Skarner's Rework - Flawless Masterpiece or Terrible Mistake? | League of Legends

scarner my boy it has been 3,000 years the patience the perseverance the massive amounts of copium that Nikki boy no doubt owe Deon several times over that got you to finally be acknowledged by Riot and finally receive a rework that came too late 15 years too late in all seriousness I think I speak for most of us when I say that visual gameplay updates are far more exciting than new releases one because it's interesting to see how Rya plans to modernize the Champions gameplay based off an existing premise and two because it feels really weird to have a champion like trendir exists in the same environment as Cante scunner has gone through enough iterations at this point that he almost feels like rise to be honest having talked about him in two separate videos I'm hoping this will be the last time we ever need to change him although given he's received an entirely new visual design and an almost entirely new set of abilities I have high expectations for this Vu more than any other I'd say let's not waste any more time and talk about Scot's rework has he gotten 200 years or have they found a way to modernize him while keeping him fair and fun to play and play against the just of gers played out prior to his vgu was that he was a juggernaut who excelled that consistent damage Tempo map control and of course lockdown his impale was arguably one of the most iconic abilities in the game being the only suppression where in the Caster could actually move prior to Tom kench and open up the door for lots of skill expression in team fights the problem was that there were so many elements about him that were either inconsistent or could be better performed by other Champions and the nature of his spes almost exclusively contained him within the jungle unless you were one of the rare few who enjoyed playing him as a top cheese pick I always considered scarner a Frontline base but at the same time it can be hard to see him that way don't get me wrong he can take a lot of punishment in addition to dealing a lot of damage himself but most of the time I'd imagine players feel more secure having a maai or Zach on their team owing to their greater durability and more explosive impact in a fight the reality of his old iteration was that he was stuck between two different chops scrapping like a juggernaut while locking down enemies like a tank splitting him into two different ropes now a hybrid between tank Juggernaut is certainly doable it's not like a warden skirmisher which are two fundamentally contrasting purposes however you do run the risk of the champion in question doing too much damage or being too tanky all the same which has me a bit worried old scarner wasn't that problematic because no one played him and he was too janky but if new scarner becomes a high-profile jungler then they'll have to be very careful with finding that middle ground between being tanky but not too tanky and being a DPS threat but not too threatening that's my concern from a practical standpoint but we also do have to look at it from a design perspective because scarner used to have a history for having either too much damage or being too tanky or bul and if they want to make that more fair it might come at the cost of his identity abandoning the crystal Spire mechanic altogether his passive is now threads of vibration when dealing a combination of three basic attacks q and or ultimate he does a big chunk of percent Health damage to the target with there being No On Target cool down meaning it's functionally A3 hit passive like Vice denting blows or vein Sil bolts only you can proc off abilities too at a surface glance I think it's a very fair passive to have I did see some sc's abilities ahead of time and he doesn't strike me as a very fast attacker this is just to ensure a consistent stream of DPS for long drawn out fights and I'm all for it since it can easily be balanced by raising or lowering the percent Health damage shattered Earth empowers his next three basic attacks to gain bonus attack speed and deal AOE damage kind of like a tiam mod passive the final attack will deal a huge earthquake at the point of impact slowing all enemies and dealing a chunk of percent Health damage on top of the percent Health damage from his passive currently with the numbers they have on the PBE it's 16% plus up to 12% for a total of 28 with this q and passive combined not only that but his three basic attacks themselves deal a total of 18% of scarner bonus health damage what scarner can also do instead of consuming three basic attacks is to instead recast his que throwing the boulder he picks up attack as a projectile essentially behaving as the final basic attack okay a very simple ability in concept but quite a bit to break down on paper the premise of this attack is awesome scarner always struggle with a lackluster neutral game a not implying juggernauts need a strong neutral but compared to Champs like Darius Vol bear udir and nases who can run you down scarner only had the same stick potential when he was fighting in a spire and so if they're squaring off in Lane he had no way to pressure opponents shattered Earth in relation to Crystal slash is very reminiscent to what they did when Cha's foral spikes instead of making it a consistent DPS tool that took way too long to deal damage they condensed it into three attacks for more immediate impact so that scarner could play more