please tell me why even allow such one dimensional, non skill expressive champs to be viable not even in d2+ games but in pro play ?
Udyr actually has some of the steepest champion mastery in the game. Turns out that when you have no gap closers or escapes and can only use one ability at a time, knowing when to go in, leave, or choose among damage/durability/disables is pretty skillful.
And this isn't even mentioning their impact on soloq, at least hecarim is perma banned so you don't have to deal with him often.
Phreak this is a slight tangent to the Udyr/Heca comments, but wouldnt it be a bit ignorant to say that the balance team has been hitting Heca and Udyr when the primary reason for their abuse is their clear speed and early/mid game. The Chemtank nerf was an offset at best as it buffed the slow and nerfed the speed. The Heca nerf of 10% was for late game rather than his early game. Games that go that late are already decided?
Another aspect I want to ask about is Orianna / Azir / Syndra. Why weren't compensation buffs given to Orianna like base armor/mr buffs so its less teamfight (pro) oriented so its solo q rate doesnt drop. Sigyetaeyeob a GM Orianna player and a lot of orianna players are unhappy with the solo q experience because of how bad she is this season.
Hecarim's E speed doesn't scale on rank. The scaling movement speed is just how E functions. It's an all-game change.
Hecarim's first nerf was to Q damage.
Kinda disingenuous to call any of those things "not clear speed"
Compensation buffs exist when you aren't trying to rapidly solve a pro play problem. Anything like that is automatically a larger project and one you have to keep up with. Yorick is a good example of this.
If your goal is to nerf a champion to lower its pro priority (Orianna, Udyr, Hecarim) you just nerf them. At some other point down the line they can stop to figure out if pros are just being change-averse (this happens a lot) or if there's actual fenagling that needs to happen, like with Azir or Ryze.
Total number of nerfs isn't as relevant as the effectiveness of them. I think the point you've indirectly made here is that the nerfs haven't been good enough and some responbility here lies on the balance team.
I've seen champs get f**king nuked when Riot wants the champ out of pro play. It's clear with the repeated love taps to both Udyr and Hec that Riot was at least complicit with or enjoyed having then around and didn't want to blast them out of pro play (or blast their soloq win rates).
No jungle meta has ever been amazing tbh, but this Udyr Hec meta needs a stronger hand from the balance team to force it out, and it's not like it isn't clear why they're so good, as you can see from the comments in this thread.
To be clear, there are two distinct things going on:
An Udyr nerf, with a follow up that seems to be giving a real decline to Udyr pick/banrate, to the point where I expect with no further changes, he'd be sub-80, which tends to be the cutoff point. Still, he had another small nerf in 11.7. The round 2 nerf probably could have come in sooner, though.
And Hecarim, who did not cross pro play thresholds until the 11.6 nerf, which was a pretty substantial 0-20 damage off of Q. That is generally not what you'd consider a love tap on a low cooldown primary damage ability.
I think my biggest problem, is finding champions that punish Udyr/Hec. There aren’t a lot of good scaling answers to them, Karthus can work but has a much higher risk factor. You can beat them early with Nid, but then risk falling off. I feel like we’re in a limbo where carry junglers don’t get the necessary resources and traditional utility junglers can’t keep up.
Champions that appear to do well against Hecarim: Ivern, Skarner, Dr. Mundo, Nunu, Volibear, Rek'Sai, Trundle, Jarvan. So, mostly champions who fill the role of beefy frontliners while likely being able to out-duel him.
Good against Udyr: Ivern, Lillia, Zac, Sejuani, Taliyah, Kindred, Mundo. So, champions who make it difficult for Udyr to get past them (CC from Ivern/Taliyah) or just kite exceptionally well (Lillia, Taliyah, Kindred).
i love you so much man <3
<3
I mean Seraphine is much more popular in mid and bot though, TK has never been the same since those nerfs in season 9 he is a corpse of what he was (and for good reason too because he was pretty busted in pro-play). Honestly thinking of it more closely this season has better than season 9 or 10 in terms of support diversity.
My problem with the balance in support in the last 3 seasons I cannot really remember a time where Mages and Enchanters were clearly the meta over tank supports like Thresh, Ali, Nautilus, Leona, Rakan, etc. in botlane. Like when was the last time Zyra, Karma, or Lulu have been the top of the meta as supports in pro-play? Sorry for the digression this is just a pet peeve of mine about support balance.
In terms of mid I mean I don't blame Riot as much for that. The game is played almost entirely around Dragon Soul right now so you need to have good late-game teamfighting to win those fights and control mages are great at that.
1-2 years ago Karma was perma pick/ban. This was after the Ardent Censer meta.
I agree I'd like a much healthier mix of tanks and enchanters. For whatever reasons, pros seem to just go 100-0 on one side of it. Even in the Ardent Censer year, we went up until Worlds with whatever champion just building Redemption with Censer just sitting there unpicked for the whole season.
Apologies! Meant it more as a reminder in case it was an unintentional slip-up than a "got you!" sort of thing. Cheers, and thanks for engaging in these discussions!
No apologies needed. I worded my post poorly and you caught it. Thanks! :)
Hecarim's most recent nerf was 11.6
You guys actually took 10% off his maximum Devastating Charge speed in 11.7! Easy one to miss, given how much he's been in the patch notes lately.
