Welcome to this patch's General Discussion thread for the League of Legends subforum. This thread is for discussion around League of Legends. Free feel to talk about anything LoL related here that does not already have its own thread.
On July 18 2018 11:52 Gahlo wrote: "I found out how to fix funneling! We change jungle items in a way that hurts junglers!"
Fuck you, Riot.
Does that change actually drastically affect jugglers though? Are jugglers often the highest gold on their team? Doesn’t it only affect their gold from lane minions?
It could affect junglers who don't complete the jungle item later in the game. If they get fed and want to split.they'll be getting reduced gold still.
Why exactly is funneling gold a bad thing? I still don't really understand that.
And if it is a horrible awful thing, say because it is too passive and / or boring, then bring back real carries that can play against it. You want to play a wet noodle mid and feed a Master Yi while you stall the game? Great, the free farmed Kog with a Janna laughs in your face.
Alternatively, you could get rid of everyone's free vision and let the other jungler take over the game.
Idk, I don't understand. They made changes because games were too fast and exciting and people didn't like not having control, now they mad that games not fast and exciting. Isn't this what you wanted?
Also, am I correct in noticing that Jinx and Twitch now have more HP than the average bruiser at level 1? Wtf? I'm old and dont play much these days, but that seems to be symptomatic of a game thats jumped the shark a bit.
On July 18 2018 14:34 iCanada wrote: Why exactly is funneling gold a bad thing? I still don't really understand that.
And if it is a horrible awful thing, say because it is too passive and / or boring, then bring back real carries that can play against it. You want to play a wet noodle mid and feed a Master Yi while you stall the game? Great, the free farmed Kog with a Janna laughs in your face.
Alternatively, you could get rid of everyone's free vision and let the other jungler take over the game.
Idk, I don't understand. They made changes because games were too fast and exciting and people didn't like not having control, now they mad that games not fast and exciting. Isn't this what you wanted?
Also, am I correct in noticing that Jinx and Twitch now have more HP than the average bruiser at level 1? Wtf?
Funneling is a problem because the game has been, for 5 years, balanced in a way that makes funneling a problem.
The most obvious example is Master Yi. This champion was intentionally balanced around the idea that it was very difficult for him to get ahead (or even stay even) of the enemy CC. Theoretically hes always been able to R-Alpha and wipe teams, but in most games that was not even a thought. Once it was able to occur it was an issue because the game was never balanced for a champ like Yi to get that much gold, because in the normal game, a Yi would get stomped if he went into either of the 3 lanes as a primary farmer. There have always been champs that would be OP if they got sick early farm without contest (for instance, playing Tryndamere) but the issue has been that sacrifices were never balanced for. Thus once there was a chance to sacrifice, there was a good chance that people would be affected.
On July 18 2018 11:35 Seuss wrote: The Akali rework looks okay except for the ult, it's needlessly complicated.
That's the only thing I'd have issue with too. I would have loved if they kept old ult, trim the dmg on it to make it fair w/ the new kit but keep all the functionality.
The new ult is Riot Design™ to a tee. It can't just do one obvious thing, it has to do a dozen different things which don't really make it better. It doesn't need to stun, do two different types of damage, have two different dash speeds/animations, do AoE on one dash but only hit one target on the second, etc. Two dashes is fine, especially for interplay with her passive .Two dashes with a thousand bells and whistles dumped on top for no cohesive reason is silly.
I think the real irony of the jungle item change is that it’s been “standard” for years on end for laners to steal jungle farm. But once it’s become standard for the reverse to be true then it’s something they’ve gotta address.
Actually kind of a good point. Why do they just nerf the lane gold for junglers and not the jungle gold for people with a non-jungle item? Exp is already reduced for them, why not give it an extra incentive to not take it?
On July 19 2018 03:52 Uldridge wrote: Actually kind of a good point. Why do they just nerf the lane gold for junglers and not the jungle gold for people with a non-jungle item? Exp is already reduced for them, why not give it an extra incentive to not take it?