towards traits having the extra property to launch the Boler affords scarner a modum of neutral pressure in the event he can't get up close to attack which has me believe this might open up the possibility for scarner to be a top laner as well not sure about that yet the damage does have any erasing an eyebrow though tanks can't afford to build DP PS since you know they have to build tank so they're given percent Health damage to allow them to still be relevant in the mental aing but when you deal too much percent Health damage that can lead to a repeat of or if you guys remember or when he first came out he did like 25% Health with this W then another 25% Health with brittle then with this ultimate he got rittle two more times for another 25% each so he literally dealt like 100% Max Health damage to all Targets people complain that Mundo SKU does too much but in his defense it's only single Target and it's also current health not Max Health scarner shattered Earth and T him with threads of vibration can let him deal huge amounts of AOE Max Health damage he does have to get three attacks off but it does feel like it could get oppressive although Q was his only source of damage and it's the same here so maybe it's to account for the rest of his kid not doing that much damage I like to clarify though that I'm a big fan of his new Q it is far more interactive than Crystal slash moving on though we have his W siis and Bastion crystaline exoskeleton was a shield that gave him ramping movement speed making him a speedy boy besides MC basan actually deals a small chunk of damage before gaining a shield and instead of speeding him up slows all enemies down a person maxed out is a pretty small number for a shield but at Max rank the cool down drops to 6 seconds a much shorter cool down than most of the shields in the game plus scarner will basically be building full HP anyway expectedly W is the least interesting part of his kit now comes the actual interesting ability ex stalls impact this is the one that caught everyone's attention for just under 3 seconds scarner enters a Scion ultimate Noo-noo type interaction that lets him travel forward including through walls ramping up in speed as he goes along if he comes in contact with any Champion they get suppressed and move along with them for either a second or until they Collide into a wall so the total suppression never goes beyond 1 second and if he collides into a wall that champion takes damage and gets stun for 1 and 1/2 seconds essentially totaling 2.5 seconds of suppress and stun in total with the Z this is cool it's a really damn cool ability maybe when on the receiving end it can be kind of scary to suddenly see a man eating scorpion dig through the wall and drag you into another wall but this isn't as scary as it looks for one unlike shadow assassin cane who you only have like a quar second to react to scarner moves pretty slowly at the beginning and can only steer as much as noooo W and only when he grabs onto a champion so fast Target can easily step out of the way just like they with a San ultimate Landing exols impact will be difficult if the enemy sees you coming in other words counter playing scarner is as simple as just using Wards and map awareness he's also not CC immune during this Dash so anyone with hard Cc or disruption can screw him over pretty easily unlike noooo whose W snowball is a massive destroying hit boox in front of him I'm pretty sure you can stop him with things like Pantheon stun gr his body slam and whatnot so it is sort of like a channel ability you can think of this as G Shadow step if the god forsaken ability was actually bounced I appreciate that they made the movement mechanic similar to cion and not free movement really SS the idea of drilling through terrain to get to the other side something to note of with dick doll's impact is that it doesn't necessarily require you to go through a wall if you're fighting someone in lane and just so happen to be next to a wall you can treat it almost like a poppy dash making scarner a very positional awareness demanding Champion for both the person playing him and the person playing against him 2.5 seconds of total CC can be very dangerous if he has backup last but not least this trade Mark impale scarner marks an area in front of him and after a 75 second delay up to three enemy Champions still within the area get dragg to him and suppressed for 1.5 seconds during which he can move around just like his old version only now he can't turn around anymore he stays in the same directional orientation my theory behind why they did that was to prevent teammates from accidentally missing their followup because the scarner player turned around and pulled the target more than they were intending to just like they did with warx ultimate They removed the instant point and click activation in exchange for more impact and use cases SC is Ultimate can lock down three enemy champions for 1.5 seconds that's actually insane however the 3/4 of a second cast time gives enemies just enough of a buffer to flash Dash or even walk out to account for this they gave sconner a guaranteed way to combo into impale for one Champion thanks to his e which is an important element to have in a Champions kit much like how Warick has Primal how to guarantee infinite duress it's starting to make a lot more sense why sconner has a slow on his q and W now to make it easier to land his new impale they essentially took away all the