Everything Wrong With: Pyke | League of Legends

in the first two episodes of everything wrong with a shared theme between gante and akshan is their hybridization I call that to attention in great detail because all too often in the spirit of keeping their game as Innovative as possible developers fall into the Trap of oh what if we did this or what if we did that and get a little too ambitious basically they get too carried away in the pursuit of something new and inventive that they overstep boundaries that should never be crossed ever and hybridization is one of them the point of a class system is to establish recognizable limitations in a champion both for their sake and those who play against them another champion who is the unfortunate byproduct of R's habit of breaking their own rules is Pike the first officially designated carry support in League of Legends Infamous for being the hardest role to carry through especially at lower elos the champion design team thought it wise to add a few members to the roster capable of exerting enough pressure to influence the outcome of the game in a more proactive self-serving way while car supports have existed prior to him such as Zyra Vos and whatnot they were once Maes who instead became supports through circumstance whereas Pike was the first champion who was intended to be a support from the get go he word intended since then he's had to deal with the literal crippling balance timeline that serves to highlight why those AFF forementioned boundaries are there in the first place so for today's video we'll be talking about everything wrong with Pike the blood Harbor Ripper while this episode will share much of the same overall premise as kante and hakan I don't think anyone considers Pike to be as ridiculous as them in fact this kid is relatively straightforward All Things Considered however the player base said have a mind to categorize him as such in light of how drastically he could skew the game in his team's favor just by being present so in a way it's not what he had that made him such a problem but rather how that would affect the progression of a game Pikes a hybrid between a catcher and assassin true to their name catchers excel at locking down and or isolating Targets on their team making them the best of searching for picks coincidentally that overlaps nicely with the assassin class whose job is also to single out and isolate a Target and dispatch them quickly so compared to antithetical pairings like Marksman and assassin or Warden and skirmisher Catcher And assassin get along rather well what differentiates Pike from other catchers like BL cranor Nautilus is that he actually has damage of his own sacrificing durability and area coverage in the process given that he scales off attack damage and the adality his Auto attacks and damaging abilities do hurt quite a bit so when being reeled in by a pike you not only have to be concerned about his teammate standing next to him but he himself especially when we get to his ultimate even with that death from below though Pike has a very solid damage combo that can double as an escape B skewer intended when Phantom undertoe equates to 565 base plus 160% bonus ad in damage not to mention the stun that follows couple that with a few Auto attacks thrown in and he can Chun you down pretty good on his own he doesn't exactly on-shot you like a conventional assassin but for a support he definitely has more kill pressure than his Pierce Pike takes advantage of the Assassin part of his identity by being arguably one of the most difficult Champions to catch ghost water dive allows him a short lived yet extremely fast burst of speed coupled with camouflage which can be used for both running away and closing in on a Target Phantom undo is also one of the best Dash abilities in the entire game in my opinion being a fast free Target Dash with the delayed stun attached to it naturally it's best used when attacking but it's incredibly useful for shaking off fleeing enemies since pursuers have to worry about the Phantom stunning them on the way back to Pike compared to your usual Catra supports who are ironically easy to catch out themselves Pike is able to get out of a tricky situation if he finds himself stuck in one which is one of the less talked about aspects of what makes him so frustrating to deal with whenever he is strong of course the biggest contributing factor that grinds people's ears is his Infamous Ultimate Death From Below marking an X shape in front of him he dishes a heavy damage do all Targets caught in it instantly executing Champions below a certain HP threshold regardless of how much armor how many Shields if Pike is exhausted what have you if someone dies within that time frame he blinks to that location and resets the ability being able to cast it again within 20 seconds at no cost in addition rather than gaining the normal assist gold his allies are instead granted the same amount of gold they would have gotten if it was an actual kill hypothetically if Pike scored a kill he would get 300 gold while 150 will be split among any teammate who assisted and said killed but through death from below he would get 300 gold while the last assisting Ally would also get 300 for a net positive of 150 at least that's how it is now but for the longest time ever the net positive would actually be 450 gold because Pike would be awarded to kill gold for actually killing the champion and the bag of gold that came with it so he would get 300 Gold Plus the bag for another 300 while one of his teammates got 300 gold for a total of 900 yeah double the gold essentially and this is attached to a resettable AOE Dash execute a single tripli Kil from pik's Ultimate awarded so much gold to himself that it wouldn't be unusual for him to reach full build an entire item before anyone else give an adequate performance on paper I can totally understand why this condition was added supports are generally not meant to get kills nor are they intended to lasted any minions as that should go to and is put to better use by their teammates that being said assassins are among the most gold hungry classes in the game they heavily depend on items to offs set their po neutral game and low durability being part assassin Pike is intrinsically dependent