[2020] Malphite has been broken according to Riot's Balance Framework since pre-season started but he has barely been touched despite being a grave offender throughout multiple patches

I'm guessing this is because they've been going after his items.

AP Malphite, for example, seems to be pretty balanced. His most purchased AP mythic in Luden's is ~51% win rate. Considering the last three patches chain-nerfed tank items, it makes sense that they tried to hold off on nerfing him specifically while hitting items that needed it.

That said, Malphite is still broken and should be nerfed.

Ye you prob right. We didn't swing at many of the tanks (except Amumu, that guy was wack) because we planned to iterate a few times on tanks. That said, we will be wack-a-mole-ing properly now that pre-season is coming to a close and items are getting more stable. The fact that only a few champions are outliers like this means we are getting close to a (relatively) balanced game!

Thanks! <3

I know at least one designer was looking into him. I forget what happened and why there aren't any changes at this time.

FWIW people are building him wrong. Not that he's outstanding or anything, but Divine Sunderer is incorrect. Trinity Force and Galeforce both seem to heavily outperform it.

I'm having a great time. It's cool figuring out builds and getting to try out stuff that other people haven't caught onto yet.

Yeah Reddit doesn't always leave the best opinions upvoted.

I think Riot went and nerfed champions + items when they had like a 57% win rate or higher. Otherwise, I like the idea of them hitting items first and knocking champions into line once the season starts.

And this is why sometimes Riot does both. And sometimes they do it perfectly. Jhin got weaker with his lethality builds, took a Q nerf, and is still the #1 ban in the game. (OK yeah Galeforce is giga-busted)

Yeah they posted about it before the preseason changes hit.

Yeah we will be "reverse wack-a-mole-ing" as well and buffing up champs that need it. Not sure about Veigar specifically (winter break and all that) but we will be doing our regular buffs/nerfs.

I mean Amumu is in a completely reasonable spot right now. I'd say they aimed their nerfs pretty accurately.

2% winrate lift is a pretty big deal for something as small as "pick a different first item."

In general though, GP's winrate is low is because people are building him wrong. People will eventually figure it out. You don't buff a champion because people are misplaying him. Something as simple as "buy the right first item" puts him easily within normal winrate bounds. Anything but a very small buff would just be wasted work that could go to a champion more in need.

To be fair "giga-busted" is hyperbole. Maybe not the place for it. My bad.

It's ultimately the most damage and in many cases the most survivability of all the competing mythics. The cherry on top is also the target access.

Most champions who are building Shieldbow/Kraken should actually be building Galeforce and just haven't realized it yet. The cooldown cut to 60 seconds is really meaningful and it's snowbally as hell since you're pretty much always in range of whomever you want to kill.

I'm not sure it's SUPER out of line, but I'd confidently call it the strongest of the three crit items. It's even singlehandedly turned Master Yi's best build back into Crit because it turns out giving Yi a free-target dash and more move speed is really really strong.

Galeforce Yone / Master Yi.

A few thoughts on this:

1. It's technically not hard to just throw on a random change like "-10 Q damage" and revert if it's too much. But...
2. Submitting a change and reverting it is not as trivial as going into a tool and modifying five numbers by lowering the tens place. More people are always involved like QAing the change or consulting with playtest over how big the change actually is. So there's a flat amount of work that comes in on top of simply implementing the change itself, no matter how small.
3. I believe the designers try to (and usually do a pretty good job of) identify what element of a champion actually deserves to be nerfed. This is why there are designers at all and not an automated script that pulls in a random nerf from a library of "Nerfs that will lower winrate by 1%." For example, and I'm honestly curious about this, what would your ideal Malphite nerf be?

Anyways, I still agree that they could assume how impactful their changes would be and do more on top as a result, but I also totally understand not doing that.

It really depends on where you think the problems lie.

Day 1 of preseason the top 8 champions in virtually every role were tanks. Tank Mythics were OP and this wasn't up for debate. So you have to nerf those items into line, or at least into a point where you're comfortable with their power level. Then sort out individual champions from there.