get to read me working through the crap to get at the heart of the matter. Well, thanks for bearing with me.

      This post is a culmination of a few different posts regarding relative champion strength and the overwhelming fury I feel toward champions like Sona and Mordekaiser, so I hope it will be a little more focused and my point of view will be easy to understand.

      Most of my frustration with League of Legends in the past few weeks has revolved around the relationship between a champion’s strength and the skill required to provide the maximum team benefit that champion provides. For many of the overpowered champions in the game, the problem is that the champions are both strong and incredibly easy to play. It’s something I think Riot misunderstands, as you can see from the difficulty screen above. There is literally no situation in which I would consider Sona difficult to play.

      Mordekaiser falls under that same umbrella. There are players who think it’s tough to know when to fight with him, but I could not disagree more. Your team is there, you fight, and you get a ghost and murder the other team. If they aren’t there, don’t fight, unless you have a ghost with you, in which case you should kill the entire opposing team. In all seriousness, though, Kaiser’s ease of use comes from his shield, which allows him to be a serious threat to any opponent in lane just by standing in range. Consider other casters, like Annie for instance. If Annie wants to deal damage to me she has to get relatively close, giving me the opportunity to deal damage in return. Kaiser has to do the same thing, but his shield removes his personal threat, allowing him to harass at will without consequence. It’s a crappy mechanic to play against, but worse yet, it encourages players to be sloppy and lazy.

      The easy to play/easy to win champions actually hurt the game as a whole by allowing players to enjoy success without the skill to back it. One of the great things about this game is that the wide variety of champions can encourage players to get better. When I saw my first good Shaco I thought, “damn, I want to be that guy.” I was horrible with Shaco when I started, but now I’ve probably played 500 games or so with him, so I’m really good. It took time. My first game with Sona, I died too much. Every game after that, I dominated with her. It was easy farming, easy laning, and once I had a locket, easy winning. When those types of champions dominate games, players don’t learn how to gank, how to lane, when to run, when to dragon, any of it, nearly as quickly as they do with a difficult champion.

      Then there’s the simple fact that strong champions carry weak players to higher ELOs. I have run into at least ten different players who, after seeing their favorite champion banned or chosen (most often it’s Mordekaiser, I’m not kidding), say something like, “Shit man, they took my guy. Anyone wanna trade? I don’t have many champions.” That’s a problem. I expect players to be able to play a variety of champions and fill a variety of roles, just as I hope they expect the same from me. I know I’m a great carry, but I’m also a very good jungler, a very good nuker, and a decent tank/support player. I own every champion in the game. I can play every champion in the game with a modicum of success. The same can’t be said for the jungle Kaiser I played with over lunch who tried to gank MF middle by walking out of the mid-lane river brush with red buff and trying to auto attack her. No. No, that’s not going to work.

      I want to see thoughtfully designed champions, champions with very real, very high skill ceilings. Enough of the MFs and the Sonas and the Mordekaisers. This is the same issue I used to complain about with Sivir, but back in the day, Sivir was just about the only toon with a crazy-low skill ceiling and a crazy-high impact. These days it’s like a free-for-all on high-impact mechanics that require as much thought as relieving my bladder. Biological imperatives aren’t interesting, and neither are mindless champions. Make me a toon that I want to learn instead of someone I could play with my elbows and I’ll remain convinced that this is the game for me for the near future.

      Champions, Current Affairs, Editorial, league of legends

      Are tanks too tanky?

      November 8, 2010 /

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      This isn’t exactly a revelation, but it’s something I’ve been seeing a lot in my past few games. I’ve spent a lot of games playing Corki and Tristana recently, and I’ve been horribly frustrated by how well a tank can scale.

      It actually seems to be a really complicated problem. At first I wanted to blame it on items – Warden’s Mail/Randuin’s Omen is crazy strong against ranged DPS. If you’ve ever chain-slowed yourself against a fleeing Mordekaiser you know what I’m talking about. But it’s more than just the fact that defensive gear (Randuin’s) is arguably much stronger against DPS than the DPS anti-tank item (Madred’s).

      There’s at least one more issue, though, and that’s the conflicted itemization between carry items and carry runes. Most DPS players run flat armor penetration runes, which are great early and later against casters, but actually kind of terrible against tanks. They reduce the total effectiveness of Last Whisper, which is a big deal. Last Whisper is still a great item, particularly for the cost, but the fact that you lose any effectiveness whatsoever kinda sucks. You also have to consider that most ranged DPS try to get an Infinity Edge as early as possible. It’s a huge DPS bump, but many of the popular tanks in the game are so good at farming that they’ll have close to 4000 gold by the time you get IE, which means they’ll probably cut your damage in half with items.

      The other thing that bothers me is that tanks also have incredible control on top of their high damage and survivability. Taunts, snares, stuns, slows, often a combination of these things, plus very respectable damage output with a Sunfire Cape or two.

      I actually miss Alistar these days. Yes, in his heyday he was obnoxious to play against, but it was because of his control and pretty much nothing else. Alistar can take a beating and a half, but you rarely had to worry that he was going to kill you right out. I always thought it was kind of cool that he could pop his ult and rush a turret to push, even if he wasn’t going to bring down your carry. It made him seem nuanced and interesting – a playstyle that was tough to master. The best tanks in the game now are great farmers, great gankers, excellent pushers, and huge damage threats. That’s not really all that interesting, and it’s certainly not very fun.

