Since her release in 10.15, Lillia has never appeared in balance notes, only receiving minor bug fixes, while having presence in every level of play.
All champs eventually incur some adjusting as the game itself continuously evolves, but I wanted to take a moment to appreciate this simple, fun, "balanced" champion.
External link →This was my first full champion I worked on the pre-release balance for at Riot! At times she looked strong (pro meta pick) and at times she looked weak (early S11 preseason), but without any direct changes she equalized back towards the middle before we commit to any changes and that's awesome to see. We are hoping to make this the standard of precision but it's not easy, going to be applying my learnings to my next champion as well!
Lillia is great, I love her so much. I love champs with zoomies and I love champs who are very positional reliant, so she’s been one of my favorite recent releases for sure!
Out of curiosity, I thought the person who partially designed Yuumi (another champ I liked) was the person who designed Lillia. This is Maxw3ll on the league fandom wiki. Is this incorrect, or am I misunderstanding both of your roles in champion creation?
You're correct! he's the designer (creative gameplay mind and programmer/scripter) and I'm the game analyst that's responsible for launch balance, game health, counterplay, visual clarity, playtesting, etc.
We are hoping to make this the standard of precision
Strictly out of curiosity, what do you think you did that caused your champ to not require balance changes like that?
Lots of things:
Luck, and lots of it. We have only around a dozen games playtested on champions on their final couple iterations, and it really doesn't compare to the millions we get quickly after release. Nailing a % winrate balance number with that small sample size is a lot of luck.
Making sure her super fun and high-agency strengths (ramping movespeed, true damage, triple damage W, infinite range E/R) come with big drawbacks (squishiness, low base MS, slow moving abilities so that the player feels like a god but the opponents know the counterplay and don't feel oppressed.
Sharp strength/weakness profile. Strong early clear speed if un-interrupted, but low damage and durability. Strong mid-game spike but falls-off lategame.
A LOT of comparing her stats/ability DPS/clear speeds to other champions in dev, as well as time spent optimizing her jungle clear in development. You'll see in her champion spotlight we even included a clip of how to clear on her as we know it'll take some learning. Fun fact: it's me in the video :)
Are you a bit sad she became popular in pro play thus making her worse in solo queue? Pro play makes balancing champions awful for solo queue I hate it a lot of the time.
It's bittersweet, on one hand it meant we didn't need to balance change her because she was performing really well somewhere, on the other hand it kept her from being above 50% like a lot of other champ releases. Luckily players didn't feel weak on her which is great.
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