PhreakRiot

That's fine, they still crushed it with a good video :)

Actually the designers are the ones who make direct changes. I know some games don’t really have tooling for that and rely on engineers to modify the game. Not on League (mostly). This was a simple mistake from a human being.

I don't write the patch notes :(

I'm not trying to downplay your attachment to on-hit Varus.

Yeah I definitely can't help you if you preferred a specific build and it got weaker =[

I’ll give you that it wasn’t a massive huff but his winrate also didn’t tank. So I’ll accept a “we were all wrong.”

I mean let's be real. IG is just better than TSM or C9 or whoever.

Obviously good communication makes you a better team. But League has a lot of skill checks in it and communication is not the biggest one. Sometimes you have to cover for weaker players with comms. As Doublelift mentioned, reminding playoff players of dragon timers is a real thing. I've micromanaged my jungler's gank route to someone else's lane in competitive play before.

Sure it'd be ideal if every player was always perfect but we know they aren't. Not even Faker is perfect. So considering players are neither telepathic nor perfect, it's your job to provide actionable information.

Karthus can't watch lanes while clearing his jungle. I guess you can look at the minimap, but you functionally can't scroll the map without missing a Q. So if I'm doing my first clear on Karthus, the only way I know how any lane is doing is if they tell me or I'm walking between raptors and wolves. That's it. Othe...

Stridebreaker or Trinity Force.

I mean, that's generally how balance works. If people aren't frustrated by it (ban rate) and players aren't penalized for reasonable choices (win rate) then yeah, you let it ride. AP Twitch had a lower win rate for a very long time, presumably because it took people a while to learn the playstyle. But here we are with like a 2% win rate bump by going Nashor's first vs. an AD mythic and it's a pretty reasonable thing for the designer to check up on his project and go, "OK, yeah, I have to nerf this."

Obviously not the designer who worked on this but, uh, I have thoughts:

I know for a fact that the Xin Zhao work was ongoing well before AP ratios were added to the kit. It's not exactly hard to say, "OK, I'm happy with the reshape, let's slap on some AP ratios now." As someone who gets to see in-progress updates, there were weeks and weeks of design work and updates. The very last change list I saw had AP ratios attached. If you want to take a pessimistic view, I guess it means that there's comparatively less playtesting on the AP build, but the entirety of the design work was done with no changes to AP ratios at all.

So to be clear, the idea of AP Xin Zhao in no way impacted the work done on Xin Zhao.

The refrain, "Literally no one wanted to play [x champion build] before [x champion build] existed" is a dumb one. No one asked for a wind samurai but guess what he's the most popular champion in the game. If your argument is, "No one asked for this" your arg...

To be clear: Braum doesn't just destroy projectiles. The projectile fully hits him.

He makes Nami bubbles hit faster and they're centered on his location.

So the interaction with Seraphine ult is really up to interpretation and either could make sense.

I understand expecting it to work one way instead of the other, but this is honestly well within reasonable expectations for the ability.

For reference, Varus R works perfectly against Braum as well, which is another interaction that makes perfect sense to me.

This is super cool! I like the approach taken to ideal champion picks by rolling in more of the available information, like pick order and the rest of the team comps.

Nice work!

Read my point more carefully. I'm implying teams won't default to English-speaking, just like with LMQ in 2014

Edit: I had a different version of the above post before I actually submitted it. So it wasn't explicit at all there.

In short, yes, you could just have a full Korean-speaking team without import restriction. Your pool of acceptable players skyrockets.

Being an import is not a specific need. Teams are not shopping for "import-tagged" players. They are shopping for very good players. However, they are only allowed to attain two import-tagged players. Thus Team Liquid right now has zero demand for any import-tagged player. Even if they'd like to pay for Faker they literally can't without firing Alphari or CoreJJ... which means they aren't in demand enough...

Indeed, there is a lower supply of "resident" players since everyone who's not an NA resident isn't a resident. You have a lower supply of resident players, raising the prices of the elusive good-and-resident player, and a lower demand of import players, lowering their prices.

Lo and behold, here we are, at exactly the place I mentioned.

Deathcap, 15-mejai's, Rocketbelt for 25 flat pen + Void Staff, full build.

Yeah, so true damage on like 700 AP E+Passive+Lich Bane+Nashor is just absurd burst.

And people were complaining about BotRK Katarina KEKW. AP Kat is giga-broken.

Respect for you, too <3

On the salaries point, I don't try to find any extra information. Certainly nothing is handed to me in that regard as a caster and I don't go looking for it. I probably get salary info from the same places you do (RIP ESPN).

There is more breakdown that could be done on style-of-imports, to be fair. For example, right now no self-respecting LCS or LEC team imports players who don't speak English anymore. This used to happen. It was bad. They never worked out. The coaches/GMs did a bad job vetting and understanding language barriers. So through that lens, by default LCS teams need to be English-speaking, unless you could get together a roster like huhi+Pobelter, any other Korean-American or Korean-Canadian players and some more Korean imports who may not speak English. That would absolutely move the landscape around.

Hey, gbay. I appreciate the video and I agree with most of your points. However, some issues or outright mistakes:

1. At 3:30 you talk about no local talent post-franchising. This is actually very easy to research and I'm sad you didn't. I know you went for a quick vlog-style post, but just saying "Well I'm pretty sure the number of imports only went up" is not exactly great argumentation. I'm not saying you're wrong, just that you didn't substantiate your claim in any way.

2. 10:10 has a fundamental misunderstanding of economics. The demand for top talent is strictly lower right now because it is impossible for an LCS team to have Rookie, TheShy, and JackeyLove on the same roster. There are only so many truly S-tier pro players out there. Only so many Fakers, CoreJJs, etc. but only 20 of them can ever be in the LCS. The demand is lower. This lowers their price. Removing the import restriction would RAISE the price of S-tier pro players because then Team ...

It was intentionally designed in a specific way:

If you had Black Shield, it would block Drowsy and thus Sleep

If you became Drowsy you could not Black Shield after to prevent Sleep.

Specifically intended by the designer because he didn't want Morgana to hard counter Zoe. I can understand the position, but I think it ultimately proved better for the game to make that interaction Morgana-favored.

Yeah I kinda expected there'd be shenanigans with how it's measured. Not surprised it shows both champions "win."

Point still stands that a lane counter is not necessarily a game counter. If Kennen is able to withstand split push in the late game while still being a better teamfighter, then you have these situations where players go, "WTF I countered him!" and still lose.

Regardless, the overall ability to win the game is pretty equal across both champions. If you throw out solo queue overall winrate as meaningless, you're still left with the comparative-winrate not moving much either direction, leading me to still stand by the point that Irelia doesn't gain much traction against Kennen as a counter-pick.

But there's a sentence literally in the screenshot that says "Wins 0.59% more often than expected [based on win rates]."

To be clear, this is not "X champion wins lane." It's "X champion wins game." Kennen wins games more often against Irelia than he does against other 47% winrate champions. (This scales. He's slightly good against Irelia overall according to that sentence).