On July 19 2018 03:31 geript wrote: I think the real irony of the jungle item change is that it’s been “standard” for years on end for laners to steal jungle farm. But once it’s become standard for the reverse to be true then it’s something they’ve gotta address.
I can't make sense of what you're saying. In pro play, it's mostly the "carrying" players that have taken the "jungle role" so they can farm both the jungle and the lane, so who gets farmed within the team is the same guy. In soloQ, laners steal camps but I wouldn't pretend junglers never take lane farm either.
On July 18 2018 11:52 Gahlo wrote: "I found out how to fix funneling! We change jungle items in a way that hurts junglers!"
Fuck you, Riot.
Does that change actually drastically affect jugglers though? Are jugglers often the highest gold on their team? Doesn’t it only affect their gold from lane minions?
well it depends on how you play but it's irritating if you're doing well having to juggle between either keeping your gold lower, not farming lane minions, or finishing a fast enchant
On July 19 2018 03:52 Uldridge wrote: Actually kind of a good point. Why do they just nerf the lane gold for junglers and not the jungle gold for people with a non-jungle item? Exp is already reduced for them, why not give it an extra incentive to not take it?
Because they don't want junglers to be a carry threat anymore. Riot Design right now thinks that carry junglers are "Bad Design" because it's passive play leading to massive power spikes faster than "Good Design" laning.
They want to turn junglers into the "position 4" role of Dota 2, where they are basically supports with slightly more gold. Riot Design right now wants to break up this notion of "tank top, mage mid, ADC bot" and turn things more into Dota 2's Position 5 - Position 1 role.
The problem behind that philosophy is that League's champions don't have nearly the same set of skills or items to allow for that to occur. The only buyable ward is a permanent, true-sight version that only one champion can place at a time. Items like Blink Dagger, BKB, MKB, Satanic, and Divine Rapier either don't exist or are so wildly different they can't be used in the same fashion. Battle Fury (the thing most akin to jungler items in Dota 2) also affects enemy heroes, where-as League's jungle items only work on a third of the things you can hit (jungle monsters vs. lane creeps and enemy champions).
Riot Design - in my eyes - is trying to emulate the success Dota 2 has had in the past few years, but League's fundamental game design doesn't allow it to occur without massive changes (see 8.11), and the only time these massive changes should occur is after Worlds.
Even if they want to go in a more Dota-style (which I don't think is true) I don't see how this would get them there. Jungle has always been "position 4" in LOL and it was just for a few patches that jungle (which really was mid in many ways) became a position 1 thing. Position fluidity like jungle being 1 or 4 is very Dota, jungle always being 4 is very undota.
On July 19 2018 03:52 Uldridge wrote: Actually kind of a good point. Why do they just nerf the lane gold for junglers and not the jungle gold for people with a non-jungle item? Exp is already reduced for them, why not give it an extra incentive to not take it?
Because they don't want junglers to be a carry threat anymore. Riot Design right now thinks that carry junglers are "Bad Design" because it's passive play leading to massive power spikes faster than "Good Design" laning.
They want to turn junglers into the "position 4" role of Dota 2, where they are basically supports with slightly more gold. Riot Design right now wants to break up this notion of "tank top, mage mid, ADC bot" and turn things more into Dota 2's Position 5 - Position 1 role.
The problem behind that philosophy is that League's champions don't have nearly the same set of skills or items to allow for that to occur. The only buyable ward is a permanent, true-sight version that only one champion can place at a time. Items like Blink Dagger, BKB, MKB, Satanic, and Divine Rapier either don't exist or are so wildly different they can't be used in the same fashion. Battle Fury (the thing most akin to jungler items in Dota 2) also affects enemy heroes, where-as League's jungle items only work on a third of the things you can hit (jungle monsters vs. lane creeps and enemy champions).
Riot Design - in my eyes - is trying to emulate the success Dota 2 has had in the past few years, but League's fundamental game design doesn't allow it to occur without massive changes (see 8.11), and the only time these massive changes should occur is after Worlds.
