[2021] Quick Gameplay Thoughts 7/23 - Why does Akshan have a revive?

I figured I'd take this opportunity to post some quick personal thoughts on how I see our game design in league of legends evolving. In response to Akshan, the general consensus has went from "Look at all these unique tools Akshan has, how can he possibly not be OP/overloaded and exist in the same game as Udyr/Annie?" to "Wait, this champion is REALLY weak and his W is holding him back". And this evolution in thought is interesting because it really speaks to how much there is left to learn about power budgets in League of Legends.

Champions can win in a variety of ways in League of Legends. Some of them are super obvious, stat-stick style win-conditions (a-la Jax or Jinx) where they just have big numbers that add up to winning fights heads-up. Inversely, though, some champions have power budget shifted into less obvious win conditions, like Bard's super unique utility/roaming power or Ivern's contributions to utility for his team (like buff sharing and low-econ jungling). Understanding that we can essentially tune down "traditional" power (in the form of stats) to introduce ways to win that are unique (like Akshan revive/roam power budget), keeps the game fresh as far as alternative playstyles and game-to-game variance.

To turn this into a thought exercise using numbers, if Zed or Lucian get 50 "win-rate points" from just their damage, target access, and other fighting power, that is perfectly okay as long as we understand that their utility will amount to essentially 0. Inversely, Akshan, for example, may get 10 "win-rate points" from his W utility alone, so we pull that power directly from "traditional" combat power sources, and tell the Akshan player to get creative with how they win the game and use the power budget allocated towards the W to create wins.

With this context, it comes at 0 surprise that players are struggling on release. They have been given a champion that's power is under budgeted towards combat compared to what they're used to, so they have to learn to win with his unique playstyle/win conditions. As we create more champions in league of legends, the exercise of trying to put power into kits that aren't just "more damage on X ability/combo" to diversify gameplay is one we will likely improve on over time.

If anyone has any questions regarding Akshan (I am the lead analyst on him), I'd be happy to answer.

That's an interesting idea. I'd love to find an opportunity in the future to share my (and my team's) learnings from Akshan development/launch, including things like mastery win-rate growth.

The points on kit cohesion are less my wheelhouse, so I'll defer that one to a designer.

As for the "How does this all add up to a functional play pattern?" part, that I can speak to. Akshan's power is meant to come from opportune roaming, which each portion of his kit is meant to feed into. His Q is meant to provide wave clear so he can push for priority in mid lane to have first moves on roams. His W (the stealth and MS and mana regen) are there to enable him to arrive at a fight undetected and quickly. And lastly, his E and R are meant to chase down those that get away.

To your point though, his DPS is low, his targets being full health usually makes them non-targets for him, which is why roaming to fights that your team has initiated is his strength.

We usually do a quick check to see if he's micropatch worthy (that's today, actually), then would look again come next patch.

We would likely target areas that make him "easier" for people less familiar with his pattern. This could be early AD/waveclear to assist with farming or base durability so he gets less punished for misplays.

Yeah, before we tuned his damage down to the (aggressively) low numbers they are now, games would get out of hand fairly quickly due to his propensity to roam. Similar to Taliyah mid, gating his 1v1 power has kept him from running over his lane then the game, which previously was his win-condition.

These comments are fun.

Love to hear that :)

Thats a fair concern, and its something we keep in mind when hotfixing him. We choose AD partially because his last hitting and farming was very difficult, which isn't a weakness we wanted him to have (nor likely any champion to have). Things like the attack speed are on our radar for similar reasons, we have weaknesses we want him to have, but for our buffs we want to target those weaknesses which aren't intentional or vital to his identity.

I am at peace with this "meme" because honestly the answer is candid. For example how much power is a potentially 5-man 2.5s complete invulnerability? On paper that is surely game-breaking absurdity but in practice Taric ult is a completely fair and reasonable spell. We want each champion to have an identity and do something unique, and quantifying that uniqueness is almost always exceptionally difficult. I would almost aruge that the less quantifiable an effect is the more interesting and unique that makes it, though our goals vary for each project on just how much we want to push the bar.

I don't know if you are joking and just wanted to insert this funny clip but this article (which I am assuming you didnt read based on the reply) literally explains why he has a revive in great detail.