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I haven't really felt the need for mana costs changes whenever I've played him, but I generally wasn't shoved hard (save by a Ziggs, + Show Spoiler +and I hated every second of it because the guy was doing a bunch of mistakes and missed around 2/3rd of his Qs aimed at me, but he still had enough mana to shove while I couldn't punish him because all mine had to go toward not losing waves to the tower;
Some range on E would be appreciated, and I'm not sure why Sear only has 900 range for its paradigm (maybe to compensate for its "high damage" because of the passive?).
But iirc E was nerfed from 675 (eg. higher than most champs' auto range) because he was a big lane bully at the time. If you did stuff to help his mobility like raise his base MS, E's range, or even reduce its cost a bit (it starts at 70), maybe he'd become too big a lane bully and would have to be hit.
(Of course Syndra would still shit on him.  )
DotA has some asymetrical values in the per level gain of its abilities, and that's something LoL could take from I think.
For example, give a bit of range to Conflagration at level 4 or 5 would reduce the potential for early bullying even if you max it, because by level 6+ most champions either have some way to clear at range, or can all-in Brand to punish him (yup, not walking within 625 range of Kassadin, Katarina or Fizz post-6).
It's "counterintuitive" and beginners would wonder about it so it's typically what Riot would never do though.
Edit: + Show Spoiler [I'm bad at this] +yup, I started League the week before Orianna was added, and I remember Brand being mentioned as a lane bully. He was mostly forgotten because when Orianna came along with standard auto range and 900 range Q she took lane-bullying to a whole other level (you can compare the timing for their changes, Orianna was targeted a lot for tweaking, almost every patch).
The biggest reason to target Brand was gone with her release, and Riot has a really poor track-record with tweaking champions once they leave the spotlight (save with Ahri since they buff her back if she ever leaves it).
I think Brand's damage is fine, or rather, the "big weakness to his core design" that I mentioned in the previous post is that most of his assets are his damage. Q would never be a stun without the combo mechanic, and because there's mostly 3 spells, the tweaking you can do around it is limited.
However, if you wanted Brand to be remembered as a "massive burst AoE damage" you'd have to make it much higher than the current standard to make up for the bunch of utility he lacks compared to others.
To exaggerate, what would you think if all his spells had 0.9+ AP ratios? That'd be outright broken, regardless of his immobility and squishiness, so it's not viable. But because most of his levers are on damage (since Riot aren't keen on changing ranges or mini-rework like Ablaze effects) there's not a whole lot you can do with him.
TBH I wouldn't mind if magic damage was generally lower (hey Xerath) but in exchange MR was harder to come by, or at least stack to unkillable levels. This way champs like Brand could more easily remain where they're at and still have a stronger "damage" feel than others, without instakilling anyone who doesn't buy BV's.
TL;DR of the edit: Orianna was released a month or two later and eclipsed the "issues" Brand had (mainly bullying) and him falling off the spotlight made Riot not look at the nerfs' effects. He's amongst the old champs that aren't considered when the creep happens.
Because most of what he brings to the table is damage, it makes him a bit binary to balance, and it's hard when you can't make said damage higher than utility mages' enough without him being OP.
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why IEM still did not announced 8th team yet.. It has been a week since that pending...
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On February 24 2015 02:20 Osmoses wrote:
When I jungle and there's a LB mid I don't even bother ganking unless our mid has permanent, one click lockdown. Seriously, fuck that champ -_-
I mean one reason lissandra is so popular is because she is one of the few champions with the cc to lock down the bullshit that is kalista/lb these days
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Yeah I actually said to my team only yesterday the sole reason Vi is back in the meta is goddamn Kalista -_-
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On February 24 2015 01:57 Carnivorous Sheep wrote:
Everything you said is pretty much true, but it can distilled even more simply. Brand was nerfed back when he was a dominating presence, when mid lane was Annie/Brand/Malzahar. Now, with absurd power creep in mid and stupid shit like LeBlanc every game, Brand is incredibly lackluster. He needs his nerfs reverted and maybe lower mana costs on top of that.
Brand was simply balanced for an extremely different iteration of the game.
I think it is kinda funny that you picture Annie/Brand/Malzahar as the old champs being pushed out of the game by absurd power creep when all three of them have really high soloq winrates right now. Granted, Annie's is inflated by support Annie, and Brand and Malz are still not seen in competitive play. Nevertheless, these old champions are very underrated in mid.
Malz especially is a great pick, generally easy to play and has ridiculous gank-support. Hard cc junglers plus Malz are just terror post-6.
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Baa?21248 Posts
Solo queue winrates don't mean much imo. I play Malzahar all the time but that doesn't mean he's good against organized teams.