What are you talking about this isnt about junglers being a carry threat its about laners who can easily farm both mid and jungle with a support to get a huge gold/xp boost over everyone
yi was kind of an exception here but he's not much of a jungler anyway they just gave a bunch of free monster damage on his Q because his kit is too bad to lane
Riot invested too much time into role selection, something I truly believe was awesome, despite the early teething problems. The game is in a convoluted state right now, I agree, however, I believe we're moving in a better direction. I think it's cool to give supports super powerful actives, but if they also give laners some powerful actives that'd be great too. There are almost no interesting active items outside support role, I'd like that to change.
Years ago Yanger and myself had some discussions about how Riot could make support itemization more interesting. Dota tries to do this through two core concepts:
•High gold efficiency with poor slot efficiency •Cheap stat allocation with powerful active effects
This means that even though supports have low gold income they can still have access to powerful items. Laners with high income can go these items but they quickly become inefficient to use(Drums) so the power spike of buying them have to win the game or you are just super behind.
Riot went with another option of just increasing support gold income. They changed how passive gold generation works by increasing it and shifting some gold off minion farming. They removed wards and instead created a trinket which is essentially income for a support. They created support items that just generation income while being efficient. Then they kept making cheapest efficient items. The problem is whenever these items are good, laners just buy them since there's no real loss of slot efficiency in league. We've seen this time and time again. Locket top/jungle back in the day to Knights Vox and new locket top laners etc.
Personally think the slot efficiency/item actives is the way to go to make the roles items more interesting. Removing supports ability to dominate vision also removed agency from the role. I know why they did it but it forced them to then add more power in other ways. This has all culminated into the situation we find ourselves in where supports are just insanely strong. How do they fix this? I don't know if they can really without overhauling their system or doing something really innovative.
What exactly is the issue with supports being as strong as they are at the moment? League has always had periods of time where a role was stronger than the rest.
Supports being strong isn't really the issue. They have made passive income so strong while making support items just really efficient. So supports don't really have to do anything to get the power they have.
On July 19 2018 21:05 Gahlo wrote: Because it's causing all this funneling nonsense.
actually supports being rich caused problems before this funneling nonsense. the whole "better bot lane wins game despite every other lane losing" thing is due to supports being too fed. the adc with better survivability/peel just outlasts everyone. we havent seen a proper assassin meta in ages because supports get their adc buff items too quickly.
the issue with lol atm is just champion design (or game design, whichever way you see it). there are over 100 champions but outside of a handful of champions, there arent enough team compositions that would incentivise you to pick a specific champion despite it being considered "off-meta". few champions are actually good at one thing and bad at the other. in the end it all just comes down to how riot scales the damage numbers and how easy it is for a specific champ to land their damage (skillshots vs aoe vs targeted).
dota doesnt have "funneling" issues as bad as lol because it has heroes that can deal with strategies no matter how shit they are in any given patch. every "strategy" has a counter to it that is viable at almost any time because of the way the heroes and game is just naturally designed. league just suffers from always having a group of champions that benefit more than everyone else when riot implements a balance change to sway the meta and as a result, creation of a new "hot" strategy. thats just fundamentally poor game design
On July 19 2018 21:05 Gahlo wrote: Because it's causing all this funneling nonsense.
actually supports being rich caused problems before this funneling nonsense. the whole "better bot lane wins game despite every other lane losing" thing is due to supports being too fed. the adc with better survivability/peel just outlasts everyone. we havent seen a proper assassin meta in ages because supports get their adc buff items too quickly.
the issue with lol atm is just champion design (or game design, whichever way you see it). there are over 100 champions but outside of a handful of champions, there arent enough team compositions that would incentivise you to pick a specific champion despite it being considered "off-meta". few champions are actually good at one thing and bad at the other. in the end it all just comes down to how riot scales the damage numbers and how easy it is for a specific champ to land their damage (skillshots vs aoe vs targeted).
dota doesnt have "funneling" issues as bad as lol because it has heroes that can deal with strategies no matter how shit they are in any given patch. every "strategy" has a counter to it that is viable at almost any time because of the way the heroes and game is just naturally designed. league just suffers from always having a group of champions that benefit more than everyone else when riot implements a balance change to sway the meta and as a result, creation of a new "hot" strategy. thats just fundamentally poor game design
My post was by no means me expressing that it wasn't a problem until now.