Right, yeah, pro-facing nerf. I'll fix the post.
You raise some fair points, but I think this Spring has been really boring meta-wise in jungle especially but also in support and mid-lane. I know people used to complain about Riot making too many forced changes to meta, but honestly I would like to see some forced changes and a different meta after MSI. Maybe Viego and Gwen being available in Summer will shake up the meta?
Outside of Alistar and Rell, I'd argue that there's a lot of space in support when looking at the whole year. It's heavily engage tanks because of the first two and the next few who trail them, but Senna, TK, Seraphine, and Gragas occasionally built full AP make for some decent variety.
Mid is really just dominated by Orianna Azir Syndra Viktor Zoe TF, mostly the first three. I think Riot did a good job of getting Sylas into a playable spot and we saw some Lucian/Trist, which was also cool, but yeah I think the Orianna changes came too late.
Except that the balance team deigned to not do a third nerf, which is something that pro-play numbers supports, despite Hecarims presence in soloQ as well.
Not doing a third nerf when looking at pro-play could be argued, but not when he also has as much presence in SoloQ as he does
To be clear about something, Riot cannot react to pro play the immediate patch before. Not only is there a minimum 8 day lag between a patch hitting live and pros playing on it, the number is greater than that because, let's be clear, a single bo3 between T1 and NS is not a good source of data.
So Riot is necessarily one full skipped patch behind pro play. There just isn't another way to do it. 11.7 can look at 11.5 pro play and 11.8 can look at 11.6 pro play... just not all of it, since those are playoff patches, but you at least get enough of a look.
Hecarim's most recent pro-facing nerf was 11.6, yes, meaning 11.8 could have had more pro-reactive nerfs. However, it's reasonable to conclude a large reason for his prevalence is from Chemtank, which also got nerfed in 11.7. For further reference, his win rates on non-Chemtank are pretty reasonable, leading to a fair conclusion that a Chemtank-focused nerf would be fair, combined with a lighter nerf on his E.
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Read moreTbf the balancing team has a really weird way of actually trying to "balance" something. They never directly address the issue, they always try to nerf something in 500 different ways first. In master+ elo on EUW heca and udyr is ban or dodge. That's so fun. I don't watch LCS but LEC games are so stale, like having Corki/Azir meta. Every game goes down by book, really boring knowing what happens before it does. Lee sin at least does flashy plays, heca just presses e and chemtank and runs you down. That doesn't even look good and engaging.
How exactly do you find nerfs to Phoenix Udyr's clear speed and Chemtank's movement speed "indirect"?
Except this completely disregards SoloQ data input.
And those champions got nerfs every time they set off the solo queue flags. It's not like Riot was like, "Nah, let's just ignore the oracle data this time."
Isn't the problem having to clear the entire jungle pre 3:15 for crab or you are doomed? Pretty much the only things we see are champs with a super fast clear.
You don't really have to, though. Whether or not you're level 4, the team with lane priority is the one who's getting the crab. It's not unreasonable to do 5 camps and just take the other one instead.
I just think people are so bored of seeing Heca and Udyr they want both of them to be Olaf'd to oblivion. Fwiw, even though I'm not a fan of this meta I think it's a good thing to take it slow if the champ is not Samira levels of busted, but I can see where the frustration is coming from.
And I can understand that, but let's be really specific about what happened:
Riot nerfed Udyr in the 11.5/6 playoff patch and Hecarim was only at 61% presence the last time Riot had a chance to react to pro play metrics for 11.6.
I really don't think Riot should get in the habit of roller coaster champion balance. It'll feel sh*tty for players and it'll feel sh*tty for pros just playing whack-a-mole with champion select.
While I see most of your points here, Hecarim is still smashing every benchmark for nerfs and has been for literal months
https://lolalytics.com/lol/hecarim/build/?tier=d2_plus&patch=11.7
"elite" tier, ranked number 1 jungler and 53.5% win rate close to 70% ban rate. This is for 11.7, "fine now"
And ill cut off any discussion now about "noooo this other stat site says he is 52.5% not 53.5%", because rather than obsess over the number in a vacuum look at his rank 1 overall in the jungler position.
"I think a third hit on Hecarim in 11.8 is warranted, but it's not like Riot didn't continually tap them down."
Literally in the post, bro.
FWIW, Hecarim and Udyr each received several nerfs in addition to Chemtank being nerfed.
I know Reddit likes to complain about "triple nerfing" something, but sometimes that doesn't do enough.
Hecarim's nerfs weren't in for the LCS playoffs, though he was still #1 pick/ban in the 11.6 playoffs regions.
Hecarim's second nerf, Udyr's third nerf, and Chemtank's nerf were all in 11.7, which were all put in after Riot reacted to the 11.5 second round of Udyr nerfs not lowering his priority enough.
I think a third hit on Hecarim in 11.8 is warranted, but it's not like Riot didn't continually tap them down.
Plus, let's not act like pros are good at reacting to changes on time. You say "months ago" as though people whose literal job it is to pick the strongest champions didn't fail to identify them.
11.2 had Chemtank's big buffs where it got much cheaper. Hecarim's presence: 28%. Udyr's was 74%
11.3, where Udyr was specifically nerfe...
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