Its just doesn't make any sense why he doesn't, he´s the goddamn God of Thunder!
Maybe take out his 50 range on ult and put it on, it amplifies his power fantasy+ why range if he already can, by default, extend his range with his passive?
Thoughts?
External link →This was something Voli had in early testing. It's been a while so I may not be remembering everything perfectly, but I believe what we found back then was that letting R stack P meant that the max-stack P payout had to be lower than we wanted and R's damage also had to be meaningfully lower, so we made the choice to unbind P max stack payout from R even though it was a cool fantasy win to grant full stacks on R.
I don't work on PC League anymore so I couldn't tell you the current thinking there but I suspect the same concerns would probably exist for this mechanic today. The bigger concern is around the P max payout, where it should be a really powerful and satisfying moment, and if you can "cheat" your way there instantly with R then there's much less gating on it and necessarily it can't carry as much power or satisfaction.
Maybe there’s a middle ground or a mini-game here waiting to happen. I played AP Voli top for fun to try and hit my Nashor-Riftmaker 1v5 split push fantasy, but found the actual fun was in leading enemies into an E-R burst where I’d try to swing that shield+damage lead into a full passive stack engage.
I’d give up all of the raw burst damage if landing E+R was a secret sauce to full passive stacks— I’d still feel amazing for getting that combo down and feel even better knowing that trying to raw R, which already feels kinda meh, isnt the optimal use case.
I am also a pretty big AP Voli fan - enough of a fan to play it for ~75 games straight at one point and have a silly montage made of some plays.
Lutzberg (the designer on the Voli rework) did explore a lot of different ways to scale AP Voli and different avenues to let AP provide power, and the one part of those that ended up shipping was the AP ratio on the passive AS. However, from my recollections of conversations back then (which may not be perfect) as well as my own thoughts here, anything that "cheats" P stacks to max or even grants easier access to max stacks comes at a cost to the power of P, particularly for AP builds. There are very few spells that scale multiplicatively with a single stat, but Voli P scales both the damage and AS with AP, and since AS scales the on-hit damage frequency, it actually scales better with AP the more of it you have (unlike other spells with typically scale linearly with stats). This makes the gating extremely important, though as I recall we did briefly test some things like E granting more stacks based on AP which we pretty quickly concluded were both confusing and powerful in very unintuitive ways.
I'd agree that current AP Voli feels a bit torn where the P max payout is so powerful it feels like it should be the thing you play around but it's so difficult to access that ER burst is a much more realistic path to success for AP Voli. I don't think there's an easy solution to this problem via Voli's kit (if nothing else, we likely would've found some evidence of this in the different AP Voli iterations we tested internally). I suspect that ultimately part of the blame here lies in that the existing itemization support for AP fighters (which could play well into the P pattern) is not well-suited for Voli, particularly Demonic Embrace. This leads to AP Voli playing more like a mage because, well, you have to buy mage items or use AP fighter items somewhat poorly. This isn't an indictment of the current item system, just an unfortunate side effect of the current arrangement of items available for some classes.
Thanks for the insight
np
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