Tag: balance (Page 1 of 2)

Has the power creep gotten out of hand?

December 16, 2011 / Jeff Morgan

I already know what most of your answers will be on this question, but I participated in a situation so bizarre today that I knew I had to write a post. For anyone who may not know, power creep is essentially the process by which a game becomes unbalanced, often by the continual addition of powerful features and mechanics. In the case of League of Legends, power creep can be seen in the amount of AP on an average late-game carry, or the health/damage ratio of a bruiser, just to name a few examples. On with the story.

I decided to play a quick game before bed, as I often do. I was playing Vayne, planning to run the build I used when she first came out (Sheen -> Wit’s End – > Trinity – not sure I’m in love with it). I ended up in our bottom lane with my ally, Kennen. We were up against a Graves and an Amumu, which went really well for us. Well enough that Kennen was unstoppable within 12 minutes. It was a solid game. What baffled me, though, was Kennen’s rapid AP increases. I hadn’t looked before the game started, but suddenly he was level 7 with more than 100 AP. It wasn’t long before he was over the 300 mark, which is when I attempted to do a little mental math.

Kennen was sitting on something like 365 AP with just a Deathcap and a Will of the Ancients. That’s it. At first I thought, my god, he only has 190 AP in items and yet I’m seeing 365. I had forgotten about the aura from WotA, which brought him up to 220 base. Even with the bonus from Rabadon’s and the 5 percent mastery, that would still only be 297. Shortly thereafter, Kennen bought another Needlessly Large Rod, bringing his base up to 300. His shown AP: 535. Yup. He had 535 AP with just 300 AP in items. What the hell is going on there?

That’s power creep, and it’s totally out of hand. One of the biggest problems I see is that it can be difficult to understand and difficult to predict. Players are already dealing huge amounts of incoming information for an average game. Do we really need to be performing this kind of math while playing, too? Trust me, I don’t think things are going to change; Riot has been using the additive method of problem solving for far too long. I do wish we could go back to a slightly simpler time, though, when a player’s items and his numbers lined up in expected ways.

Editorial, league of legends

balance balance issues champion balance imbalance league balance lol balance power creep

Heartseeker Strike may not have a balance point

December 3, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

One of the most fervently discussed issues for Pantheon players is the damage of Heartseeker Strike. When he launched it seemed to deal very respectable damage, then there was the period in which it could hit people for three quarters of their health at any point in the game. That was soon nerfed, to the point that most players didn’t bother ranking the skill past rank one, and then only to get the critical strike bonus. Well, it has been buffed again, this time at the cost of some Spear Shot base damage.

While it is nice for Pantheon to have the skill back to a level of usefulness, it’s also back to being extremely unfun to play against. The problem, in my mind, is that he has a targeted stun, which allows him to always land Heartseeker. With the new damage buff, he hits incredibly hard. As Shaco, I was getting hit yesterday for 700+ at level 15. With Aegis and Spear Shot in one rotation, that’s more than 900 completely unavoidable damage that comes, as is usually my problem, at very low skill cost. In my current game, I’m level 11 with nothing more than a BF Sword and Heartseeker hits for 700 damage on heroes. His ultimate does the same damage at that level and is infinitely more difficult to land.

I think Heartseeker is hard to balance for a couple reasons. One is that it basically stuns Pantheon, and during that time he can’t deal any auto attacks, so it has to feel ‘worth it’ to use the skill. Second, there’s the fact that it deals double damage to champions. I’m not sure why that has to be a part of the skill. Is Riot worried he’ll farm to well? That wouldn’t be as big an issue if Heartseeker didn’t hit so damn hard. Reduce the damage and remove the double damage component. Then he gets the gear to make the skill hit hard. The real problem to me, though, is that he can use it in conjunction with his stun. That’s why I don’t think there’s a point that it will feel okay to play against.

I think the guaranteed crit is kind of a cool mechanic, though, so I’d propose remaking the skill into more of a skill shot. What if Pantheon had a hook that was shorter range than Blitzcrank’s? The text might read as follows:

Pantheon attempts to impale an opponent on the tip of his spear, dealing attack damage and pulling the target back to his location. Pantheon’s next attack is guaranteed to be a critical strike and cannot be dodged.

I think you could even leave the current passive component in tact. It would definitely add some more flavor to his character and reduce the feeling that his damage is completely unavoidable. It would also give him some more tools to maximize his auto attacks, rather than encouraging a damage-only build.

Champions, Current Affairs, Editorial, league of legends

balance fix pantheon heartseeker strike heartseeker strike damage pantheon pantheon buff pantheon changes pantheon nerf pantheon op

I can’t wait for the Garen nerf

September 4, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

Despite early claims that Garen was balanced, just that people were finally learning to use him, Riot has admitted that Garen may be a little too strong at everything he does. It is just a tad ridiculous for him to be able to buy survivability items and completely melt an entire team. Also, the fact that his W has both a passive damage reduction buff and an active seems like overkill.