Riot is trying to loosen positional roles, and realising they've stapled their balls to the floor because they've been enforcing said roles for years. As always, their solution is to rip everything up, have a mess of a meta for a few weeks or months, and try to balance the game from then onwards.
Many role mechanics, especially role items, do not support the current approach, because by definition, role mechanics enforce a meta.
On July 19 2018 21:05 Gahlo wrote: Because it's causing all this funneling nonsense.
actually supports being rich caused problems before this funneling nonsense. the whole "better bot lane wins game despite every other lane losing" thing is due to supports being too fed. the adc with better survivability/peel just outlasts everyone. we havent seen a proper assassin meta in ages because supports get their adc buff items too quickly.
I think the "better bot wins" meme is mostly thanks to Censer period and the often ignored fact that botlane winning means you have two champions that win their lane and the enemy has two champions that lose their lane. If your jungler and mid/top lose the game is/was very very hard to win especially when one of them are a hardcarry like Yi for instance, ADCs are by design hardcarries.
Assassins are perfectly fine in soloQ Talon, both the smite or flash variants, is one of the strongest if not the strongest midlaner right now. Pro games are an entirely different matter.
I'd love to see more viable hardcarries in the other roles rather than nerfs. Rito is honestly way too fast with the nerfhammer.
soloq is hardly a good way to judge whether the game is designed well or not, but even then youve only specified talon out of many assassin champs. all the rest have been sidelined for either bruisers or mages with good waveclear and roam (something talon also happens to excel at). zoe is another thats picked but thats cause her ranged cc and damage is just stupid. and the bot lane wins game thing came from a winning combination of jg/mid/top being unable to outcarry a single winning bot lane.
On July 20 2018 00:55 evilfatsh1t wrote: soloq is hardly a good way to judge whether the game is designed well or not, but even then youve only specified talon out of many assassin champs. all the rest have been sidelined for either bruisers or mages with good waveclear and roam (something talon also happens to excel at). zoe is another thats picked but thats cause her ranged cc and damage is just stupid. and the bot lane wins game thing came from a winning combination of jg/mid/top being unable to outcarry a single winning bot lane.
Assassins are perfectly viable mid: Ekko, Zed, Katarina, Wukong do I really need to go on? The point is the top dog generally is considered to be Talon an assassin. Assassins ALL roam and shove. The most consistent rank 1 in NA is an Akali main for crying out loud.
Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one actually playing the game on this board.
Why is soloq not a good indication of proper game design? Sure you'll have preferences and people will still play what they feel like, but the large majority plays what is viable. No one wants to play something that feels weak AND unfun. And even if it's fun, if it's weak enough, it becomes unfun if you get clapped every time you play the game with that champion (or at the very least get clapped enough; >60% I guess, or should that be higher?)
So what parameters can then be used to evaluate your game design? I'm not saying looking at the majority is the right way (was just kind of playing devil's advocate; but you do want to maximize fun/counterplay/viability; but it does have some merit). Also, I'd argue that the current state of the game is the most variable it's ever been.
Can standard/hyper adcs (with their support complement) ever exist in a mage/bruiser botlane meta, or are those mutually exclusive? If the scenario is able to exist, it would certainly be the most succesful balancing ever, right? It would be even better if more adc's other than ezreal & lucian mid could sit in solo lanes!
