What’s up guys it’s me Jeremy.
I do a lot of research about champion development.
And when I say a lot I mean a lot.
If a champion designer at riot so much as sneezes on a character I’m probably gonna
find out about it.
And with that research comes a lot of boring stuff that I filter out, but amongst all of
the piles of threads that I read through, the messages that I send, and the topics I
investigate, I also encounter a few hidden gems that just blow my mind and are absolutely
incredible.
And although I might still make what could have been videos for these champions in the
future, think of them as like an individual album, and this as like a greatest hit’s
compilation.
Abbey Road was a masterpiece but that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy rocking out to the Beatle’s
greatest hits every once in a while, you get the idea.
This is the best of the best of the scrapped abilities that could have made it into league
of legends, but didn’t for one reason or another.
And I’m hyping this one up because I truly believe that these abilities are just something
extra special, and are so much more than what we looked at in the last compilation video.
So as always if you guys enjoy the video hit that like button and if you don’t hit that
dislike, and let’s get started.
The first ability we have is an ability that existed in one of the original designs of
the Urgot rework.
For those who don’t know Urgot was planned to receive a rework for this year, but it
has been shelved and is currently not in development, since the team that worked on him was unable
to capture a meaningful gameplay design that kept his theme in tact.
All of the successful designs just made urgot a completely different champion, and his rework
is expected for 2017 or even later now.
One of the abilities that was used during one of the potential versions of the urgot
rework was this jayce-gate type ability.
However, instead of speeding up allies who passed through it, what it did instead was
that it multiplied allied projectiles that were shot through it.
So for example if you shot an ashe ult through this urgot gate ability, you would get three
ashe ultimates coming out of it in a volley-like formation.
It turned every skillshot from you and your allies that passed through it into three.
And this is one of the few cases, where yeah that ability was as crazy as it sounds, especially
since it was not his ultimate.
The designer who worked on the ability described it as being just totally absurd.
It was cool as hell, and would’ve been so much fun to play with, but it was also completely
broken, impossible to balance, and to top it all off it was impossible to code too.
This ability pretty much broke the entire game, and although it was fun as hell, it
was just impossible to make work.
The riot designers love to try out crazy ideas on the off chance that they might just be
super fun, and although this urgot gate was fun as heck and was totally insane, it just
had too many things stacked against it.
Our next ability comes from our man Riot Gypsylord, a lead champion designer at Riot games.
When was talking to him about some information revolving around Gnar, he shared an unrelated
ability with Ekko that just blew my mind.
During his development for quite a long while, Ekko’s old W was actually his Chronobreak,
his ultimate.
It functioned similarly to his current ultimate which I’m sure you can imagine, but instead
it was on a cooldown that would be typical of an ability on a champion’s W, so the
cooldown it had was probably around 20 seconds or so.
And gypsylord described this ability as the most broken and overpowered version of any
champion that he had ever worked on, literally ever, so yeah, this thing was pretty dang
insane.
It’s interesting that they tried out his kit like that, but honestly it wouldn’t
be surprised if we see like a discount ekko ultimate in the future maybe akin to this
ability.
Next up we’re taking a look at an ability that I actually missed during my Azir video.
During Azir’s original design, he was being developed as more of a traditional mage type
revolving around the use of sand, rather than being a mage emperor hybrid type of guy, and
in that original design of him, where he was being made under the name seth, before he
would get cancelled and go on to be revisted, his kit involved the use of sand.
One of the abilities he had involved spreading sand around the map, and interacting with
it, almost like how the Zerg from Starcraft interact with creep.
You would use that ability to spread sand around the map, and while you were in the
sand you were given buffs and bonus movement speed, as well as other interactions with
his abilities.
It was an interesting concept to design the entire kit of a champion around, and it was
pretty cool, but unfortunately it wasn’t actually that fun to play with, since it made
it so whenever you were in an area that you didn’t have your sand spread to it was really
lackluster and quite frustrating.
Another ability that was really just crazy, and actually is one that had a lot more potential
than some of the others on this list took place in Caitlyn.
Now Caitlyn is a really old champion, so it’s difficult to uncover information from her
design, but originally Caitlyn had an ability on her W, that instead of placing a cupcake
trap on the ground, it would literally place an actual bush at the ground on a targeted
location.
She could go around the map placing bushes all over the place, and could use them to
juke out opponents during fights, or just as a way to interact with her kit, which heavily
revolved around bushes.
This ability was pretty cool and that version of Caitlyn was interesting and had a lot of
potential, however unfortunately at the time when they were designing Caitlyn, they didn’t
have the technology to get an ability like this to work, remember this isn’t the reworked
Caitlyn, we’re talking Caitlyn from 2010.
And because of that it was removed, and they decided to go with an ability that was much
simpler, while also keeping the bush theme within her kit by giving her the headshot
passive that interacts with bushes a bit.
But this ability definitely had a lot of potential, and it’s actually possible that it may even
exist in the future now that the design tech has evolved a ton for champions over the past
few years.
