What’s up guys it’s me Jeremy!
So everyone knows by now that the LoL Beta Champions were crazy OP, but there are actually
a lot more reasons behind it than just ‘Riot used to suck at balancing,’ so we thought
it’d be pretty fun to take a look at exactly WHY the LoL beta champions were so ridiculously
overpowered!
And if you enjoy the video definitely hit that like button because if this video hits,
let’s say ratings, then I’m gonna .
We’ll start off with the biggest factor that comes into play, and that’s the foundation
that League of Legends was built upon.
The MOBA genre really kicked off when the modder Aeon64 made a custom map for Starcraft
named Aeon of Strife - featuring the three iconic lanes that have come to be the standard
for MOBA games.
DOTA, or Defense of the Ancients, was actually a conversion of Aeon of Strife - from the
Starcraft engine to the Warcraft III engine.
With the addition of elements from the tower defense genre, and refinements to the mod
by well known figures such as Guinsoo and Icefrog, what was left was a complex and innovative
gameplay experience.
When Riot Games developed League of Legends, the most obvious starting point was the original
DOTA mod, as members of Riot had already been involved in its development and realised from
a gameplay perspective that it was pretty solid already.
Riot started creating their own original champions, but the power levels of the champions were
more or less equivalent to those of DOTA heroes, as the numbers they were tuned to were the
foundation of the game.
So essentially if you took one of the Alpha or Beta champion releases and plopped it into
DOTA, it wouldn’t really be all that out of place - like, they wouldn’t deal too
much or too little damage, the numbers would all be relatively equal.
But as we can see from DOTA’s gameplay, although the power level of a single hero
might be higher than the champions in League of Legends, it’s still really well balanced,
so you have to wonder why the beta champions in League were so broken.
There’s one really simple answer to that question - summoner spells.
During League’s development, Riot wanted to find something that would build on the
gameplay and offer something customisable to players that would help differentiate the
games and make them play out differently.
They created summoner spells with that aim in mind, with the idea that it would allow
players to develop new strategies, build on champion strengths or help make up for weaknesses.
Although summoner spells were really well received and a much loved part of the game
today, the issue was that these champions were never designed to have access to those
tools, so when they had access to them, they became enormously overpowered.
Think about it like this - when Riot designs a champion, they talk a lot about that champion’s
‘power budget.’
This is the reason that certain champions have insane Ultimates but weak kits, and vice
versa.
Take Blitzcrank for example - his Ultimate isn’t awful but it’s not a game changer,
and with very good reason; most of his power budget has gone to his insanely strong Rocket
Grab.
On the other hand, you have champions like Rumble or Amumu who can dominate an entire
fight with one press of their R - so the rest of their kits are less powerful as a result.
Riot assigns the same power budget to every champion, and the only thing that changes
is the distribution of that power throughout the kit.
In the Beta phase of LoL, League champions were designed with a power budget similar
to that of Dota heroes, hence why they could probably have slotted into Dota without much
issue.
The problem arises when summoner spells are brought into the picture.
Once you add summoner spells into the mix, you’re left with champions as strong as
Dota heroes but with even more customisable power on top of their own kits, resulting
in almost every champion being stupidly overpowered.
The summoner spell effects themselves were based on active items that were originally
from Dota, but making them available for free made them really overtuned, and every summoner
spell was pretty overpowered because of it.
This is the main reason that Beta champions were so damn strong - they were just never
designed with the added power of summoner spells in mind, so when they had access to
those tools, they just became unstoppable.
Take Flash for example, which can enable a powerful but immobile champion to escape a
fight if they position badly, or give Twisted Fate a way to instantly getting into range
to start landing AoE stuns on the enemy team.
The reason this doesn’t happen anymore is because Riot keeps the added power from summoner
spells in mind.
If you took the power budget from a beta champion, and removed the power of summoner spells,
you’re left with the amount of power you can safely put on the kit of a new champion
who has access to summoner spells, without making them too crazy overpowered in game.
Although the introduction of summoner spells were the main thing that made the beta champions
overpowered, they were already way stronger than they are now thanks to just being based
on Dota heroes.
The raw power that they had in their mechanics and ratios were off the charts.
Although spells had longer cooldowns and cost more mana, the overpowered nature of them
drastically overshadowed the downsides, and as a result the champions found much more
strength in a game that was designed to be faster-paced and snowballed a lot harder.
Instead of having long trades in lanes and battles of attrition, Riot ended up with League
being a game of ‘who lands the first big hit first’ because you can bet that CC would
be followed up with instant death.
This effect snowballed players ahead in gold and experience, in turn raising their power
more and making the game almost a coin flip at times - whether you got the first kill
or not.
Once you got those first kills, you were handed improved abilities, or early access to the
god-tier Ultimate abilities, along with raw stat advantages and a load of gold to spend.
The snowball effect from the fast-paced gameplay brings us to our next point - after all, you
gotta have something to spend all that gold on.
Of course, we’re talking about the items themselves, which were designed from the ground
up to be even more power-spiky than they are today.
Getting items was designed to be a huge turning point where a player could have way more impact
on the game, and as a result the items themselves were vastly overpowered, once again easily
to the power level of DOTA items.
They were more expensive and took longer to get thanks to lower passive gold gain and
lower gold from farming minions or getting assists, but they still had a ton more power
for the cost, way more than the gold efficiency you get out of an item today.
The items all had their own insane actives too, so on top of the free summoner spells,
you also gained even more powerful effect to use once you picked up your first few items,
so players had access to much more power per item for the gold than they would otherwise
have had today.
A 6-item build in Beta was terrifying, the amount of power was utterly game breaking
and it was really just a race to see who got to that point first - assuming the game actually
lasted that long in the first place.
In the current game, early kills don’t necessarily decide the outcome, because assists will distribute
gold to the team and help promote team play, and you could just choose to farm up and out-cs
your opponent to have quick access to items yourself, even if you were losing on kills.
That wasn’t the case in Beta, since kills were by far the easiest way to get gold.
That means players picking up kills were getting items way quicker, which in turn made the
game even more snowbally because those first item pickups would add so much more power
that they would become almost unstoppable.
Another point worth considering is that being based on Dota, League was originally going
to have minion denial as a mechanic.
This was actually why the items had been so strong for their cost, because minion denial
would theoretically slow down the rate at which players would gain gold, so items needed
to be cheaper to offset that mechanic.
Once minion denial was removed to further distinguish League from Dota, the items weren’t
changed much, if at all, to compensate - so you were left with super powerful and relatively
cheap items that would be picked up quickly by players with an early lead, and games one
become crazy one-sided because they could now essentially solo entire teams.
Anyway that just about wraps up everything about beta champions and why they were so
overpowered - we talk about beta champions so often so it made sense for us to exactly
what it was that resulted in the power level of the game being so much higher in the early
patches - and it turns out it does go a lot deeper than Riot just not being as good as
balancing.
Make sure you leave us a comment and let us know what your favorite champion was from
beta if you played back then, or just what your own personal experiences with the game
was back in the earlier days!
And it looks like 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!