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Naafiri is a good case on what Riot should avoid in champion design
1- The end goal was terrible
“A while back, our champion design lead, August Browning, did an analysis of our whole roster and categorized each champ by role, class, and difficulty in order to find some opportunity areas for players,” game designer Glenn “Riot Twin Enso” Anderson reveals. “He ended up finding two major holes: a higher skill tank, which ended up being K’Sante, and a relatively simple and beginner-friendly assassin, which became Naafiri.”” - Naafiri champ insights June 2023
These were a bit of flawed goals, Tank like K'Sante having so much agency forces him to be permanently bound to being highest presence in pro play despite multiple adjustments, nerfs and reworks so he has to remain as 45% WR while an assassin with literally no skill ceiling gets dropped by mid lane players almost immediately and thus have an abysmal pickrate
2-"Monster champions have low pickrate" was used as an excuse to not follow up on Naafiri's post release
Naafiri was in fact just a check box, community kept asking for a monster champions and Riot wanted to fill the gap in their roster so they just checked both boxes, released the filler champ and moved on to the next project.
They didn't stop to think that maybe the brand new easy/intro champion should at the very minimum have same pickrate as other niche assasins as players should find immediate success when they pick her up
Sure, there is truth to it, if Naafiri had a model that looked like the other darkin champions but female, she would have had higher pickrate but there are also tons of monster champions who are faring well in terms of popularity with much older kits and worse looking models.
3-Naafiri should have been allowed to jungle
I can understand why not let her jungle at the first month or two as to push her identity as a mid laner or solo laner but once the dust settled down and mid laners voted with their pickrate that they don't want to play this absolutely boring kit, Riot should have immediately given some jungle ratios and see how she would fare in the jungle
Riot literally buffed Sylas, Olaf, Zyra, Brand, Sett and others to push them to jungle and attract more pickrate for these champions, but the least popular champion in the game isn't looked at?
I don't see any reason why Naafiri shouldn't have been allowed to jungle, Junglers are more likely to pick up monster champions. If Naafiri would be problematic and very frustrating jungler and get +30% banrate then sure remove her jungle modifiers but at the very least give it a shot and see if her dwindling playerbase would recover from its death spiral
4- Her kit has an identity issue as she plays like a skirmisher rather than an assassin
-her engage ability [W] is a point and dash that has long channel time and can be blocked by other enemies standing in its path so her back line access is pretty sh*t specially the higher in MMR you go and enemy team has that knowledge. Diana E for example has the same range of Naafiri until Naafiri hits lvl 11 but she has no cast time and other champions can't block it
the cast time of W gives too much counterplay, any champion with an ounce of hard CC can easily interrupt Naafiri mid dash [Hwei EQ, Syndra E, Lux Q, etc] compare that to the instanteous Diana dash's case where the enemy mid laner has to predict that Diana will dash and throw his CC early to stop Diana mid dash
-she has no escape tools but to compensate she gets shields from her R + on her take downs as well
-The bleed in her kit synergizes with Black Cleaver and Eclipse [Fighter items]
-So is she a good skirmisher? not really, she lacks any form of CC whether slows or hard CC, that greatly diminishes her skirmishing
5- The kit has nothing to master and the narrative is disconnected from the gameplay
shes literally a nothing burger, she has no skill expression and she gets boring after the third game as her gameplay loop gets very repetitive and boring.
her E is the only redeeming ability in her kit as she dishes out damage at start of the dash and then at the end of the dash, she deals even more damage in an explosion but the fun thing about the abilitiy is that it immediately recalls your dogs and heals them up
her R is you get more dogs and bonus AD + shield, the cool part is that the dogs get a small boost in HP so they could survive getting one shot, I like that part
the champion theme is the pack and half her voice lines are all about unity and how the pack makes her strong and that a lone dog is weak, etc. etc.
where is that pack in her gameplay???
why don't her abilities get some twists depending on how many dogs she has? doesn't have to be more or less numbers in her damage, what makes Naafiri unique from the other 166 champions? its her pack gimmick and nothing else.
Naafiri has the tools in her kit to protect and heal her pack and but she is punished for protecting her pups as she blows her mana, damage and her cooldown for literally no gain
to reiterate, I don't say Naafiri should have been a high skill floor champion but there are lots of champions that have low skill floor and are newbie friendly but also moderate to high skill ceiling to encourage players to main them and not get bored after a few games.
Closing notes:
its a shame how Naafiri turned out, her in game model is cool and very different from your average league champion, the dogs AI is smart and I love that they can help you CS and they move smoothly around you, her R animation and sound really sells the whole unleash the pack vibe, the animators, riggers, vfx artists all did a wonderful job.
but the gameplay is horrendous and she is doomed to be the lowest pickrate champ in the game unless she's balanced around having 52% WR and her pickrate will still be bottom 20 as you can't bribe players with winrate to play this boring ass champion
No other newly released champion in League's history had their pickrate plummet this quickly and sharply after their release
to understand how bad Naafiri pickrate is, it took Rell ~2 years after her release to get the midscope rework and Rell's pickrate pre midscope was higher than current Naafiri.
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