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Riot does not know how to handle Yuumi and by the end of this post, I think you will think the same:

I will start this off by saying, that I am a hardcore Yuumi Main and have been playing her basically since her release. This will be a "longer" rant so please read everything before you comment.

Ever since Yuumi's release, people have been complaining that Riot did a bad job with Yuumi's release by putting a champion into the game that is able to provide so much power for doing nothing. And i agree with that. Yuumi's power budget is not correctly balanced. She needs to have less power just sitting on someone (I will refer to this playstyle as AFK-Yuumi from now on) and more power for actively procing her Passiv and jumping around (I will refer to this playstyle as Active-Yuumi from now on).

In my opinion, Riot does not understand the "hate" between Yuumi correctly. They are clueless about how to lower her ban rate. Yuumi is only "broken" in Pro play where teammates are able to communicate correctly and play the Active-Yuumi playstyle. In Normal Play, Yuumi is mediocre at best, sometimes strong in certain compositions, and always super reliant on how the team plays, because you are not able to "impact" the early game as much as other supports and have to hope the Team doesn't end up going 0/10 till you come online. Here is where Riot should start making adjustments. Make AFK-Yuumi much much weaker and put that power into Active-Yuumi so that she is able to have more "impact", but only if she plays actively and puts herself in danger compared to AFK-Yuumi.

Not only in this subreddit, but from Friends in general, I have constantly heard that "the way to fix her" is to make her W have a fixed time and afterward "push" her off.

THIS IS ABSOLUTELY THE WRONG APPROACH! and I will tell you why:

1. It disappoints the current Yuumi player base: The current Yuumi Player base does not want this. It changes her playstyle extremely hard. It will make her basically unplayable vs certain champions. Being pushed off will also ALWAYS happen at the "worst" possible times making it very unfun for the Yuumi player. With a change like this, it would only lower the fun to play her and increase the frustration of playing her.

2. It does not change anything in Pro play: Lots of people always take Pro play as evidence when they call something broken. (Yuumi having a 100% Winrate in Worlds for example so she must be broken in normal play...) A change to a fixed w time would, drumroll please, change nothing! This has to do with the fact, that yes, Pro players are actually very good at the game and thanks to the communication they will be able to adapt to a change like this. But this will only be because of communication. A change like this will inevitably only "hit" normal play. It will not only hit the "hated/disliked" AFK-Yuumi but also the Active-Yuumi. And the active playstyle should not be hit but rather promoted.

Let's talk about what I think. I think Riot needs to start realizing, that Active-Yuumi is what the player base and the enemies want. It puts Yuumi in danger, thus giving the enemy a window to attack her, but also needs to give Yuumi incentive to actually get off "on her own" instead of being "forced" as most people suggest. Here the Passiv comes into play. I will also not comment on the fact, that AP Yuumi only "became" such a big thing because they started nerfing "Enchanter" Yuumi over and over again. But that's a different Topic.

Since her release, Yuumi's Passiv has acted as basically a way to INCENTIVE (not force) Yuumi to get off and proc it to gain a boost of value. Ever since Riot started hitting this incentive, they wonders why the Active-Yuumi player base is decreasing and the AFK-Yuumi playstyle is increasing. They do not realize the huge connection between playing actively and having a worthwhile Passiv to proc. As of now, we have the "worst" Passiv we have had since release afaik, so you can understand my frustration when I saw what they were hitting next patch:

HER PASSIVE AGAIN!!! I wonder what Riot thinks about increasing the CD. "MMH I wonder if this change will promote the AFK-Playstyle even more by giving even less incentive to hop off more often to proc passive because it's not up yet"... Riot really should start reading "Rants" like this to understand that nerfing the passive over and over again is the WRONG way to go. Even if it sounds weird at first, BUFFING Yuumi's Passiv will actually make it so that everyone involved will be happy. Give incentive to Yuumi Passiv so she WANTS to get off to proc it. "Punish" Yuumis who don't proc it harder.

Controversial option: I think they should increase her Mana costs in order to make procing Passive more important but only if they buff Passiv to go along with these changes

Thank you for having gotten this far with me. I will now end this off by mentioning some of my Ideas (changes) that would in my opinion be liked by both players and enemies and will push Yuumi in a direction where she is more fun to play actively, and less fun to just AFK with.