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Non competitive heros almost always have average or higher win rates because people unfamiliar with the hero don't pick it for "freelo"
Leblanc being the classic counter example
Janna as well was near #1 until she became fotm after worlds
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I think Brand is another mid thats better as support, but he just isn't as good as Annie, Vel'koz and Zyra. The problem with his damage isn't really numbers it's more that the Ult is too random and useless often(if you catch an enemy while roaming it does nothing when there is no one else around).
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I can never relate to the "soloq doesn't mean much" argument. I think soloq winrates mean a lot. Only a very small amount of all players play in organized, competitive environments. Most play in solo queue and normals. If the game is skewed in the casual, soloq/normal environment way more people are affected and receive a bad game experience.
That does obviously not imply that only soloq/normals matter. Riot has to walk the thin line and balance both competitive and casual at once.
Edit:
On February 24 2015 02:51 Slusher wrote:
Non competitive heros almost always have average or higher win rates because people unfamiliar with the hero don't pick it for "freelo"
Leblanc being the classic counter example
Janna as well was near #1 until she became fotm after worlds
I'm not convinced that this is actually true.
I'm not certain how to spell out "non-competitive heros" in a non-vague way, but as it is somewhat plausible that competitive champions are more popular I looked at the winrates of popular champs and unpopular champs:
According to lolking's champion winrates data champions below 5% popularity are made up of 19 above 50% winrate and 38 under 50% winrate. That's not proving anything (because it still is possible that all of those champions would have worse winrates if the champions were more popular), but it puts some doubt on the intuition that less popular champions have higher win rates because people unfamiliar with the hero don't pick it for freelo, which is a close relative to "Non competitive heros almost always have average or higher win rates because people unfamiliar with the hero don't pick it."
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On February 24 2015 02:51 Slusher wrote:
Non competitive heros almost always have average or higher win rates because people unfamiliar with the hero don't pick it for "freelo"
Leblanc being the classic counter example
Janna as well was near #1 until she became fotm after worlds
I'm pretty sure she lost her uber high winrate when she lost her global ms passive
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Poll: Malzahar of Cass?Cass (8) 67% Malz (4) 33% 12 total votes Your vote: Malzahar of Cass? (Vote): Malz
(Vote): Cass
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On February 24 2015 02:56 Prog wrote:I can never relate to the "soloq doesn't mean much" argument. I think soloq winrates mean a lot. Only a very small amount of all players play in organized, competitive environments. Most play in solo queue and normals. If the game is skewed in the casual, soloq/normal environment way more people are affected and receive a bad game experience. That does obviously not imply that only soloq/normals matter. Riot has to walk the thin line and balance both competitive and casual at once. Edit: Show nested quote +On February 24 2015 02:51 Slusher wrote:
Non competitive heros almost always have average or higher win rates because people unfamiliar with the hero don't pick it for "freelo"
Leblanc being the classic counter example
Janna as well was near #1 until she became fotm after worlds I'm not convinced that this is actually true. I'm not certain how to spell out "non-competitive heros" in a non-vague way, but as it is somewhat plausible that competitive champions are more popular I looked at the winrates of popular champs and unpopular champs: According to lolking's champion winrates data champions below 5% popularity are made up of 19 above 50% winrate and 38 under 50% winrate. That's not proving anything (because it still is possible that all of those champions would have worse winrates if the champions were more popular), but it puts some doubt on the intuition that less popular champions have higher win rates because people unfamiliar with the hero don't pick it for freelo, which is a close relative to "Non competitive heros almost always have average or higher win rates because people unfamiliar with the hero don't pick it."
You underestimate the faceroll efect.A lot of champs will have good winrates regardless of how strong they actually are.
Pretty much all champ that aren't faceroll have low winrate even if they are op in the right hands.
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Baa?21248 Posts
Annie and Malzahar are easy to play. I think ease of executability, though nebulous and not nearly as pronounced in League as in Dota, should still factor. I play Malzahar precisely because he's easy to play huehue.
In general I prefer the Valve method of balancing solely for competitive play. Balancing solo queue just has way too many conflicting factors and variance and it all becomes really messy. It's just very hard to have both a good competitive balance as well as a good solo queue balance, and I think Riot should be more at ease with the idea of having hue discrepancies between solo queue and professional win rates.
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Bearded Elder29905 Posts
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I don't know, splitting the ranked playerbase doesn't sound like the best thing to me.
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We don't know if it will be a separate ladder or simply a different matchmaking method for people who don't mind longer queues as long as they get the role they want.
Also my favorite thing would be if we could set up priorities like in Evolve where I can set my 1st prefferred role, then 2nd etc. (and of course you can opt out of number of roles if you only want certain ones).
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I think Annie mid right now is pretty strong, but that's mostly just because people forgot about how to deal with her actually having farm and levels.