on gold to achieve his job the point of your cut is to allow a win-win scenario where Pike is able to amass a heavy sum of Gold without compromising his teammate's ability to do so as well the issue with your cut though was that a snowballed on itself really really hard prior to version 12.9 you were essentially getting up to three times the amount of gold per Champion kill through Pike than if you were to kill someone the normal way not counting to reduce gold from negative bounties the max amount of gold the team could acquire by killing all five members of the enemy team was 450 * 5 for a total of 2250 with Pike that total went up to 4500 moreover 3,000 of that was condensed into him roughly the cost of a full item purchasing that item dramatically increased the execution floor of death from below further increasing the likelihood of even more double gold drops in the near future a Fed Pike could accelerate his team's gold lead at such a high rate that a team with him included would have a 12 to 15,000 gold lead as opposed to a team without him having only about 8 to 10,000 and this was all while being a support assassins are already very snowball and Pike could snowball twice as fast as the conventional assassin the fundamental trade-off of playing a carry support is that they will inevitably siphon resources away from their teammates to fuel their own agenda with the hope that said that Divergence would produce a net positive outcome for the team an investment that fails more often than succeeds which is why carry supports are found upon by most people down in bot they provide no benefit for the team other than damage but to acquire high amounts of damage they have to steal resources namely kills from the rest of their team Pike was effectively the only carry support who could have the best of both worlds it didn't matter how many times you KS do with this ultimate you would get the full kill gold anyway that was the biggest downside of his kit he was a hybrid between a catcher and an assassin giving him some of the best kill pressure in the entire game from a theoretical standpoint one way to stop assassins from getting the drop on you is to swim with a buddy catchers specialize in yanking you away from the positional safety of your team so when you combine a catcher ability to forcibly single out isolated targets with an Assassin's ability to effortlessly kill isolated targets that alone makes for a dangerous pairing but then counting for pik's extra reward factor and you get someone who can snowball faster than anyone else in all of League of Legends and this was all in someone who is fundamentally designed to be a support despite his intended purpose though Pike was given roughly the same independent statline as a non-s support Champion not to mention as an assassin he's functionally meant to be more combat independent than a tank or Enchanted appears repeating that under no circumstances does he ever match a full flesh assassin blow for blow since half of his kid is allocated to being a catcher but even so he's afforded enough concessions to at the very least pose a threat to Mages and marksmen even if he's flying solo as if that weren't the case that would defeat the purpose of him being an assassin no matter how diminished he should still be able to solo kill or at least threaten the lives of targets to some capacity following that thought process ultimately backfired though since Pike had enough self- sustainability to survive with or without the help of his teammates that's what enabled him to Moonlight as a mid laner giving rise to the contentious pipe mid one of the biggest design oversights I've ever seen in League's history in my oxan video I mentioned how assassins are kept in check by their lousy neutral game which is why they tend to struggle in laning Phase where they don't have the speed cool down some burst potential to disregard neutral and go straight for the kill gift of the drawn ones prevented Pike from gaining any bonus Health except through grow but in exchange he could passively regenerate a huge portion of Health loss when not visible to enemies so if you just took a lot of damage from your lane opponent all you had to do was back away for a couple of seconds and Bam you recover a good half of it this was originally intended to help him survive 2v2 botman where you'd naturally be taking a lot of poke damage from the enemy ADC and support but it was even more effective in mid lane where you only had one target to worry about plus given that it was a solo Lane the enemy midlaner had no support to count on to either body block his skewer or peel him off of them when he went in making it ironically easier for him to score kills while in mid lane he would gain better access to the rest of the map taking advantage of ghost water dive to quickly Traverse it leading to another design oversite generally engage supports like Alistar blitzcrank and thrush prefer to roam around the map looking for ganks contributing to their kids being quite efficient at doing so but they don't have the luxury of roaming around the entire map freely for three reasons one they're rather slow in Tempo which is why they buy Moby boots to compensate two few marks and can one You2 bot Lane without hemorrhaging resources and losing priority neglect them for too long and it will cost your team dearly three by roaming you forfeit a lot of golden experience since you're not in Lane very often supports may not need golden experience as much as other Champions but they still do need some if you spend too much time roaming unless you pull off several successful ganks you will fall behind in the long run Pike circumvents all three reasons one he's very fast in Tempo one of the fastest in the game two he can or at least he used to be able to go to mid lane so he didn't have to compromise his teammates own progression just to do what he wanted to do couple with the fact that he could return back to mid lane just as quickly as he left it and three since he could score so much extra goal through death from below the cost of abandoning Lane wasn't nearly as high for him as it was for everyone else and let's not forget he had way more solo kill pressure than a bliss crank or Alistar all of these factors made it so he was