What’s up guys it’s me Jeremy.
Riot has been getting closer and closer to a complete set of design rules that they focus
on sticking to.
A lot of champions are quite outdated when compared to these guidelines though, and a
lot of the time it’s just a single ability that is causing a conflict.
These are abilities that have a very unhealthy design, or have some reason that could cause
the champion to get a rework in the future.
Season 6 is the year of reworks, and I don't expect Riot to slow down in Season 7 with
their reworks either, and a lot of champions are getting reworked left and right, and there's
a few abilities that stick out as creating problems for the champions they are on that
could be big enough to potentially cause the champion to get a rework or gameplay update
in the future.
Keep in mind that we’re not going to include any champions that are already confirmed to
be getting a significant rework, such as Yorick or Urgot, and some abilities can force reworks
because they simply don’t fit a champion rather than being particularly unhealthy.
As always if you like the video hit that like button, if not then hit the dislike, and let’s
get started.
First up is Fizz’s W, Seastone Trident.
That might be surprising because Fizz’s E is notoriously his most annoying ability.
The problem is that his W is a huge case of what Riot calls ‘hidden power.’
One of their big design philosophies is that it should be really clear where damage is
coming from, so players fully understand the risks and rewards of using or playing against
each champion.
The damage over time of Fizz’s W has a pretty much invisible indicator and it doesn’t
deal a consistent amount of damage because of the missing HP scaling.
It’s important to Riot that you should be able to expect a certain amount of damage,
based on how many items an enemy has for scaling and how tanky their target is.
Missing HP Scaling really takes you by surprise and lets Fizz put out an insane amount of
damage that you wouldn’t really expect from looking at items, and this is the hidden power
that Riot is pretty likely to try stomp out.
We really wouldn’t be surprised to see this become a completely new ability in the future
to get rid of the hidden power and let players know exactly what they are dealing with when
playing against Fizz.
Malphite is up next with his W, Brutal Strikes.
Honestly, this ability is just dull and uninteresting.
It causes Malphite to have a really one dimensional playstyle where he’s pretty much useless
outside of using his Ultimate.
There’s a few ways to build Malphite - either tanky, full AP or even an AD bruiser build
that gained popularity a little while ago, but no matter what his Ground Slam feels like
it deals no damage at all and offers nothing in the way of CC.
It’s not really unhealthy from a gameplay perspective, but having an ability that feels
like it has no impact at all makes it kinda boring to play Malphite, so we’d expect
to see this replaced in the future.
The most exciting part of this ability is the bonus armor, which is pretty useful for
Malphite considering he scales with armor and wants it to be tanky, but the activated
side is just terrible.
Even something like a 3 hit passive would be better than a waveclear tool that can’t
waveclear.
The only alternative really would be to give it a sizable buff, but Malphite is a champion
that is always hovering the line of being broken because of his game changing Ultimate
by itself, so it’s kinda hard to justify buffing any aspect of his kit because it might
but him into flat out OP territory.
At least as he is right now you don’t really need to worry about Malphite quickly clearing
a wave and then roaming to other lanes, and that’d be a big issue if he had the tools
to do so.
Next up is Nunu’s W, Blood Boil, an ability that is incredibly anti synergistic and doesn’t
really make sense because he has consume in his kit.
You could technically say the same for consume, but in a vacuum by itself consume is a far
better ability that has actual strategic purpose, while his W is kinda useless for the first
20 minutes of a game, other than letting you charge your passive a little faster for the
free ability cast.
Stat boost abilities are fine as long as they are multi-purpose or tacked onto a solid support
kit, but Nunu’s W is kinda useless until late game when it can used on your AD Carry.
Nunu has a really interesting design and is king of counter-jungling, and it would do
a ton for both his power, design and overall fun if W was changed to an ability that felt
a little more impactful.
People often say that your job as Nunu is to make the enemy jungler even more useless
than you are, and to be honest I think it would be pretty cool if Riot kinda rolled
with that a little and gave him a new tool that properly reflects his playstyle as an
all-around pain in the ass.
Mordekaiser’s W Harvester of Sorrow is up next, and when his rework was first released
it was actually pretty good on paper.
He was pretty broken overall on release so he ended up being hit with some huge nerfs,
and a lot of players were kind of annoyed that their favorite champion had been made
unplayable in his original role, now only viable as an ADC alternative.
