Where are the KSante proplay nerfs?? -300g on Randuins is like a gigabuff to him. Im so sick of watching this champ the whole f**king year he's still here. Now he's gonna be in worlds which will make Toplane stale AGAIN. Why are they delaying changes till after worlds? Literally squeezing out more money out of this champ dude smh this balance team are frauds.
50% pro presence for 3 straight patches. Randuin's got buffed but so did Goredrinker, Stridebreaker, Shojin, and Armguard, plus some champions who innately play well into him, like Gwen. Only top laner nerfed is Renekton.
No reason to think he'll suddenly 1.5x his presence without direct buffs.
I genuinely think it’s completely fine to have some pro play oriented, super high skill champions that are always bad for low elo. I don’t think that in a game with 150+ heroes, every single one needs to be easily accessible to all players. Even if it would be more fair mathematically for these heroes to have an accessible value floor, it would still feel incredibly unbalanced if 20 games on Annie and 20 games on Azir had an equal power level. I think it would deeply invalidate almost every other champion’s purpose if you could just easily pick up and play these pro play heroes, but they also had a way higher skill cap. I also think that it can makes the game less interesting if you tune these kits down to basic levels. They still need to not let pro meta get stale and imo just let them have shit winrates in low elo.
I guess in some sense it depends what you want to watch in pro play. The flashy kits are very entertaining and seeing the skill cap and the big pop off moments are exciting. I do think if you are more interested in the drafting and the resource allocation in the game then some of these picks make every game the same every time cause they are too polarizing. But like I said they could just actually nerf them until they are balanced for pro play.
The only time I have a "problem" so to speak with pro-bound champions is when they profess that they're broadly approachable.
Azir is clearly a high skill cap champion. His pick rate is directly influenced by his pro presence. Meanwhile, Garen is the kind of champion that really shouldn't be in pro jail. He's meant to be an intro champion.
I think Jinx falls into the Garen camp and Aphelios falls into the Azir camp, to provide a few more examples. Really this is more of a sliding scale, but directionally this is where my thinking is.
Ultimately this means signing ourselves up for constantly tuning Azir, Aphelios, K'Sante, and similar champions who are going to be viable in pro or not at all. They're aspirational and difficult. That means the average player will fail on them. That's fine. But if they aren't even pro viable, then no one gets to have fun and there's no more aspiration.
Personally I'm comfortable with Azir, K'Sante, etc. having a permanent 30% pro presence. Landing exactly that number is hard, so it means there will be times were they sit above and sit below. But that's ultimately the read.
in the video, you said that there will always be a #1 champ and that you have to choose favorites and cited Rakan as an example for supports
Ideally who would you want the #1 to be for top lane? Aatrox? Renekton? K'Sante?
With this split's pro play as an example, top lane doesn't end up having a clear winner as often, since the lane frequently has sharp counters. For example, a top laner rarely cracked 75% presence, while jungle/mid/bot/supp all usually had 2+.
In general, a lane with a dedicated income stream should probably default to playing champions who care about that income stream. Either that means making every tank care a lot about gold (we probably shouldn't to a large degree) or they're mages/fighters/assassins. Though I do think each lane should have viable low-agency / weakside options.
I'm pretty comfortable with Jax being one of the highest presence top laners this year. He's likely to be #1 at Worlds. I think that's fine. Probably not for multiple years running, though.
devtrackers.gg