      Champions, Editorial, league of legends

      My take on the LeBlanc nerf

      November 5, 2010 /

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      The LeBlanc nerf is already live, which is really disconcerting to me. It points, as many things have over the past couple months, to an overly aggressive development cycle. As a result, we’ve been exposed to both over- and underpowered champions, though mostly the latter. Personally, I’ve been disappointed by a lot of the recent champion releases, and I think their absence (or overwhelming presence) in ranked play speaks to the flaws in the current pace of development.

      Let’s take a look at the five most recent champions starting with the least recent.

      Miss Fortune: I know a lot of people disagree with me on her strength, but I still think she is extremely broken. It’s not her late game, it’s not that she has high survivability, it’s that she is nearly impossible to shut down in the laning phase. She can outfarm and out-harass virtually every character in the game, guaranteeing late game success. Also, consider the strength of her Impure Shots – it has a healing debuff, attack speed increase, and passive damage increase, all on one skill. Why does a ranged carry with a powerful slow and a powerful harassment skill need that kind of utility from one spell?

      I see experienced carry players wreck more games with her than any other physical carry.

      Sona: I know the LoL community was crying loudly for a new support champion, but whoever designed Sona just wanted a champion that could dominate games. It’s clear she wasn’t playtested thoroughly, because a champion that easy to play should not be able to deal that kind of damage, be that survivable, and give her team some of the best buffs around.

      Swain: Swain had a really underwhelming release and has one major design flaw – he has to be on top of the enemy team to maximize his damage output. He does have a pretty nice skillset, although it doesn’t fit very well with the current metagame. Still, his pre-buff damage was pretty pathetic and then there’s the Maledict issue. Granted, that wasn’t changed because of a rush job, rather some design issues, but the current version of Torment is nowhere near as interesting as it could have been. The idea of building a champion around Deathfire Grasp is cool and kinda different but we lost that flavor because of some ‘burden of knowledge’ crap that definitely exists elsewhere in the game.

      Lux: Lux is maybe the best example of a design rush in the game right now. She was originally supposed to grant her entire team invisibility with a skillshot boomerang, just like the shield she has now. A cool mechanic, but it was buggy right up to release and so was quickly scrapped and a shield thrown into the mix. Lux is woefully underpowered – her spells have weak AP ratios, even weaker base damage, and some of the longest cooldowns around. Her only reasonable spell is her ult. Continue reading »

      Champions, Current Affairs, league of legends, Patches

      LeBlanc nerf is live

      November 4, 2010 /

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      The LeBlanc nerf has officially gone live. Here’s the official post:

      The LeBlanc hotfix should be our very shortly. There might be some tooltip discrepancies until you relog. Like I mentioned in the previous thread, we wanted to solve two primary issues: the strength of Q-R, especially at level 6, and her mana efficiency.

      For Q-R the following changes:
      Reduced the initial damage on Sigil of Silence to 70/110/150/190/230 from 80/125/170/215/260.
      Reduced the cast range on Sigil of Silence to 700 from 750.
      Increased the cooldown of Mimic to 40 seconds from 30 seconds at all ranks.
      Reduced the damage amplification on Mimic to 10/25/40% from 20/30/40%. (The tooltip was incorrectly stating 20/35/50%).

      To address her mana efficiency we made the following changes:
      Increased the mana cost on Sigil of Silence to 70/75/80/85/90 from 60/65/70/75/80.
      Increased the mana cost on Distortion to 80/90/100/110/120 from 60/70/80/90/100.
      Increased the mana cost on Ethereal Chains to 80 from 70 at all ranks.
      Reduced her mana per level to 50 from 56.

      We made two minor changes in addition to the ones noted above. We reduced her armor per level by 0.5 since melee need to feel she’s appropriately squishy, and we reduced the damage of Distortion and Ethereal Chains by 5 at all ranks to preserve Q’s position as the highest damage output ability and not adjust skill choices.

      We will be carefully monitoring the impact of these changes.

      On the whole I think these are good changes, though I can’t understand why she went live in her current form. To me it seems Riot really needs to get a serious test realm up and running, and quickly. A hotfix two days after release means just one thing – they didn’t test enough. More thoughts on this in another post.

      Champions, Development, league of legends, News

      LeBlanc getting a hotfix nerf

      November 4, 2010 /

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      I knew LeBlanc was strong, but I’m pretty surprised to see this bit of news. Apparently Riot is planning a hotfix nerf for LeBlanc within the week.

      Here’s the post from Coronach:

      When LeBlanc went out, we were unsure of her power level due to her complexity and skill differentials in internal play tests.

      Seeing her on live, it’s been shown that she can be OP in a couple situations.We are investigating tapering down these scenarios slightly in a hotfix tomorrow or the day after, while keeping her fun and very viable. The two key things we want to address are: the Q-R combo, especially at level 6, and ensuring her mana costs are a limiting factor.

      We will put out a hotfix in the next couple days, perhaps as earlier as tomorrow afternoon, once we have internally play tested the changes.

      This is big news, considering Riot hasn’t hotfix nerfed a champion like this in a long time (I honestly can’t think of a non-bugged hero that they’ve hotfix nerfed like this). I do think it’s appropriate, though. I just played a game as Lux against a LeBlanc. I was playing well and had a good farm, but despite the fact that she was 2/5 and had just 100 AP, she could take me from full health to half in one Q -> R combo – something like 900 damage. That’s not a big deal if it’s Annie or Morgana, toons whose ultimate cooldowns are a minute or more. Less than 30 seconds, though? Yeah, I take issue with that.

      In any case, it’s still a few days out, so enjoy your OP nukage while you can.

      Champions, league of legends, News

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