[2023] From the Durability Patch to Now

It seems that nearly every patch that comes around involves buffing underused or underperforming items and champions to result in higher damage output rather than nerfing the overused and overperforming champions and letting the underperforming champions alone. Changing things like sylas mana pool, etc is totally okay, but it just seems like in every patch we are getting a net gain on the amount of dps in any given match.

Great example of this is the design team's approach to enchanters in the coming patches. They want to make getting gold on an enchanter feel better so they are buffing their dmg output. Ekko not doing so well? Let's buff his dmg output. Prowlers claw? Same thing. Surely, there must be some other viable approach rather than proceeding with this methodology and every X amount of time, reducing the amount of dmg in the game by a flat amount.

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We're going to be putting a QGT out sometime in the next few weeks that chats about durability, snowballing, game time, etc. that will talk about a lot of the things in specificity.

But for now, the high level thoughts on durability here are that we're not close to being back to pre-durability, but natural patch balance, item changes, new content, etc. do contribute to pulling it back some.

We expect if we're taking good swings at balance we can't only nerf things, we have to buff things as well in ways that align with a champion's fantasy (preferably in ways that aren't durability, like MS buffs to Nidalee or mana buffs to Sylas like you mentioned) instead of damage. But sometimes, the thing that is going to resonate with a Caitlyn player is their damage being buffed.

Ultimately, it's a push and pull. We track the number of buffs/nerfs we do in a patch, and the number of damage and durability buffs/nerfs net we do patch over patch.

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