Proposed Change Nr. 1:

Increase all her Mana costs. Buff her Passiv so that she gains more Mana than before back but also gets a "Buff" that makes her first ability cast after hopping on someone again free.[Thoughts behind this: Yuumi needs to actively be procing her Passiv to not go OOM, but will have a very high incentive to do so (free cast). AFK-Yuumi will suffer with this change as she will have less value because she will go OOM pretty fast.]

Proposed Change Nr. 2:

W Change. When hopping onto a target, she will give him/her the adaptive stats for X seconds. Afterward, she can still heal and sit on them but will do so at lower values. She can reapply this by either getting off or on again or hopping to another target[Thoughts behind this: This will promote an active playstyle. Yuumi will have more incentive for jumping around teammates or the buff she gives will not be as strong. Different from the "usually" proposed W changes, this will not force her off, but rather make her "useless" if she decides to stay on. This comes with the pro of deciding when to get off tho so that you don't get forced off at the worst possible points.]

TL;DR: Riot does not know how to remove the AFK playstyle and increase the active Yuumi playstyle. They don't realize, that they need to add incentives compared to taking away incentives and nerfing passive etc which reduces the incentives to get off. Every Passiv nerf is a Lose-Lose situation. At some point, it will be considered Trolling to proc passive if it gives so little value.

If you have read everything and gotten this far, What do you think of my proposed changes?

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almost 2 years ago - /u/phroxz0n - Direct link

Thanks for the post. I think there are some good points in here, but there are some core assumptions that we disagree on.

Yuumi's main value to league is that she is a champion that can help a player bring their friend into the game by drastically reducing the importance of one of League's skilltests (positioning), which allows the new player to focus their mental energy elsewhere.

Live Yuumi has 3 main issues: 1. As tuned, she is a Pro Play bound champion 2. Yuumi can be frustrating for some player segments (varies significantly by region X skill bracket) 3. Tends to abandon lane partner later in the game

A few further notes. Each change we make to increase the power of active yuumi (as coined) directly makes it less likely to succeed in hitting the goal for the intended audience (new players), especially when it involves yuumi jumping out in a Teamfight where she can die instantly.

While active yuumi is less frustrating to play against, we can only go so far until it's prohibitively difficult for a new player to play yuumi and risk exacerbating the pro problem (as they will pilot active yuumi excellently) while normal players will struggle to get value.

The changes this patch are aimed at addressing her Pro Play strength (hard CC and laning durability) and getting her into a good place there, after which we will be able to take a meaningful stab at frustration.

The main reason we are changing the passive is because the change we made to lower the passive CD in early game was the direct contributor to her pro viability. The reason we made this change in the first place was because we thought a few months ago (similar to the thought process you outlined above) that yuumi should need to take more risk to be effective. However, the actual result of the change was that pro players could use this power to the max and regular players could not. Simultaneously, this change did not succeed in making her less frustrating.

As tuned, Yuumi's effective hp in laning phase through e, passive and defensive summ cannot be overcome by even the strongest early game champion pairings.

The tldr of this is that it's not that we don't know how to make active yuumi, it's that we don't think the tradeoff of making active yuumi more powerful is acceptable for her intended audience.

Instead, the direction we're more interested in that likely satisfies both parties (frustration and target audience) is to have afk yuumi have more counterplay. But before we can land that, we need to get her pro play in a good spot first. Hopefully this helps explain the reasoning for the changes.

almost 2 years ago - /u/phroxz0n - Direct link

Originally posted by Hue__hue

When the audience for Yuumi is new players why is everyone in higher elos sick of that champ then?

I don’t see high elo players complain about Garen.

This is what we need to resolve first. Long term we want to tune yuumi to be weaker for sophisticated players, so that she can be tuned around her intended skill bracket. These changes are the first step at that.

One of the primary reasons for her effectiveness in high elo is because she can get out of lane too reliably and then hop on a fighter/assassin late game and reduce their counterplay too significantly.

The intention of the changes is so that she is less likely to get out of lane unscathed in high elo, which would directly reduce the frustration as a second order effect (that's the intent at least). The root duration change is to make it so when she gets out of lane, she's not reducing the counterplay by as much.

almost 2 years ago - /u/phroxz0n - Direct link

Originally posted by AuryxTheDutchman

Are you guys mulling over changes like having CC affect her too while she’s on someone?

We've considered it, I don't think it meaningfully reduces frustration, while sometimes making Yuumi's inputs not function, which makes it feel like your buttons aren't working. As a result, I don't think it's a good change.