[Patch 4.10] Nidalee/Skarner Rework General Discussion - P…

From my limited understanding of DotA, it's also because the teams' setups and heroes' roles are far less defined than in LoL.
Because the utility is so powerful for most spells it's easier to find a replacement for most heroes if your #1 choice gets banned (save for Batrider, always pick/ban never leave alone hue). Because you run more supports (from what I got it ranges from only one "hard support" to up to 3 supports in general depending on line-ups?) you also give less information on your composition with some picks (compare to LoL where Lulu is always mid, Shyvana always off-laning, etc. Kayle and weird choices like sOAZ's Lulu top or Innox's Lee Sin are the only exceptions atm), meaning it's harder to target specific roles during interwoven bans I guess.

In LoL if you see two pics you can immediatly tell where they're going to be, and how they can be handled.
The (currently) extremely passive and slow meta also means that aggressive/cheesy compositions, although viable, are suboptimal because it's so stupidly hard to acquire an advantage large enough to close out the game by midgame unless you're superior to the enemy team to a point that reduces the importance of your comp anyway.
This by itself invalidates a lot of tactics and compositions, discourages hard roam (I still hold in my heart the AP Sion bot/Blitz support with duo mid/Elise jungle gank squad from LPL, the amount of planification and coordination was beautiful) because of all the exp/farm to lose, with the drakes on top of that.
Because only a subset of tactics and gameplans are optimal right now, a bunch of picks are dismissed and the few remaining ones are "figured out". You may had some new ones, but they'll fit into the same tactics instead of bringing new comps and styles with them (Jax is back because the passivity has been increased and the Xv0 style removes dominating match-ups like Renekton, Ryze or Kayle from the equation even when the latter 2 are still picked; Kayle has seen a sharp resurgence but she only fits the "stall then smash" style and didn't bring anything new).


It's partly Riot's homogenisation of champions.
It's partly shit like turrets and summoner spells changes, and support itemisation and shit like that that screams "fuck you for being proactive, passivity is where it's at!".
It's also because you're really punished for no following certain guidelines in terms of comps. I posted about that awhile ago, but stuff like needing a tanky offlaner because junglers are fighters and sometimes initiators but not real frontliners atm (or get crush by the aforementioned ones). You lose really easily if you go double AD, a bit less if you go double AD.
So even if two picks are really strong and would complement a specific plan and kind of comp really well, if they conflict in terms of lane assignements you have to give up on it (like how it's hard to fit Karthus and Orianna in the same teamcomp because both are mids; that's not the best exampple, hm... ).


Technically if you wanted hard stall, Anivia, Lux, Syndra can work just as well as Ziggs. They're nowhere near as safe as him (Satchel Charge is Rocket Jump levels of safety, on top of cancelling dashes/etc.) and can only clear their own wave, not the sidelanes (seriously wtf is that % bonus damage on minions). They don't poke as hard as him offensively either.
You don't pick Ziggs because you want to stall like CLG.EU did in s2 with Anivia, you do it because he fits the meta super well on top of being strong by himself. If teams specifically wanted to outscale/aim for the lategame and picked Ziggs for this purpose it'd be more interesting, for example. But currently picking late game is more of a default choice, "gotta be way better to win by midgame so easier to stack late game picks".