actually better at being a solo laner than a support his ultimate made scoring kills not only easy but more rewarding and his passive qw and E were excellent at putting himself in or setting up scenarios where he can make it happen he was sort of like Katarina where it didn't matter how much you bullied him in Lane all he needed was a single good Ro and like a triple kill to terrorize mid to late game like no tomorrow due to this the balance team had to bend over backwards to force him out of mid lane and back to bot Lane get to the John ones received a condition where to recover most of the Lost Health you had to be near more than one enemy obviously implying bot Lane where you're usually facing two opponents at once bones skewer stab version lost the ability to hit multiple enemies making it a purely single target attack whether used as a hook or stab and therefore incredibly inefficient and wave clear it was also given a hefty Mana cost but the copat that said Mana cost would be refunded if he struck an enemies Champion once again implying that they wanted to make it so using it for wave clear would be incredibly inefficient they also made it so Phantom undertale could only damage Champions against minions and monsters it would only stun annihilating all forms of wave clear from pik's kid to heavily discourage people bringing him Midland they had to slap on so many restrictions to the champion just to force him into being exclusively a support surprisingly or unsurprisingly depending on who you ask even with all of that players still found success with them in mid lane because of one simple thing death from below remember if Pike EX executed the target with this ultimate Not only would he score a kill but he would get a bag of gold to go along with it whether assisted or not effectively making is so every kill he got with ultimate would at minimum be a double kill by default so a 3 and 0 Pike would be more like a 6 and0 in terms of gold not only that but even if his jungler or someone else accidentally chaos the mid ultimate cast the total gold awarded would still be 900 when it should normally be 450 so Pike midlaners was zero in on getting one or two kills to death from below and then abandoned mid lane entirely to start snowballing all over the map so after years and years of letting him get away with it Riot eventually caught on to the fact that it makes no sense for a pike to get a bag of kill gold with his ultimate if he scores the kill because he would get the gold from the kill itself yes would you believe me if I told you that this entire godforsaken time the Triple gold draw thing with his ultimate was unintentional for four years it completely flew over their head that Pike doesn't need a bag of gold if he scores his kill since he would get the kill gold anyway so in 12.9 they made it so if he got the kill he wouldn't give himself two kills worth of gold and instead get credited for just one which not only lessened his overall profitability but made it so solo killing with him was no better than solo killing with any other Champion finally shutting down mid Pike once and foral additionally he would only get one bag from Ultimate assist instead of two that was also a funny interaction if he used death from below on a Target who died before the attack finished he would still register as a successful kill awarding him his original bag of gold but since he was technically the last assisting Ally he would also get the assist bag of gold while his teammate would get the kill gold meaning whether his ultimate connected or missed his team would get three kills of gold no matter what and they let that slide for 4 years basically Pike is an excellently well-designed hybrid between a catcher and assassin which is exactly why he was such a problem he was so good at his job that it was almost impossible for him to perform at a healthy and reasonable level as a support at the same time being a support who could build carry items gave him the benefits of being a carry Champion while still being able to quote unquote support his team through picks and extra gold so he was stuck in a catch 22 where he was a degenerate midlaner and a degenerate support his design was so efficient that he turned into an always weak Champion similar to air or rice where the only way to keep them healthy is by keeping them constantly weak or unviable since even the slightest concession was Skyrocket them to Big ban op I think a lot of that has to do with him being a double offensive hybrid Senna for example is a marksman and offensive class and enchanter a defensive class making her a little more healthily designed as to carry support than Pike whose catcher assassin hybrid is double offensive where he supports through killing people instead of healing or shielding his team overall though while I don't think Pikes catcher assassin hybridization is as bad as auction's Marksman assassin or gan's Warden skirmisher because Riot wanted Pik is a support that's what made the catcher assassin hybrid a problem if he was designed as a mid or jungle champion from the get Bill he would have been fine but the words assassin and support aren't ever meant to mingle together what do you guys think do you believe there's a timeline where Pike can work as a support or is he just so contradictory from a design standpoint that he will never be in a healthy position feel free to share in the comments down below for now if you enjoy the video I'd appreciate it if you left a like and subscribed don't forget to follow me on Twitter at far join my Discord server and check out my other everything wrong with episodes if you haven't yet until next time thanks so much for watching and I look forward to seeing you again soon take care

Channel: Vars

Views: 192,032

Keywords: vars, varsverum, league of legends, lol, vars lol, league of legends gameplay, lol discussion, vars league of legends, why no one plays, lol why no one plays, lol pyke, lol pyke support, lol pyke mid, lol pyke s13, pyke, pyke season 13, pyke 2023, pyke gameplay, pyke pentakill, pyke montage, everything wrong with pyke, what happened to pyke, vars pyke, carry supports lol, lol pyke carry

Id: sWcNAqM0Dgg

Length: 14min 38sec (878 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 15 2023