But to get back to my point: maximizing a parameter, say viability, will never mean complete viability. The way champions have their specific niche implies total viability can't be attained. But in soloq I feel everything is viable anyway because it's literally a coinflip (even more than it used to be) lol.
i mean i thought it should be obvious that you design games for the people playing it there's a difference between not taking the average players opinion on what should be changed and watching how they actually play the game
Thought it was a remark on how people are stupid and don't know what's right for them. Edit: And you added something to your post that makes me look like someone that doesn't understand what you mean when you type stuff lol
I guess the "average league experience" could still be viewed as non indicative of how balanced the game is. They don't know what's strong or how to play the champion correctly so why take that into account? At the lowest level everything should kind of balance each other out because of ignorance and being inept. It would be a pretty interesting experiment to release a convoluted champ with much depth and complexity, but only becomes broken once it's played close to optimally and see how it fares until mid diamond.
On July 20 2018 19:33 Uldridge wrote: Why is soloq not a good indication of proper game design? Sure you'll have preferences and people will still play what they feel like, but the large majority plays what is viable. No one wants to play something that feels weak AND unfun. And even if it's fun, if it's weak enough, it becomes unfun if you get clapped every time you play the game with that champion (or at the very least get clapped enough; >60% I guess, or should that be higher?)
because you determine whether a game is broken or not by judging the people who play it at the highest level and take the game seriously. soloq has so much trolling/fuck around factor in it that the quality of the games doesnt accurately represent the flaws/qualities that the game has. tfblade being top of soloq doesnt mean akali, or assassins in general, is a "viable pick". if anything tf blade being at the top of soloq proves my point. the fact that one tricks can take a champ that isnt considered "meta" and stomp people with it show that soloq is in no way gameplay at the highest level. it just shows that for 99% of the playerbase, macro elements, team efforts to control vision and other team oriented actions that need to take place in progames are severely overrated at pub level, and the deciding factor is in fact just damage numbers and how reliably you can land your hits. you can either take this as an indication that the standard of non-pro players is completely shit even at the highest ranks, or that players just dont take soloq seriously enough where you can draw conclusions from soloq statistics and claim it to be a reliable point of reference for game design.
personally i think its a case of both, but either way thats why you dont look at soloq results to check if your game is balanced well.
On July 20 2018 20:28 Slayer91 wrote: I mean, if all the zed players are complaining about certain things it doesn't mean there's a problem, but if they all stop playing zed there might be
this is a win in my book, no problem here, keep walking nothing to see here
The strategy in LoL is extremely low level. Macro is simply a result of 5 people being able to cooperate, nothing more. You still need to land your abilities at the correct time and you still need to stand at the right place with the right people. That doesn't change in soloq. If your backline stands in front like a moron they're going to be blown up regardless, doesn't matter if the macro is godlike or not. LoL is basically some kind of fighting game that has strategical elements sprinkled in it. It's all about execution of your character and sure there's some basic thought involved like wave manipulation to open up overextension of your opponent. And you could argue that buying the right items and runing correct is strategic, but I think it says more about the player's intelligence, just like how you can be better at wave manipulation so that you let your opponent overextend. The pure balance aspect is champ interactions (and how champs utilize items); not map interaction. For instance, you can't base a balance decision on the fact that Garen always overextends at lvl 2 because he E's the whole wave, gives FB in 99% of the games because he's overextended then and then chainfeeds into a loss, therefor Garen is in need of a buff on some of his stats/abilities, right?
To balance champions properly they should let every champion be processed by a machine learning algorithm, then let every champion interact with each other and balance until every 1 on 1 is 50% winrate lol. Or just hold a giant tournament by every OTP ever and tweak numbers until 50% winrate is achieved for every 1v1
And for the record, I absolutely think that assassins are a viable pick. They're just SO high risk that they can't be played reliably. It's the same in soloq. If your assassin whether that's TF Blade on Akali, LL Stylish on Zed, or Faker on LB doesn't get rolling, he's done for. Can't split and can't teamfight. The high risk is what people tend to avert, not the viability. It's the same reason why people don't invest in high risk high reward scenario's or why companies stop taking chances. They're scared of taking a leap of faith. It's a symptom of stability rather than an symptom of (im)balance. You have so much control when working as a team that assassins get an autonerf, but then it means that you need to induce a little more instability in your games to let assassins thrive. The higher levels have come so accustomed to played one way of playing the game (vision, cleaning vision, grouping for a siege, letting waves stackn ...) that they're unable to see different options, which makes for one dimensional gameplay. It's all in the name of "going for 80-20 plays" or something like that, when the play making decision making 100% changes with assassins, because they have greater outplay potential of you have a mechanically gifted player using them. Making an initial 40-60 a potential 70-30 if these conditions are met (which you could control, IF you're the better player).
