Balance Nightmares: The Most BROKEN Champions (Literally) | League of Legends

so far the champion groups i've covered such as the manulis champions anti-carries or lane bullies comprise mechanics and playstyles existing within the game but this time the group in question is based on neither game mechanic nor playstyle rather a phenomenon that takes place due to at least in my opinion some less than stellar play testing and balancing today's video will be discussing balanced nightmares the most broken champions in the game literally anyone who's been playing league for a while has probably heard this term thrown around at least once or twice we all like to joke about how 200 years riot's balance and design team can be at times especially when figuring out how to make seemingly problematic or overpowered champions feel better to play against while somehow preserving their current identities naturally it doesn't turn out that way and the champion either ends up nerfed to the ground before getting trickle buffs here and there or they have to get reworked neither outcome is much of a happy ending though is it deciding what is a ballast nightmare can be kind of difficult since like i said at the start of the video it's not tied to any mechanic or playstyle consequently there's no strict definition for it to keep things as simple as possible i'll go with this one a balanced nightmare is any champion with an excessively turbulent and contentious patch history of buffs nerfs reworks and adjustments over an extended period of time in layman's terms if you see this champion receiving what feels like buffs or nerfs every other patch and they still feel completely stupid to deal with that is what you can consider a balanced nightmare it's important to understand that balanced nightmares aren't always overpowered or overloaded for example yonder is constantly seen as one of the most broken champions in the game but hasn't gotten a single meaningful buff for nerf for over half a year in fact at the moment he is doing significantly worse in performance than his brother yasuo who's slightly more helpful in team fights thanks to his amazing wind wall and synergy with knockups conversely a champion can be very weak and not have the most overloaded kit but be considered a balanced nightmare kalista is a primary example she has a very simple kit relative to her contemporaries but her amazing combat mobility and ability to almost infinitely stack spears onto a single target is problematic due to pro players abusing her objective control to all health finally some champions may have been balanced namers in the past but have now found a somewhat comfortable spot where they're not too overpowered or too weak gangplank is one such case upon his rework he went through clusters of buffs and nerfs going from super overpowered to super weak during season 6 and 7. but ever since around season 9 he's been more or less right in the middle of course we're not sure what's going to happen with patch 11.17 uh top laners have been clamoring for years to make gangplank q a ranged attack so he wouldn't get like free 200 hp from grass by spamming it over and over which is a nice fix but they increased his barrel supply from three to five giving him way more teamfight dps so we'll have to wait and see about that the point of concern we should also address is how much of it is strictly related to pro play as opposed to solo queue there are some solo queue specific ones but a lot of them are influenced by their presence in pro play i would say that probably depends on the individual for me if they're being tossed and turned within either scene then they would fit the list for others it might just be pro play or solo queue having established all that how exactly does a champion become a balanced nightmare in the first place in the case by case basis for some it's due to champion design as in there's a mechanic in their kit that's fundamentally difficult or frustrating to handle but is so intertwined with the champion's identity that it can't just be flat out removed but that ends up happening anyway akali akali akali akali you poor soul you she's by far the most apt description of the design problem scenario even at full power she's never had over a 50 win rate always hovering around the 45 mark which is code red for needing buffs despite this she's had to get so many things stripped away from her kit the energy refund on her passive the healing on her q the turret stealth and the movement speed extension on her w the physical damage from her e and ultimate the free targeted dash on alt 1 and the stun they had to break her and build her back up several times over just to keep her playstyle of being this fast but evasive ninja with an extremely skill expressive kit the sad part is that even after three long years of this she still hasn't been able to reach a healthy middle ground one might say it's because she had so many ancillary elements that didn't need to be there in the first place to which i agree but the core issue is that she's one of the few champions in league of legends where if played perfectly has practically zero moments of vulnerability see with dead even though he's also really evasive and fast with his attacks there's a good three to four seconds where you can hack away at him while he waits for his cooldowns to come up for akali so long as there's no one with big aoe crowd control like a malphite she has no down time for others it can be as straightforward as balance a champion being too efficient at their job for how little they need or how easy it is to execute on them this will be the most insidious form of balanced nightmare because it affects champions with reasonable kits i'll use kane as an example since he's been tearing through solo queue a lot as of late what ends up happening in this scenario is that the champion starts off weak or irrelevant a few people might play them here and they're just not enough to warrant attention but over time they receive tiny buffs a little more damage here a little less cool down there higher stats and so on ever since kane's released his base form was just too weak to contribute any pressure on the map and even