She can pretty much 100 to 0 anyone without a real dedicated MR defensive item at the 8 to 10 stack RoA+VS timing. Like absolutely deleted, meanwhile the splash damage chunked half their team hard.
Just need those distortion boots and that summoner cd mastery. Takes basically a minute off of flashe cd, you can really catch people off guard when they think there is still like a minute and a half till you can flash Tiber for 2600 damage and AoE stun.
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On February 24 2015 03:49 Carnivorous Sheep wrote:
Annie and Malzahar are easy to play. I think ease of executability, though nebulous and not nearly as pronounced in League as in Dota, should still factor. I play Malzahar precisely because he's easy to play huehue.
In general I prefer the Valve method of balancing solely for competitive play. Balancing solo queue just has way too many conflicting factors and variance and it all becomes really messy. It's just very hard to have both a good competitive balance as well as a good solo queue balance, and I think Riot should be more at ease with the idea of having hue discrepancies between solo queue and professional win rates.
i also like dota's balancing
however, i think the nerf mentality in league can be the most beneficial if executed properly
they need to do more than just ~10 champion changes every patch. There are champions like aatrox who haven't been touched in 20 months (that's not an exaggeration btw lol).
If every patch included changes to at least 60 champions, this game would benefit greatly from it. Some say it would create inherent chaos because so many changes would be happening and you would have a hard time tracking them, but you have to remember most nerfs/buffs in league are REALLY miniscule things like +10 or -10 damage.
at the end of the day the reason why this game is struggling in the balance department is ultimately riot's financial investment in that department. They hire 1000+ people for eSports related shit but probably have at most 10 guys in the balance roster. Chances are that these 10 guys get paid like $60,000 a year for doing simple shit like "we have reduced zed's attack speed" just because they have seniority within the company.
IMO there are two things that should happen for this game to get better. Either a) completely remove the balancin riot influenced "balancing" and let the players forge their own balance in the way broodwar did. So what if a champ goes on a 60% win rate for a period of time, someone will eventually come and figure out a strategy that will counter that and thus the balance will come from the playerbase rather than an external source like riot.
or b) keep the same balance approach but do it on a much wider scale so you don't neglect 80% of the playable roster. Unfortunately this would require for riot to actually expect their balance staff to do actual work so that's unlikely.
Also there is the problem with there being a huge indicator that riot's balance tends to involve monetary decisions aka "buff the champ before a skin is released for it" or my favorite "this champion (warwick) doesn't sell as many skins as other champs so we should never allow him to be relevant in competitive". You have to think after a while... why is lee sin a staple pick for 3 years? because he looks cool and does cool flashy plays and thus the playerbase will invest money in his skins so they can look fresh while they do cool flashy plays.
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On February 24 2015 04:57 iCanada wrote:
I think Annie mid right now is pretty strong, but that's mostly just because people forgot about how to deal with her actually having farm and levels.
She can pretty much 100 to 0 anyone without a real deticated MR defensive item at the 8 to 10 stack RoA+VS timing. Like absolutely deleted, meanwhile the splash damage chunked half their team hard.
Just need those distortion boots and that summoner cd mastery. Takes basically a minute off of flashe cd, you can really catch people off guard when they think there is still like a minute and a half till you can flash Tiber for 2600 damage and AoE stun.
For what it's worth, she was a strong mid S3 due to the assassin heavy meta and Molten Armor being OP as balls. (I can't speak too much to S4)
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On February 24 2015 05:02 RaphaelSanzio wrote:Show nested quote +On February 24 2015 03:49 Carnivorous Sheep wrote:
Annie and Malzahar are easy to play. I think ease of executability, though nebulous and not nearly as pronounced in League as in Dota, should still factor. I play Malzahar precisely because he's easy to play huehue.
In general I prefer the Valve method of balancing solely for competitive play. Balancing solo queue just has way too many conflicting factors and variance and it all becomes really messy. It's just very hard to have both a good competitive balance as well as a good solo queue balance, and I think Riot should be more at ease with the idea of having hue discrepancies between solo queue and professional win rates. Also there is the problem with there being a huge indicator that riot's balance tends to involve monetary decisions aka "buff the champ before a skin is released for it" or my favorite "this champion (warwick) doesn't sell as many skins as other champs so we should never allow him to be relevant in competitive". You have to think after a while... why is lee sin a staple pick for 3 years? because he looks cool and does cool flashy plays and thus the playerbase will invest money in his skins so they can look fresh while they do cool flashy plays.
A champion that has 2 targeted abilites/passive/aoe buff and all he does is run at you vs lee.I wonder why one is pushed into the spotlight while the other one isn't?A mystery.
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EPT
