Some Copypasta:
Power Balance is not the highest priority. It is on par with Gameplay priorities.
For example, we could straight buff Evelynn to the point where her power balance is viable competitively. This would mean that every single game below high-elo play would be an terrible frustrating game with poor gameplay. There are some changes we do because bad gameplay is fostered by the elements. Power balance is always easier to adjust after solving major gameplay problems.
So, let's go onto some specifics:
Wit's End
This was changed from a variety of gameplay reasons: Unintuitive use case plus the mana burn mechanic made this item *seem* like a mage counter, used as a tanky DPS counter but really countered tanks harder than actual tanky DPS. What small positive benefit is mostly overridden by the fact that, if this item was popular, it is far more damaging than fun.
Pantheon
Tech blocked for Global indicator tech for minimap indicator - UI usability.
Evelynn
Stealth remake blocked.
(Well, not quite, but that's another story. But mostly stealth remake blocked.)
Nocturne's "Global"
Nocturne's global range is about where we wanted Pantheon's and Twisted Fate's global ranges to be. Nocturne's ultimate was designed both to capture the darkness mechanic *and* to see if a medium range "global" played better into our game. In general, Nocturne's ultimate was an attempt to make a "global" ability without the normal horrible design pitfalls of the other globals that we had seen in the past (Pantheon/TF.)
Nocturne's global solved a few things neatly and was overall a success. He cannot split push effectively with it and it does not have the claustrophobic feeling at level 6 where if you leave the tower, you die. Success.
Tanky DPS
Tanky DPS, we feel, is in a good place at the moment. There are 4 or 5 problematic champions that stand out and have to get taken down, but the majority of fighters are fine at the moment.
Off the top of my head, Irelia, Renekton, Jarvan, Nocturne and Rumble might possibly be the extent of the Tanky DPS issue at the moment. Of course, we're still waiting for more info on the scope of the issue with these characters, as outside of Irelia, they've all been relatively recent releases.
why did they buff nerf xin zhao and then buff him? Seriously didnt need the nerf and most certainly didnt need stronger tanky stats from his ult in team fights.
Again, see the above tenet - Gameplay and Power balance are equal in priority. We nerfed Xin Zhao because there was an abusive gameplay case that was making him "balanced" because he was invincible in a one on one setting with self-sustained chain CC and melted completely in a team fight.
A character who is "balanced" by being really bad in a team fight and only good when chain-CC'ing someone else, depriving his victim of any actions is simply awful gameplay for that character. Either he's dead or whoever he landed on just takes no action. The 'nerf/buff' was a gameplay shift, shifting his balance to large encounters and away from '1v1 vs. XZ GG you lose'
make nocturne with passive attack speed and a AD steroid
We were trying something here with play/counterplay, as Nocturne only gets the AD steroid while on the shadow path, and by itself, the attack speed is fairly irrelevant.
However, the play of kiting him off the path never emerged to as compelling on live as it was in our internal tests, so that turned out far worse than we had thought it would.
Live Team Information
The reason that live team is "slow" at the moment is due mostly in part that we typically don't want to take a heavy hand with the meta and so we try to give time for things to adjust so that their true strengths come to light and such *or* that we're tech-blocked/design-blocked on another major project (such as Pantheon or Eve.)
Finally, the live team's goal is to balance the game with as few steps as possible and not create giant pools of ripples every patch. Creating a whole mess of changes with one patch simply makes it impossible to gather data on what characters need change with live research.
What are the thoughts on alternate resource systems and how do you balance for situations such as that?
Well, for starting off, I'm going to assume you mean Rumble, not Trundle, the troll.
Alternative resource systems are something we've typically not been terribly great at executing well, due to the aforementioned lane dominance, as you've said. The three characters that you've mentioned probably don't sacrifice enough in late-game team fights to actually justify how strong they are in the lane. Renekton was supposed to pay the "cost" in gear as he would be pushed to itemize AD/Cooldowns/Survivability. Vladimir was supposed to be more strongly tied to the health loss/health gain portions of his kit.
Rumble... it's a little too early for me to say but I don't think he was supposed to be that domineering in lane, due to being melee with no gap closer.
