Been seeing more and more complaints about how more one-shotty the game gets every season. Damage creep has been an issue for years but the balance team seems to embrace it. Personally the game feels like less of a fighting game in recent years. Good or bad thing?
External link →We'll be talking about upcoming changes intended to slow the pace of combat down within the next few weeks.
I remember a time y'all had discussed decreasing the time to kill because it was more exciting. Do you think there was an over correction type of thing where there's too much damage now?
We believe League of Legends is best when it is on average be fast-paced and exciting, but yeah I think it would be fair to say it has overcorrected towards damage, which is hitting away at clarity ("I can tell what just killed me" / "I can tell what I should have done differently") and skill expression ("That assassin/mage hit their whole kit, so they earned the kill").
You guys have mentioned that systemic damage is a bit high, are you guys also cool with the amount of individual champ, I understand that that may be a bit harder to measure
Not ready to discuss yet, sorry
The thing is some glass cannon champs need to be able to kill fast or they're useless, full damage champs like Kaisa (my favorite champ and old main before I quit ADC) needs to be able to quickly dive and kill the enemy backline. In exchange once her ult shield is gone she's made of paper, Kaisa needs to be able to assassinate back line in less than 2 seconds or the champ is worthless and she builds full glass cannon items to do that.
The issue is champs like Nocturne, Veigar, Kayn, Cassiopia, Vayne and others building literal tank items and still being able to one shot or one combo ADCs.
Champs able to one combo people should need to go full glass cannon and be made of paper so you have a proper risk vs reward ratio.
When I played Kaisa if I dove the enemy and failed to kill them I'm dead myself 95 out of 100 times.
TLDR Tanks Bruisers (they need more tankyness in exchange for less damage) Mages (why on earth are mage items so tanky) and Assassins building bruiser items are doing too high of damage without the risky of being squishy themselves
The thing is some glass cannon champs need to be able to kill fast or they're useless
This was raised by several people as a response, so just to take a position on it: I completely agree.
Lux blasts you with Q-AA-E-R? Cool. Zed kills you with WRQE hitting double or triple Q? Cool. Zed on even gold kills you in one rotation with just his base kit? A lot less cool. Kha'Zix or Talon grabs bruiser items and burst kills an even gold ADC? Also a lot less cool.
There is definitely risk that burst champions get weaker, sustained combat champions (tanks, enchanters, ADCs, some mages, some fighters, etc) get stronger as the immediate aftermath of the changes - predicting the immediate balance in detail is basically impossible. With that in mind, a lot of the validation we've done has been aimed at making sure we have clear alignment on when burst kills are ok and also on what we'll do if certain classes are over- or underpowered. There'll be balance instability, but I'm optimistic that we'll land it effectively and pretty quickly. You, of course, should wait and see and judge us by what actually happens, and not what I say at this point.
On the topic of damage, I would love to hear your opinion on liandry's / demonic embrace? Particularly these items on supports. One of my good friends and duo queue partners two tricks brand and zyra support and in many of our games he does more damage than our mid laner.
I'm mainly hesitant about the items and their ability to do carry levels of damage with limited gold investment but I do have some concern about brand's ability to continue doing damage after dying too (and Liandry's Demonic plays into this aspect).
I would also love know if it seems like the general consensus within Riot is similar to yours overall (all of your opinions not just about liandry's).
There's a lot to unpack about mage supports but they're not a primary focus right now - if nothing else, Brand and Zyra topping team damage charts has been happening for a very long time and is really the only thing they bring to the table as supports, so it's not the cause for any recent damage creep.
Allowing players to pick damage oriented supports and get enough gold to really scale with them was a major part of the changes that ultimately solved support autofill problems and we'd be hesitant to go back on those; we'd prefer to tune durability around the reality that many teams swap a defensive character (support or tank) for a damage dealing one and balance the two approaches against each other.
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