when he did transform shadow assassin was like one of the worst assassins in the game and rost was kind of a weaker version of other bruisers like olaf or hecarim so to remedy this riots started to slowly boost their numbers patch 7.24 extra ad scaling and more heal on ross patch 8.6 w and ultimate both got higher bonus ad ratios patch 8.17 shadow step lasts longer and has faster movement speed for shadow assassin patch 9.21 cubase damage up and more ad ratio on ross q patch 10.5 faster transformations and bigger slow on w patch 10.9 lower cooldown on q and an even bigger slow on w six consecutive buffs before he got his first nerf out of nowhere kane was played a lot more frequently and people realized how broken he was that's because individually none of those buffs were enough to shoot him through the surface but one on top of the other on top of the other caused a massive explosion suddenly going from an uninteresting b-tier pick to super ops plus tier we also saw this happen with cassadin udir ziggs ziggs is a big one he's been destroying bot lane right now and lastly of course pro play certain champions are a lot better at high levels of play and they're even better with communication competitive games are the perfect environment to truly test the limits of a champion thanks to the longer periods of neutral exchanges in between fights and skirmishes azir faces the short end of the stick on this one because his carry potential is just so ridiculously high that even a small buff is enough to force him from a zero percent big band to 100 percent for all intents and purposes his numbers are awful early game and even mid game have to be kept so incredibly weak to balance out his monstrous legend and to supplement that you need good team coordination and likely consistent jungle health naturally we'll never really be able to see kalista azir or ryze find lasting success in solo queue because of their talents imagine if any of them had a 52 win rate in solo queue that would likely translate to 70 in pro play perhaps even higher the question of whether or not riot needs to keep a champion intentionally underpowered in solo queue so as not to have them take over pro play is still up for debate since both facets are vital to the sustenance of the game's community and future prospects but out of the three types of balanced nightmares this group sadly has the lowest chances of being fixed so if you were hoping for rice to one day be pretty good in solo queue i wouldn't hold my breath the actual discussion for this part of the video is gonna be twofold part one will be if champions are balanced nightmares because of objectively bad game design or because we as players happen to dislike the way things are and demand changes rather than just putting up with it for champions like irelia and akali it comes down to the experience you have when playing against them at the present moment neither of these champions have been able to meet over a 50 win rate and everyone's thought behind that is due to the higher skill requirement to play them but even at the upper echelon of play such as masters grandmaster and challenger they're still not that great so does this mean we as a community are just being a bunch of babies and should shut up and learn how to play against them like where do we draw the line between a champion being a genuine negative influence on the game and a champion that people are just annoyed with because they're not straightforward to be a good place to start would be by figuring out where that frustration is coming from by definition frustration is the feeling of being upset or annoyed especially because of the inability to change or achieve something that definition is epitomized even further in video games where almost all of a player's enjoyment for that game depends on how much control they have and any source of frustration is always correlated to the lack of equity in influencing the outcome of the situation at hand for someone like irelia the biggest complaint about her is that she's way too fast she can dash all over the place at blinding speed and has dps comparable to that of skirmishers despite being a diver in other words champions who heavily depend on landing a key skill shot such as morgana or someone with position sensitive attacks like aatrox are at a major disadvantage because irelia has multiple mid-range dashes that just so happen to also heal her it doesn't matter how weak her numbers are because the presence of her dashes completely invalidates a large group of champions meaning to many players the only way to achieve victory against her in those circumstances is if she messes up something not within your control unavoidable pressure is what it boils down to irelia has an attack range of 200 which is very high for a melee champion and she has a point-and-click dash that closes the distance on anyone trying to play the distance game this compiled with her extremely good rush down potential makes her good at overwhelming players with equal parts speed and force usually high power is compensated with either low durability or low speed such as marksman being squishy or juggernauts being slow when you have someone who's neither easy to kill nor prone to being kited you end up with a frustrating experience where this coincides with design is that there was one rule that was emphatically expressed in all of the game design and user experience classes i took in college never makes something inherently frustrating when i say inherently frustrating i mean if the frustration directly stems from the game element or mechanic itself a common example i like to look back on is in pokemon gold silver and crystal against the third gym leader whitney the reason people have such a rough time against her is because her ace pokemon mill tank has really good base stats with a powerful move set and since you're still at the very start of your adventure you have access to almost no pokemon that counter miltank it's not miltank that's a frustrating pokemon if whitney was perhaps fifth or sixth gym leader she'd be far easier to deal with it's circumstances in which you have to fight her very early on therefore it's a frustrating