His W received a lot of mechanics changes so that it could kinda work in both solo lanes
and duo lanes, but it’s ended up as a kind of shattered mess of an ability that doesn’t
really know what it wants to do.
If you play in a solo lane, you waste the passive and get less effect out of the healing,
but if you play it in a duo lane you’re probably never going to use the minion aspect,
making you really dependant on having a good support.
It’s not a particularly weak ability and can definitely work, whether using it on a
support or a minion in a solo lane, but it means Mordekaiser feels clunky and lacks a
true purpose in his playstyle.
Riot probably need to make a decision that will commit him to a single specific role
so that they can turn this ability into something more positive for his kit.
If they want to keep him flexible to make sure all Morde players are happy, then changing
it into something that gives Mordekaiser a better play pattern would be a really cool
change and it would really benefit him a lot.
There once was a time where Akali's E, Crescent Slash, had a huge impact to her playstyle,
but ever since the ability for it to proc the mark on her Q got removed, this ability
has become something that is just so unsatisfying to play with, and there is so much room for
improvement in this ability mechanics wise.
A lot of the time it feels really out of place and clunky, and just weird that it's not so
much that this ability sucks, but just that it could be so much more and make akali so
much more exciting with a redesign on this ability since at the moment it often just
feels like a linear super short range damage ability that doesn't make that much of a difference.
The waveclear is nice but again that's not what you want to do with Akali, you want to
jump in and assassinate people and this ability doesn't really contribute to that fantasy
all that much, when half the time you could do as much damage with just an auto attack.
I'd like to see it regain the ability to proc the mark on her E, or perhaps change it to
a different ability, because when Akali lost that Proccing effect on her E she became a
lot more clunky, and in my eyes a lot less fun and fluid to play.
This is actually one of the big reasons that tank Akali became so popular too, as the playstyle
was basically just about getting Sunfire Cape and spamming your E. If an assassin is being
played as a tank because of one of their abilities, it probably needs a rework!
Next on the list is Soraka’s W, Astral Infusion.
It might seem weird to say that the issue with a healer is their healing ability, but
the problem is that healing just isn’t a really fair mechanic by itself.
Many Rioters have said that this ability is toxic design that breaks a lot of fundamental
game rules, especially in terms of attrition and resources, it just results in so many
situations that gameplay is balanced around being completely thrown out the window because
Soraka can heal someone back up to full hp for free.
When it comes to abilities that Rioters specifically complain about, Soraka's W is at the top of
the list by far, however it is also the case that Soraka's W is very very core to her gameplay
theme as a character, so even though it creates so many unhealthy gameplay patterns, it's
also very difficult to change.
Soraka's received 2 reworks already trying to address this problem, and even still is
arguably in quite a weird spot.
It’s going to be a long road to finding a fair way for Soraka to dish out her heals,
but we don’t expect Riot are quite done yet trying to narrow down the right way to
do it.
Our last ability is Body Slam, Gragas’s E.
This is one you guys might disagree with me on, and I kind of thought this for a while
as well, until Riot Gypsylord mentioned the topic briefly.
Gragas E is a very limiting ability design wise because of the interaction it has with
flash.
Because of the flash body slam combo, gragas will always be allowed to jump in and knock
someone back into his team every 5 minutes or so, which is a very overpowered move, and
has resulted in some very unhealthy gameplay patterns.
Gragas has been hit with a lot of nerfs because of this, but he’s still incredibly dependant
on using his Body Slam properly to make him work in game.
Now that said, Body Slam is an awesome ability and is pretty core to Gragas' fantasy, so
this is probably the least likely candidate for a rework on the list, and even if it did
spark a rework, I would expect him to still keep Body Slam, but instead maybe lose the
interaction with flash or something like that to where it's not as powerful of a move.
Like with so many other abilities, the important thing is that every ability should have counterplay,
and although it’s core to Gragas’s play pattern, it’s just not healthy with it’s
current interaction with Flash.
It’s honestly pretty cool that Riot take the time to rework old champions considering
they make way less money from doing so than dedicating that effort to new releases, but
they have a clear idea of the direction they want the game to go and it’s important that
every champion, new and old, fits that vision.
With that in mind we can expect a ton more reworks in the future, even if they are just
small scale ability swaps, so if you can think of any other abilities that don’t really
suit the game or the champion they are on, make sure you let us know in the comment section
so we can try guess who might be next.
That’s gonna be it from me, if you enjoyed the video drop a like, subscribe if you want,
thanks for watching and I’ll see you guys next time!