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.

When I’ve queued for ranked games recently, I’ve often been one of the last two picks on my team. For me, that has meant being pigeon-holed into playing support, a role that I utterly loathe. What could be less interesting than standing around in lane and occasionally cast Clairvoyance and a heal? Not much. Not for me anyway. I know a lot of players share that sentiment, but there are players that enjoy support. One such player made a post defending the support playstyle (albeit, calling Riot out for not releasing more support champions), and I think RiotStatikk’s response was pretty interesting.

I’ll leave you to read through his post on your own, but his basic points are these. First, bottom lane lacks diversity. This one is sort of inarguable. The subset of champions that play in bottom lane is very small, and that needs to change. Second, supports do not make interesting item choices. As Statikk sees it, “Currently bottom lane Supports function purely off of how powerful the Gold per 10 passives are.” I actually take issue with this one, because we definitely can’t peg this all on the gold-per-10 items. There’s another serious problem that allows the gold-per-10 stack to work.

The reason support players stack the gold-per-10 items is two-fold. First, gold-per-10 gives them the cash to buy wards and elixirs, performing the role they were designed to play. Second, supports can perform their role without any items. This is the big one. The base values on support spells are simply too good. You may remember a while back that the scaling values on heals got dramatically reduced in favor of stronger base stats. I actually think Riot should have done the opposite: reduce the base stats, maybe even by a lot, but allow the spells to scale well with items. Why? Because it incentivizes support players to actually build items. In their current form, support players have no reason to buy items like Deathcap or Rod of Ages. The items don’t provide enough benefit for the cost and they starve the support of ward money.

What if support couldn’t be effective without a moderate farm? What if they needed a few items in order to really support their team? Would we still see ranged AD/support in bot lane? Probably not. Ranged AD characters are typically only successful when they have a big farm. If support takes some of that farm, the Ranged AD becomes much less effective. There are characters that can still function with a moderate farm: the Tanky DPS. That’s right, all those characters that typically hang out top and have cozy little farming competitions with one another can also perform fairly well without a monster farm. They do tend to get a big farm in top lane, but you’ll notice a lot of them also take a gold-per-10 item or two. The reasoning is pretty simple – they can generally farm and avoid dying without the help of powerful items.

I think aggressive support and Tanky DPS could make for some very interesting skirmishes in bottom lane. That combination could also open the door for double-stun combos, high-burst combos, and maybe even some push combinations. Driving ranged AD up to mid or top lanes also makes for more interesting matchups in those locations. Junglers have more susceptible gank targets and the lane matchups can be more varied. Ranged AD doesn’t typically play well against a bruiser, but there are all sorts of counters between the various assassins, ranged AD, and AP carries out there. Those matchups become a lot more interesting if we force the support champions to farm a bit and drive the Tanky DPS out of top lane.

I actually enjoy a number of the support champions in the game, I just really don’t like their playstyles. Sitting in bot lane and watching the enemy jungler run in circles is not interesting gameplay. Aggressive play with a focus on buying interesting items? That’s a playstyle I can totally support.

Shurelia decided to lift the veil on the upcoming support/sustain changes this week, offering some of the numbers Riot is currently working with to reduce the passive farm-off in bottom lane. As with any change in LoL, it’s tough to say exactly how it will play out, but I think it’s pretty easy to see that Soraka is being hit hardest by the changes.

Soraka’s healing AP ratios have been cut roughly in half, she no longer receives double mana from Infuse, and the cooldown on Astral Blessing is up to 20 seconds from 10. To compensate, she’ll be getting bigger range on Starcall, a Shred bump, and a slight AP ratio bump. Honestly, I don’t know how Riot intends to keep her in game like this. A 20 second heal? Granted, that will help reduce sustain, but this seems like a push to remove Soraka from competitive play.

Weirdly enough, Sona seems like she’ll be hit the least hard, even though I consider her one of the primary culprits for too much sustain. She got a slight base heal nerf and an AP ratio nerf, but she now grants double her passive aura to herself and her target for 3 seconds after cast. That’s a pretty nice armor/MR boost, even if the heal is being cut down.

Taric caught the Soraka treatment with his heal. The AP ratio is down by nearly half and the cooldown was increased from 12 to 20 seconds at max rank, though attacks against enemy champions now reduce cooldowns by 4 seconds versus 2.

One of the big issues I see with these changes is the way it will affect squishy DPS. Healing, as toxic as it was to the game, was one way to keep squishy teammates in the fight. Without it, I think we’ll see the softer champions playing even more passively, the little that they may be seen. It’s hard for me to not see the changes as a slight tanky DPS buff, which they really didn’t need.

You can read the full list of potential changes at Shurelia’s forum thread. What do you think? Is this a good change for the League? Does healing just need completely overhauled?

