League of Legends General Discussion Thread

[Gustaran]

I was looking for the new champion spotlight and found this.

[Enoch]

Winning this made me happier than it should have



Time to run around like a crazy person while spamming /l I guess

On the question of smart cast there are some skills I wouldn't smart cast. Skills that you want to harass with by moving in and getting them off at max range like Tristana's E for instance. Also I don't like smart casting spells I need to use in a chase, for instance I'm pretty sure I won't smartcast Singed's E. But for combo champs like Annie and Ryze smartcasting is very nice.

As for other keyboard setups one thing to remember is the keys 1-4 are shortcuts to target your team. Memorising the key that corresponds to your lane mate and your carry make playing support a bit easier.

Anyone played with a Yorrick yet? All I have heard about are the slightly hilarious bugs that he had before they hotfixed it.

[Iainuki]

Global teleports and strategic stealth are both serious problems as they stand in the game. The main reason is that they force severe strategic disadvantages on the other team, and these are accentuated in solo queue because there are five opportunities to screw up the strategy rather than one. Dealing with stealth demands extremely defensive laning, pink wards (the cost of which sets the defending team behind even if the stealther gets no ganks), and later on oracles. The worst is that the end of the day, if the stealther ganks successfully they'll get fed and become impossible to stop (or at least, that's what happened until all of the stealth heroes got nerfed into the ground), but if they don't get kills, they'll be weaker than a standard hero and so their team will lose. Stealth creates degenerate gameplay, and I'll be glad to see it go.

I have similar feelings about unrestricted global teleports like Pantheon's and Twisted Fate's. The problem with them is more late-game focused than early-game focused like stealth: backdooring. With Pantheon or Twisted Fate, a coordinated team can all but force a 4v5 by threatening a backdoor and another objective, usually Baron, at the same time. The only counter to backdooring is summoner Teleport, and usually a global teleport will overwhelm one summoner teleport because of lower cooldowns. Teleport-to-champion abilities like Nocturne's and Shen's aren't as powerful, but still strong. Because of his global, Shen has been nerfed to unusability, even though his ult doesn't allow real backdooring, just more effective split-pushing. I honestly wouldn't mind seeing Shen's and Nocturne's abilities out of the game either, especially if it meant Shen could be useful again.

[Deceptus]

Anyone played with a Yorrick yet? All I have heard about are the slightly hilarious bugs that he had before they hotfixed it.

He's bad. I have never seen any Yorick be any remote threat in any game I've played yet, and so far his skills are underwhelming to say the least. That, and he appears not to have been playtested properly, so what we have is a failed experiment.

[Cull]

Globals and champs with stealth make you either all play aggressive so they can only gank one at a time, or all play super passive and defensive, as on of the Dreamhack teams basically said about TF and his lvl 6. This also applys to pre-nerf Eve lvl 1. At spawn, you have a stealth roamer with a stun. Makes you play super passive until you see her. Good opponents will use this to win lane 9 times our of 10. Then like others said, the late game potential of globals is huge. Its gamechanging, and IMO pretty broken. You either remove the global, weaken it, or change the champion completely. I think what Riot is supposedly doing towards globals is pretty good, making it limited in range like Nocturne's.

[Gustaran]

Global teleports and strategic stealth are both serious problems as they stand in the game...

I agree, but that's really nothing new, these problems were mentioned on stream 5 months ago. And Riot's treatment of " let's nerf everybody into the ground" is just terrible. If you have known for months that you need to change/remake 6 champions then you should redirect your resources towwards this goal of instead of bringing out a new champ every 2 weeks.

[uberfish]

The problem with the stealth system LOL uses is that "pay gold to detect stealth" isn't very fun, and doesn't work at low levels of play anyway. Nocturne is a better balanced version of the assassin class.

[v8mark]

I agree, but that's really nothing new, these problems were mentioned on stream 5 months ago. And Riot's treatment of " let's nerf everybody into the ground" is just terrible. If you have known for months that you need to change/remake 6 champions then you should redirect your resources towwards this goal of instead of bringing out a new champ every 2 weeks.

This is undoubtedly a problem, but I don't think a solution is that easy. Balancing champions and creating new champions require vastly different skill-sets. The main time-sinks for creating new champions are to do with art and animation -- people who do this are very unlikely to have the requisite game knowledge to be able to balance champions as well...

[Sullla]

The real solution is more time to test/balance new champions appropriately. When Riot slows down their frantic release schedule, the champions come out in a much better state. Look at Orianna: three weeks of down time before she came out, and the champion was properly balanced on release. Meanwhile, earlier this year they were pushing out champs incredibly fast, and we got a succession of total dud champs (Cassiopeia, Caitlyn, Maokai) who were useless on release and required a lot of further patching to become useful. Then again this week, Riot was clearly preoccupied with Dreamhack and wasn't ready to do another champion release, so it's no surprise that Yorick came out in a broken state.

They should take a page from Blizzard and simply not release champs if they aren't ready. If that means an extra week or two, so be it. Of course that means less revenue for a Free to Play game, which means I doubt it will happen, even if it would improve LoL substantially...

[Gustaran]

This is undoubtedly a problem, but I don't think a solution is that easy. Balancing champions and creating new champions require vastly different skill-sets. The main time-sinks for creating new champions are to do with art and animation -- people who do this are very unlikely to have the requisite game knowledge to be able to balance champions as well...

I don't agree. Of course the art team can't start to balance champion abilities, but when I look at a champion like Orianna, who has a very new way of playing or things like Nocturne's ultimate I feel the balancing time invested should have been used to solve current problems.

In no way it is acceptable to simply make a champion nearly useless because the dev team needs half a year to figure out how to solve a balance problem (which even a red post admitted was almost exclusively due to low elo complains). If you feel the mechanic is completely broken beyond saving remove the champ and reimburse players or give the champion a complete new set of abilities.