Lucky for us, he’s catching a nerf, and I can’t wait. It’s not the Garens that dominate games that are causing the problems. It’s the other Garens, the people who think they know how to play Garen, that are the issue. You’ve probably seen them trying to tank three people at level five, turret diving from level one, and stacking armor against completely magic based enemies.

It’s not a problem unique to Garen. Any time the community realizes a given champ is overpowered, players do anything they can to play him, even if they don’t know the champion. It’s already starting to happen with Kog’Maw. The little alien got a buff and now a lot of people who had previously ignored him are both picking and banning him. It’s a trend we’ll probably see nearly as often as there’s a significant patch. For now, though, I’m happy to wait on the Garen nerf, and when it becomes a problem with other champions, I’ll anxiously await their nerf patches as well.

Champions, Development, league of legends

balance champion nerfs garen garen fix garen nerf garen op garen up kog'maw kog'maw buff kog'maw nerf nerf

Ranked play needs a swap feature

July 15, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

Plain and simple. DotA had this feature, whereby you could choose a hero that your teammate might want. It’s a great feature because often the guy with first pick rights on your team doesn’t want to play a highly desired character. Swap allows him to pick a more contested character, making much better use of the early draft position than would otherwise be possible.

There is one big drawback here – the champion unlock system. Because most players don’t have access to every champion, the draft system can be a bit ugly. When I was playing a lot with players from SoloMid I would often end up with a less than desirable comp or a toon that I wasn’t great with, if only because we wanted to have the strongest comp and I was the only player on my team with a given toon unlocked.

This all goes back to a post I made some time ago regarding champion balance as the primary matchmaking problem. Balance problems encourage players to use a limited subset of heroes, meaning they don’t get to know the rest of the available champions. Ranked play might even exacerbate this problem, simply because players will get the idea of a strongest comp, post it in the forums, and the mob will follow.

Still, swap would be better than no swap. Every team, even those in solo queue, should have a chance to make the most of their highest draft positions.

Development, league of legends

balance balance issues character balance draft mode swap swap mode

Is character balance the real matchmaking problem?

June 28, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

I had this thought the other day when I got into a game with a Shaco player. That’s not really a story in and of itself – Shaco is appearing in almost every game since Zileas labeled him OP. The story is more in the way this Shaco decided to play.

Like most Shaco players, ours ran off to golem first thing to set himself up for the rest of the game. He was packing Smite, so I figured he’d spend a little time in the jungle and then, as most Shaco (and most jungle) players tend to do, hit up the lane that was pushed furthest for some early game killing. That wasn’t the case. Despite my pleading (and explanations that our lanes were suffering/being pushed and really needed to be ganked), Shaco continued jungling and only offered a phrase that completely blew my mind: “The fucking point of jungle Shaco is not to gank.”

I…was…floored. I understand that the primary advantage of a jungler is the exp. bonus for a teammate, but the secondary – and only secondary by a tiny margin – advantage is the element of surprise and opportunity to gank in any lane, thereby increasing the experience given to the ganked lane as well. My first reaction was, wow, I should not be paired with a player who so fundamentally misunderstands the game. I realized, though, that this could just as easily be a result of Shaco’s imbalance as it is the player’s ignorance.

I don’t know what your hero spread looks like, but mine is pretty wide. I play a lot of different champions, despite the bursts of new champions around patch time. I don’t think that’s the case for a lot of players, though, and I definitely don’t think that’t the case for the Shaco player in question.

This guy clearly misunderstood Shaco on a level that only someone fairly new to Shaco would. If he had been playing, say, Ashe – one of the strongest characters in the game – he could easily storm his way to a bunch of wins. That doesn’t make him good at the game, though. That makes him good at playing Ashe. The problem is that when he tries to transition to a toon like Shaco, most of his skills are lost. There isn’t the same kiting, the stun, the range advantage, the necessity to stay and farm. The game is almost entirely different, but the average player might not have that understanding about that game.

When I first started playing LoL I really liked that you could slowly build up and unlock champions. I’m starting to realize, though, that the champion unlocks coupled with the rune system means that most players will choose just a small number of champions to master and then fill out their rune pages accordingly. I actually played with a guy the other day that didn’t know Nidalee’s cat form skills don’t cost mana.

I would blame this on the character selection system, but I don’t think it would really be a problem if the characters were more balanced. Players would be less likely to change to a perceived OP toon and more likely to choose toons that they truly enjoy rather than the flavor of the month champions. Granted, not every toon can be balanced with every other toon, but when toons like Ashe and Ezreal stand as high above the pack as they have, it keeps players from being as widely familiar with the game as they could be, if only because the potentially or probably successful champion list is shorter than it could be.