If you want to take a better look at an instance where our alternate resource philosophy actually worked: Let's take a look at energy, for instance. Energy claims lane domination in return for being unable to scale with cooldowns in a late game teamfight. Take Anivia versus Kennen for instance: Kennen has the advantage in lane with unlimited harassment abilities, but as soon as Anivia gets a Rod of Ages or some mana item, er teamfight presence jumps to being far superior to Kennen's simply due to the fact that her abilities generally have shorter (cooldown : effectiveness) ratios but are gated by mana.
Xyph confirmed for clueless by saying that Eve needs a buff when she's banned in every ranked game.
Downvote me, brown nosers. She's banned in every 1800+ game. If someone on the balance team doesn't consider her absurd kit viable, we're screwed.
I'm not actually on the live team or balance. I'm actually a content designer. Sorry, I haven't checked up on the latest competitive trends and I probably should've disclaimered that example with a hypothetical or something: I was just using that as a well-known instance of frustration last I checked on her.
I've been ignoring everything about Eve in the live environment because she's been going through some pretty major changes internally. I'm only aware that when she's played competitively, no one particularly enjoys fighting her *either*.
Why was Nocturne's spell shield designed to give a reward in addition to not being gibbed and removing at least 25% of an opposing player's options in a 1v1 situation that he might be in due to his proficiency at dueling? Why does a successful spell shield have to give a benefit besides saving your ass from annihilation? Partially qqing and partially because I've never seen anyone design a shield in the way that you would actually really really want it to get broken.
The spell shield is about 2 seconds long and the additional bonus made the Nocturne player feel even better for blocking a spell than just negating your opponents. It just felt better while testing. I do admit that it irks me that my teammate can pop his shield and thus destroy me because now Nocturne attacks *me* faster.
Lee Sin
I think Lee Sin isn't OP or UP, he's simply a little awkward to use with a somewhat lackluster ultimate. I know Coronach has expressed interest in making his ultimate more awesome but I haven't really heard anything specific on that.
I don't think we'll be touching him for a bit though. We need his power level to settle a bit as it is a little hard to tell at the moment.
In general, I think Lee Sin would be in an awesome place if we could make that one change to his Ult that Coronach really wants.
The other stuff, I could take or leave at the moment. They may be required now but we'll see.
Irelia
Irelia has three major problems and a few minor ones: 1. She has terrible terrible scaling, which means tank is always the best route. 2. You can't really mitigate her damage with a reasonable amount of gold due to it's split nature. 3. She kicks your ass in lane due to having the option of going sustain or burst depending on the matchup. I'm not on live balance though, so I don't actually have much influence over the changes. I will say that giving her reasonably sane scaling and making her ultimate physical damage would go a long way to making Irelia more counter-able while also increasing her damage if she chooses to get like, a rageblade or something.
The third one will probably have to be either a straight nerf or a heavy nerf to minion healing with more bonuses from hitting champions. Unsure on that.
Vayne's percentage-based true damage simply has no way to counter it. You can't stack armor, because it's true damage. You can't stack HP, because it's percentage based. There's literally nothing a tank (or anyone else) can do to take the sting out of Vayne's damage.
In general, I hate answering this, because the answer annoys me a little as well.
However, Vayne's damage split is actually physical/true. She can never do true damage to you without dealing physical damage first and the relative porportion of her damage is something like 70 to 80% physical damage to 20% true damage.
Tanks should itemize armor to survive longer against Vayne, even though silver bolts still makes them feel terrible. This is because Vayne's high burst DPS mostly comes from Judgement double as well as empowered Tumbles.
Yes, I agree that it feels bad to fight against as Tanks though. I believe the intent of the true damage passive was to make a skill that was "super awesome" but not OP at the same time. I admit that silver bolts probably feels awesome to use as Vayne, although I can definitely agree with you in that there's some frustration there.
When has Nocturne ever been considered tanky? His ability to absorb a spell doesn't necessarily make him safe from the focus of two champions. The reasoning for his nerf was "He was able to build tanky and rely on high base damage numbers." I must have missed this phenomenon entirely because I've yet to see it ever occur.
Nocturne is considered tanky because he has almost all of Master Yi's steroids, plus a spell shield. Master Yi does a mega*word* of damage without items but really only has Alpha Strike for base damage. Nocturne deals base damage on his 'Q', his 'E', his 'R' *and* he has almost all of Master Yi's steroids, making his potential damage without items really *really* high comparatively. Nocturne is like 80% Master Yi with 3 more nukes.