game element the second question is how can ballast nightmares be fixed if at all to tell you the truth there's no easy way to do that for any of the three categories the design balanced nightmares i already sort of explained is tied to a specific mechanic in their kit that just doesn't feel very fair or fun to go up against but since that usually encompasses their entire gameplay or theme you'd have to rework the champion entirely to not have to function around that mechanic problem is that's tantamount to character assassination i can't legitimately think of a way to make it so champions like irelia and tokali can exist without having those abilities they wouldn't be irelia and akali anymore the statistical bounce nightmares are also not as straightforward as you might think at least not all of them at first glance one would say you can just nerf them so they go back down to a reasonable level but sometimes riot goes overboard on the nerfs and then you get hecarim who not only got his base numbers nerfed like crazy but his items which sent him from a 53 win rate all the way down to 47 for a bit i think he said like 49 right now certain champions swing one way or the other drastically and almost never have a firm middle ground you might have a few champions that no matter how weak they are they always get played such as lee sin but there are also champions that are only played when super overpowered and never played otherwise as for the pro play balance nightmares that's also very difficult to do because it ties in with the design group ryze kalista and azir are simply far too good in the hands of expert players that the only thing preventing them from being turbo pick ban every game is their efficiency so they have no choice but to be kept super weak to discourage people from one tricking them in pro play but that causes them to be non-existent in solo queue because it's almost impossible for you to tap into that champion's full potential in that kind of environment the reason balance in league of legends is a lot more complex than simply raising or lowering numbers is because 99 of the time it's not just the champion that changes a whole bunch of other things can be affected too in fighting games if a certain character is overperforming relative to the rest of the cast or if they have an attack that's broken they can do things such as nerf the damage make the attack slower or alter the attributes in a way that make it less effective or more punishing if used carelessly conversely if a character feels weak or has really terrible moves they can buff them by making that specific move faster maybe combo better etc more often than not that doesn't cause the domino effect all of a sudden this stage is different or whatever right it's just the character is slightly worse or better for moba games trying to decrease or increase parameters or effects can cause extreme shifts in the champion's viability and popularity vladimir got a tiny buff in patch 11.8 just decrease the cooldown on transfusion from five seconds to four might seem harmless at first but that one change skyrocketed his win rate from 49 to 53 because a lower transfusion cooldown not only means more damage but more healing frequent trades higher dps up time faster power spikes so on and so forth no one could keep up with the strain tanking capabilities so shortly after they partially backpedaled on it by bringing the max cooldown to 4.6 and his win rate dropped back down to normal along with his pick rate this even extends to areas you wouldn't expect like trading card games yu-gi-oh occasionally releases erratas which is when a card is reprinted to have a different description than it did before usually for the purposes of rebalancing or nerfing the card erratas are put in place to prevent broken combos and degenerate strategies like when chaos emperor dragon was changed because its ability allowed you to effectively lock your opponent out of drawing cards for the rest of the game through yatagarasu combo after it was reworked no one ever plays chaos emperor dragon anymore there was no way to have its effect be tournament legal the way it was because there was almost zero way to stop it do you remember the frustration part does that mean these champions will forever be doomed to suck or succeed probably yeah for some ballast nightmares there's legitimately nothing that can be done to simultaneously preserve their identity and find that sweet spot at least not in a way that makes everyone happy azir cannot be both viable in pro play and solo queue irelia will never be both strong and not hated by tons of people hecarim will only be played when he's broken and never played when he's not now seriously look at his popularity history he's either why everyone plays or why no one plays never in between i don't know if that's necessarily bad design though some champions are kind of meant to be like that it's just that they're victims of circumstances such as how the game is played how the community views them and how balance is handled but at the same time i think it would be pretty cool to see azir in solo queue i think he's pretty intense to play with and play against sorry for kind of going along on this one but if you enjoyed the video or rating would be much appreciated consider subbing to the channel for more content like this follow me on my socials and join my discord server and if you haven't yet check out my other discussion videos after this one for now though thanks so much for watching and i'll see you again soon for the next one take [Music] you

Channel: Vars

Views: 381,065

Keywords: league of legends pro guides, michael reeves lilypichu, offlinetv and friends, best junglers 11.17, league of legends, proguides, balance nightmare, lol champion, lol balance nightmare, lol broken champion, broken champions league of legends, season 11 broken champion, akali broken, irelia broken, azir pro play, best champions in league of legends, most overpowered champions, lol season 11, lol discussion, vars league of legends, why no one plays azir, why no one plays ryze

Id: fXtA8uE4KPE

Length: 15min 21sec (921 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 03 2021