I played a normal game tonight that served as a painful reminder of just how toxic support currently is to League of Legends. I’ll spare you the long and drawn out replay and just say that my opponents had a healer and my team did not. Actually, scratch that. The things the healer allowed them to do were so utterly ridiculous that I need to explain.

My team was losing the early game badly, but with some farm and a little map control we were able to regain our footing. We took baron twice, knocked down two inhibitors and I thought we had sealed the game. Not so. As we went to push the third lane, three of my teammates and I got caught in a well placed Orianna ult/Veigar cage combo. I made it out alive but three of my teammates died. The enemy team had five up, all chasing down Fiddle. There was no chance I could stop them so I tried to quickly backdoor bottom lane. I got the turret down in a hurry and moved on to the inhibitor. Pantheon was able to bring me down from the 25 percent HP I had survived with. Despite the fact that we had two lanes down, the enemy team of Tristana, Veigar, Soraka, and a very low Orianna were able to soak wave after wave of turret fire and super minion aggro, tearing down a lane turret, two nexus turrets and finally my nexus.

It sucked, and they wouldn’t have been able to do it without the support. I know Riot has said support is going to get nerfed/changed, but I think we can take the Kayle remake and use it as a barometer for the change we’re likely to support over the next 3 months.

Originally, the Kayle changes were supposed to be a serious remake, altering the way that she performs healing and shielding significantly. What we got in the end was a passive remake and some number tweaks. Though she does seem to deal damage a bit better than before, she certainly isn’t in a great position. She heals decently as ever, though, and her ultimate can still be incredibly frustrating to play against. In short, Riot decided to leave her role virtually unchanged, a role that contains some of the most problematic elements in the game.

I think we’re going to see the same thing happen with the other support characters. Riot has agreed that healing is bad for the game, but I have yet to see even a suggested solution to the problem. Chances are, if Riot is going to do anything significant to healing it will happen to all the targeted healing in the game in one patch. Remaking one champion at a time doesn’t solve the problem, it just moves the other healers up the viability list. Unfortunately, I don’t think Riot can afford to significantly change the way support works. Tournament players are too used to it, and for the time being, tournament play is the most exciting thing happening in the LoL community.

What’s more likely is that we’ll see a long string of number adjustments for the support characters in game, reducing heals and increasing the resistance buffs granted by their spells. Reducing the duration of shields and increasing mana costs. Until the launch of Season Two, I think support is going to stay as it is – frustrating the hell out of blind pick players and encouraging the passive tournament play that pretty much defines high tier these days.

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Orianna’s “Champion Approaches” thread is up, which presumably means we’ll have another patch on Tuesday to bring her live. The thread also included the skill list, which looks significantly less like a pet class than may have been suggested in earlier threads. I’m actually glad for that. The other pet characters currently in League of Legends feel clumsy and unresponsive. Let’s put that aside for a moment and dig into the skills.

Passive – Clockwork Windup: Orianna’s autoattacks deal additional magic damage every hit, subsequent attacks on the same target within a few seconds will add more damage per hit. This bonus stacks up to three times.

Command – Attack: Orianna commands her ball to fly towards target location, dealing damage to targets hit but doing reduced damage for each additional target hit. Her ball remains behind at that location afterwards.

Command – Dissonance: Orianna commands her ball to emit a magnetic pulse, dealing damage to units around it. Afterwards, the ball leaves a field behind for a few seconds that speeds up allies and slows enemies.

Command – Protect
(Passive): The allied champion the ball is attached to gains bonus Armor and Magic Resistance.
(Active): Orianna commands her ball to fly to and attach onto an allied champion, dealing damage to enemies it passes through and shielding the allied champion when it arrives.

Command – Shockwave: Orianna commands her ball to emit a shockwave after a short delay, flinging affected enemies in the vicinity into the air a set distance towards, and possibly over, her ball.

I’ll start by saying I’m going to need a video to understand how her skills work. The Q is clear enough, and the W sounds like a version of Lux’s AoE slow, but in reverse – it slows after dealing damage. I’m not sure why her E is split into an active and passive component unless the ball just stays on the target indefinitely, which seems odd. Her ultimate sounds interesting, though I think its effectiveness will depend entirely on the size of the AoE and how easy it is to get the ball into position.

While I understand the idea behind her passive, I have to wonder how its going to work out. Few damage dealing passives really incentivize players to do things that are counterintuitive to the champion. Jarvan, for instance, has a damage modifier, but he also has a skillset designed around getting close to and staying close to the enemy. This passive sounds less like an imposed skill ceiling and more like a source of frustration. If it is too easy to use, she’ll have absolutely wild burst, but if it’s too tough there will be endless complaints that she is underpowered. Here’s hoping Riot struck a balance.