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Riot: Lucian is too toxic of a solo laner
Also Riot: Allow ourselves to introduce, Akshan!
Riot: Lucian is too toxic of a solo laner
Also Riot: Allow ourselves to introduce, Akshan!
The goal with Akshan is to mitigate the areas in which other solo lane marksmen were historically frustrating (lane bully pattern, high safety, high kill threat), and shift the power budget towards roaming/contributing to sidelane plays. The intention is that his lane is not nearly as oppressive as Lucian, Tristana, or Kalista in the 1v1.
Hey just in terms of design pillars the team is still referencing the: https://na.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/dev/dev-balancing-new-champions/ benchmarks your outlined a whole back right?
I really like how the team has outlined specifications and levers that give us a behind the scenes look into the choices you make. Nice bit of transparency and keeps the team accountable.
Yes sir, we typically benchmark new champion health using the metrics on there.
How does giving him a resetting grappling hook and a ms steroid mitigate high safety?
The grappling hook does not work if the target gapcloses onto you, unlike other marksmen's escape tools.
The grappling hook does not work if the target gapcloses onto you, unlike other marksmen's escape tools.
Also it doesn't go over walls
One common thing I’m seeing now just browsing Reddit was how much text is in his passive and his W.
How do you guys go about making passives? Like his three hit burst makes sense if he’s supposed to be a rouge assassin, so does the MS speed thing if it’s to help him get away after the kill, but couldn’t you have just made it those 2 things Instead of also letting him have a shield and second auto, what determines if someone has a Zed passive vs. someone like Akshan? They are both assassins (I realize Akshan is burst marksmen though)
Akshan's shield in particular allows him to take trades in lane on an infrequent cadence, similar to Viktor Q. Without it, he would need very high damage stats (particularly base AD) to trade into most midlaners due to his low AA range.
Passives are assigned during initial champ development based off however the character is meant to be played. Using Zed as an example, his is meant to increase his burst on lower health targets, giving him clear opportunities to W in or commit to kills. This would not have fit the pattern for a ranged marksman like Akshan.
What about his base damage? Sololane trist can kill people level 2 and Lucian can take like a 1/3rd of your HP away with auto e auto lvl 1.
His level 1 is quite good (Passive+Q), but after that he gets less combat power than Tristana/Lucian. He does not consistently bully/solokill like those mids
What do you personally take on Akshan in playtests, i imagine PTA and Kraken sound pretty sweet with his passive
PtA and Electrocute are crowd favourites. For mythics we like galeforce for burst, but kraken/shieldbow are nice as well.
Can you also share his max order, i assume its q->e->w
Correct
So if the target dashes to where you will be you mean?
Just confused what you meant, like if the target gets in your face the hook doesn’t keep swinging or something?
Correct! If an enemy is very close to you (touching practically) or in your path, the swing cancels. This keeps it from being viable to escape champions that gapclose to you.
2 questions, if you don't mind.
Kit "fluff": It feels like it's not only common, but almost expected at this point that champions with this many small extras on their kit will inevitably lose some of them at some point. Akali, Azir, Irelia etc. While I don't imagine part of design is adding in bits and bobs so that some can be removed at a later date to help balance, losing parts of your champ's kit is arguably one of the most frustrating things to have happen.
So aren't you almost inevitably setting a champ like this up to lose mechanics and do you think that that's an acceptable way to design a champ?
Intended gameplay vs actual gameplay: Now, you guys clearly have more data here than I do, but I can't help but feel that his "ideal" gameplay pattern will be overshadowed by his "real" gameplay pattern.
And by that I mean the ideal is clearly: You start roaming bot as a fight breaks out. Your bot lane dies, takes the enemy support with them and the enemy adc escapes with low hp and a double kill. You stealth in there and recover sufficient mana to zip around with a grappling hook, pick off the enemy adc, bring your bot lane back to life, and then sneak back to lane/base.
But it feels far more likely that a teamfight happens, Akshan throws out a boomerang and lands a couple of autos against the enemy frontline, the enemy adc gets a couple of kills but dies and Akshan rezzes his teammates for free since his boomerang did a little bit of damage to the scoundrel. Probably not all of his teammates, maybe even only one. But so long as Akshan merely taps the enemy, he gets that rez.
So what's the plan to balance Akshan around this? Because the roaming mid adc that cleans up the end of fights is clearly a more interesting design. But the poke adc that free rezzes part of his team seems like it will happen far more often, especially in solo queue.
And because of that, will he not be incredibly frustrating to play against? He lands a little poke and potentially brings back most of his team. Late game that can single handedly win the match and it doesn't actually require Akshan to play well. It won't happen all the time, sure. But how often is acceptable? How many highlight videos of an Akshan with 226 teamfight damage winning his team the game need to be made? How frequently can game ruining experiences be allowed for the enemy team in the name of making a new champ unique/powerful/fun to play on their end?
I'm jumping to a bit of hyperbole, sure, but this will happen. So how much of a kit is ok to remove in the name of balance, and how frustrating of an experience to play against is a champ allowed to be, even if it's only sometimes?
Some general notes: W Revive only works if they are recently damage by you (similar to Rengar/Katarina). This is to keep him from just tagging everyone and calling a teamfight won.
As for the last points related to "game ruining experiences", the same can be said for a lot of champions. When Karthus presses R and gets a pentakill, ending the game from 6000 units away, that is an experience that happens very rarely, but sometimes. Defining the health of a game based upon the very best/worst case scenarios for every ability in the game is disingenuous, but keeping an eye out for how frequently they occur is important. If it's trivial for Akshan to flip games using his revive, it will be adjusted, but in testing that has not been the case.
What's to stop him from just being an ADC?
500 range, low AA dps. Also power budget in W roaming, which is mostly inaccessible from bottom lane.
If he runs marksman mythics how do you stop him dealing good dps, particularly considering his 3 hit passive seems to have no cool down. I assumed he would run lethality Are his base stats just that bad?
He will deal good dps for an assassin but not for a marksman. It's all relative.