I guess I'm starting to ramble a bit and that it's muddying my point, but I hope you understand what Im trying to say. The gist of it all is this: it's all a team/player mentality to not play assassins because they/he think(s) that it's going to be more risk averse of doing so, while risk in itself isn't something to be averted from. Being risk averse is basically being scared. And being scared of losing is a recipe for stagnation. If you'd get some reward for being exciting (crowdpleasing) we'd see way more diversity I bet. Too bad competition is so one dimensional.
It seems odd to me that generally the same population of people who think soloQ gives you valuable insight into balance also generally say you can climb the ladder with any main. These positions are incompatible.
Another design difference between Dota 2 and LoL is that Dota tends to "buff up" heroes and items that are not meta or considered "not viable," compared to LoL where they "nerf down" champions and items more often than not. When combined with a large pool of unique and powerful items for all roles in the game, this lets Dota have a much larger "viable hero pool" compared to League. Look at what current supports buy for items in League: a gold generation item (Spellthief's, Targons, etc.) that they can eventually turn into an item that spits out wards with some extra stats assigned to it, one or two party helping items (Redemption, Locket, Athenes, etc.) and then the rest of their gold is spent on true sight wards.
Compare this to Dota 2, where most support heroes (aka the position 5 role) can have items like Mekansm, Urn of Shadows, Arcane Boots, Force Staff, Glimmer Cape, Ghost Sceptre, Vlads, Pipe of Insight, Spirit Vessel, Medallion of Courage, Solar Crest, or Euls to keep themselves alive, an ally, or be used to help win a team fight. And these are all items that are relatively cheap (I think the most expensive is in the 3.5-4k range) and not unreasonable for them to get in a normal length game. And this is on top of them having to buy items like wards (vision and true sight), smoke of deceit, dust, and gem of true sight.
Why does Riot insist on not showing how the skins they want to sell look in game? I mean why do they want me to type in "ssg ezreal" in google instead of just showing it on the page announcing the skins?
Why does Riot insist on not showing how the skins they want to sell look in game? I mean why do they want me to type in "ssg ezreal" in google instead of just showing it on the page announcing the skins?
That link has a youtube video embedded in it that shows off the skins in game
So has anyone else run into a bug where it gives your team/the enemy team the option to 3 minute surrender despite having all 5 members in game? I just traded kills with the enemy top laner, only for them to trigger the 3 minute surrender and have the game say their top laner wasn't there.
Were they a 5 man premade? That sounds like a possible exploit, as it's usually not possible.
To balance champions properly they should let every champion be processed by a machine learning algorithm, then let every champion interact with each other and balance until every 1 on 1 is 50% winrate lol.
You're never going to get a usable result from machine learning for LoL, because it's just going to spit out scenarios and setups that don't get used in real games, if it even works at all. Otherwise pro teams would be running automated simulations to figure out optimal builds and comps.
On August 01 2018 05:26 Gahlo wrote: I'm more concerned about those ratio buffs on Fizz R.
Fizz is good when Ahri is good so this is just icing , the w change is the bigger deal outside of free match ups
I mean, probably. I don't know enough about Fizz' play patterns to comment about his W.
It's the 30% AP buff on rank 1 ulti for a champion that I keep hearing is dependent on getting value from early ults to get rolling as an assassin that makes me pay attention.
I can't believe they went through with those Fizz buffs...
He's gained an extra 0.7 AP ratio plus super strong W, with 100 AP he's going to be doing like 100 extra damage, on top of his already great damage. Champ doesn't need damage buffs ffs.