Of course, he's probably in a somewhat decent state now, minus the terrible feeling you get when you pop his spell shield.
Fiddlesticks / Galio
I actually have no idea on the direction/perception of these guys or the intent. I'll have to check in with live team in person as I haven't actually touched on these guys for a while.
Sorry, wish I had more information to give you on Fiddle.
I do know that Galio has one of the best semi-peels in the game though. Bulwark is ridiculously good. From a design perspective, Galio's inherent weakness is that he trades having ranged abilities and very strong farm for a weaker initiation move. I'm not sure what he needs, however, as making him a stronger initiator would just mean that Galio doesn't give up a whole lot for being a tank while having long ranged harass spells and decent farming.
Nidalee is the queen of self-sustainability through healing
Note that we hate this part of Nidalee, but we're holding off on changing it until we make Cougar not immediately explode the instant you pounce into a fight.
How is Nocturne apparently being a "Better Master Yi" make him tanky?
He scales worse than Master Yi, but has around 800 more base damage. This means that he can itemize tank and still do really good damage, which is one of the hallmarks of Tanky DPS. That's probably far less true now than on release, but I'm trying to explain the last round of changes.
Whereas, if Master Yi tries to itemize tank, he still does pretty good autoattack damage, but he doesn't have that 800 base damage to carry him to hit hard. Master Yi really needs to itemize DPS.
Do you ever test champions/items/overall gameplay changes before releasing them? Because sometimes when you release/change something, I get the impression that we are playing BETA.
For example, some time ago, Sivir's passive became completely broken after a patch, and it took you a month to fix the issue.
TF was bugged since....forever.
Vayne's true damage is one of the few things I actually think is plain and simple OP.
On Sivir, depending on when the bug was released, it could take us up to three week to four weeks to fix, because of our patch cycle and code lock dates. Essentially everything that might be risky going into the patch has to be prepped roughly 3 weeks before we can put it in.
On TF, I think we may have been unable to repro this for a long time and it got lost in the shuffleboard somewhere. Apologies.
On Vayne, testing revealed that the true damage was not OP at all after numerous death recaps and damage totalling. Whether Vayne, herself, is OP is probably a more open question.
Renekton vs. Kat
The comparison between Cull the Meek and BB isn't just numeric though, as magic damage is harder to itemize against than physical and Cull the Meek is a melee range ability and thus has that payoff.
I agree with you though, that for Renekton, his resource only makes him stronger. He was originally supposed to be balanced by longer cooldowns than the other cooldown only casters but this proved to be somewhat sluggish gameplay in general.
Whether it is this aspect that fails, or whether it is simply the fact that he has a little too much survivability and a little too much base damage for having a strictly all up-side resource compared to the other CD casters.
what are RIOTs current plans for Vladimir?
Honestly, I have no idea. I know his 'Q' is problematic with spell vamp items but Morello has checked himself before gutting Vladimir as Morello has a huge Vladimir bias.
I'd have to check in with live to get more details. :/
I'd like to know your personal opinion on the subject of These two champions, then the general consensus over there at Riot. Twitch( especially his ult, i know theres already alot of trouble with stealth), and, This is a drawn out topic that im sure isnt really your guy's top priority, but i'd also want to know about the idea of hybrid Kassadin that never really worked out.
Twitch is in the same place Evelynn is at right now. We can really make changes to either of them until we have some major overhaul changes. Working on it. :/
Kassadin on the other hand, is in a pretty good spot, power-wise. Even though hybrid Kassadin isn't working out, changing Kassadin right now to make that viable would mean nerfing AP/Assassin Kassadin. It would cause waay too much disruption for something that would only be a minor payoff and probably unnecessary at this point.
It would be nice to have a 'W' on him that wasn't bad but he's in a pretty decent spot so it's probably low priority for now.
Alistar
Hm. I think 75% damage reduction has simply been consistently over the top. It lets the non-tankAlistar tank just as hard, if not harder, than the tank-Alistar for some odd reason. (Mostly because the non-tank alistar is so much more of a threat that people have to focus him even more.) Reducing the damage reduction would make the AP Alistar die, while the Tank-Alistar (who can now farm) would still have decent survivability.
Not sure at the moment, I'd have to check with live as to what his state is.
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