The next ability we are taking a look at involves a little short story about an interesting
development cycle that could have occurred.
The juggernaut update back in season 5 was a pretty big deal, because it was the first
instance of riot doing this massive rework to a bunch of champions, however what you
might not know is that Udyr was originally planned to be a part of the juggernaut rework.
Udyr was going to get a rework on the scale of Garen and Darius and the others, and he
definitely falls into the category of being a juggernaut, but it was eventually decided
that he did not need a rework.
And they probably had tested a few other champions for being reworked as well that the team eventually
decided against.
And during that phase of the team attempting to construct a rework for udyr, one of the
abilities that he had would allow him to spawn additional neutral monsters on the map.
They really took the idea of him being a farm heavy jungler and pushed it to the max, as
yeah udyr was able to spawn what were essentially additional jungle camps that he could farm.
And they weren’t just any normal odd jungle camps, these were like crazy ass monsters
on steroids that did some crazy things during combat, but also upon the kill that made for
a meaningful reason for opponents to contest them, rather than udyr just getting a bunch
of extra free monster kills and xp.
The idea was pretty crazy, but it ended up not making the cut as the udyr rework ended
up being scrapped.
Another ability that could have existed in league of legends involved something from
Shaco.
Or actually, rework Shaco.
Now as for the progress of the shaco rework I’m not entirely sure, and I’t probably
not coming any time soon if at all, as there are more pressing champions riot wants to
rework like yorick and ryze, but when the design team was messing around with the idea
of a shaco rework, they tested a couple abilities.
One of the more notable abilities that could have existed in this shaco rework, turned
shaco himself into a projectile and launched him in a direction, and at the end of the
projectile he split into two shacos at the end of it.
This was an interesting way to take the current function of his ultimate that he has now,
and maybe make it a bit more exciting, or a bit more impactful upon the actual activation,
but the problems the ability had with the coding were unsurmountable.
So much so that if shaco used this ability, launched himself out, and then hit a windwall
from Yasuo, he would disappear from the game completely, and forever.
For the entirety of that game shaco would cease to exist and the person playing shaco
would be powerless as his team would have to play out a 4v5 for the rest of the game
due to the bug.
So, as I’m sure you can imagine, that ability had to be scrapped, as making a champion literally
disappear from the game forever wasn’t exactly the most ideal thing to occur during a game
of league of legends, although it’s not impossible that a similar ability, or at least
a similar concept of trying to make shaco’s ultimate more impactful upon the initial cast,
exists in the future if he actually is going to get a rework in the next couple of years.
The next ability involves something that was the original design plan for Tahm Kench.
In his very first gameplay kit, Tahm Kench had a passive that would cause enemy champions
who stood near him to gradually have their vision range lowered over time, until it reached
it’s full peak at that point it would also hide your allies from your vision on top of
giving you what was the vision radius of something like how Quinn’s Blind is now.
And this was on his passive and took only a few seconds to activate at which point the
opponent was just left stuck not being able to see well enough to get out of it.
And you guys thought the current version of Tahm Kench was annoying!
Eventually this passive proved to be broken beyond belief and they knew that not only
was it super overpowered, it was frustrating and unfair to play against, so the vision
reduction mechanic was toned down a bit and moved to the devour portion of his W instead.
And the next ability we have involved something that was planned to be on Soraka during one
of her reworks.
I think this ability was the original version of her Q, although it might have been her
W or something, but let’s assume it was on her Q because that’s the most likely
candidate.
Anyway, this ability instead of being an offensive damaging skillshot, it was an area of effect
mikael’s crucible for her allies.
So it would throw down a zone, and then any allies that were in it, were given a nice
little heal, and were also cleansed of all crowd control and debuffs.
It functioned exactly how mikael’s crucible did, except in an area of effect radius and
on a much shorter cooldown.
With some CDR it was likely that you could be using this ability multiple times in fights.
Now cleanse effects are something league of legends haven’t really explored all that
well, I believe the designers much prefer spellshields as a mechanic to avoid some ability,
but there’s no doubt that this soraka ability would be pretty insane, and it would honestly
just hard counter such a large amount of champions in the game, to where she’d become an insane
champion.
Cleanse is a weird mechanic in League, because versus a lot of champions it’s a total hard
counter, while versus others it’s completely useless, and that situationalness of an ability
is something riot really wants items to have, but’s it’s very difficult to put on an
actual champion.
As the designers say, they want every champion to be good in their own way on their own right,
no champion should be good for the sole reason that it counters someone else, because then
that champions success entirely revolves around the things it counters, and they don’t want
to limit it to where it feels super lame to play a champion just because you aren’t
playing against that one specific counter matchup.
And as a result of that design philosophy, this ability was removed from soraka, although
it was a pretty cool concept for sure.
And that just about wraps up my list of what I think were some of the coolest abilities
that could have made it into league of legends, but didn’t for whatever reason.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video, if you did subscribe if you want, thanks for watching,
and I’ll see you guys next time!