movement speed Buffs he used to get and replaced it with a bunch of of slows more specifically AOE slows with a longer cast range he can also pull enemies over walls now so in addition to the opposing team wanting to Ward over walls to keep an eye on scarner E they also have to watch out for scarner pulling them through a wall too I would say the main positive about skarner's new kit is that baring his W Shield he has multiple uses for each of his abilities giving him a higher skill cealing and therefore greater potential to be used in higher elos his Q can be used either for quick trade damage or as a projectile the L of which can enable him to catch up to enemies who are running away poken neutral or use his cover fire by slowing down enemy pursuers however I was told that the cast time for both picking up the boulder and throwing it kind of ruins out of it his he can used for traversability navigating the jungle more efficiently and giving him more Avenues to gang go Lane instead of just walking through River but you can also use it as an escape or engage option as well unlik Shadow step exol's impact does not cancel early if scarner is not inside a wall so you can use this to run down the lane faster just like you saw on screen finally just like I described impale can grab more than one Champion making him way more team fight oriented and being able to pull out through walls can add more surprise factor I think this version of scarner leans into more of a tank than a juggernaut to be honest he certainly deals a lot of damage but with the mountain of soft and hard crowd control in his aatur I think he's much more of a funline base than a lockdown Champion which in some scenarios is an upgrade and in others a downgrade he does raise a few red flags though as mentioned already though the bulk of his DPS is condensed into his que and realistically you only get to proc his passive once per rotation this guy can do a lot of damage if he builds ability haste he can achieve rotations even faster get shields faster again juggernauts are supposed to be threatening enough to where you can't ignore them but personally I'm always apprehensive about tanks having multiple sources of double digit per Health damage conceptually the way it's applied is well executed it still maintains the feeling of consistent DPS that the old scarner was done for but now it's more applicable in traits I just wonder if he might be a repeat of War where he does too much damage while being too tanky second issue is that the utility part of his kit both B stalls impact and impale despite their wider range of use cases and potentially greater influence feel like they were improved in some ways and downgraded in others when compared to fracture and old impale thanks to the interactions with the z d and q you could do some really fun combos like double fraction and pale for 4 seconds of RCC which is how scarner top players cheesed unsuspecting Lane opponents who got a little too close to their Tower exol's impact gives scarner more macro pressure but I think fracture gives scarner more I suppose Freedom if that makes sense to be blunt I think exol's impact feel like it's a bit too impractical as in it's going to be used less for the wall ganking and more for pting someone into wall when you're already next to them as if you were a poppy Scar's old fracture had a mind game aspect to it as for impale yes you can na three Champions but impale kind of got nerfed in my opinion old impale was so impactful because of how fast scarner could get if you had passive plus W speed up plus dead man plus face Rush plus ghost in 1.75 seconds scarner could drag you really far away from where you were standing that was the fun part of the champion with current scarner having barely any movement speed and the duration shortening to 1.5 seconds you don't really get anywhere so it's almost exclusively a lock tool now instead of a displacement you can't be line for a Target then drag them all the way back to your team you also can't change your direction anymore removing that aspect of them one of the most enjoyable parts of playing scarner was the Speedy lock down aspect here now that's gone and replaced with I guess traditional engage there's a part of me that can't help but wonder if they maybe went too far with the trade-off yes qwe and ultimate gives scarner more ways to play the game than old scarner ever could but they made him slower and clunkier in the process people who never played scarner before will now have a practical in incentive to pick him up but is it just me or does this not feel like scarner anymore another thing about scarner that made him so uniquely enjoyable was that one game you can go full tank and be your front line another game you can go damage and Shred enemies to pieces this scarner forces you to go full tank and forces you to be a Frontline base you're certainly a much more effective Frontline base than old scarner but you lost that entire other aspect of him at first when I saw shattered Earth and upheaval I thought they preserved his Dynamic nature but they kind of nuked that other half of his identity maybe I'm just being pessimist about this but compared to Fiddlesticks volley bear and noooo who were the creme de creme when he came to visual gameplay updates new scarner doesn't feel like gold scarner instead of taking his existing kit and retrofitting them into a modernized kit from my point of view they designed a new kit and then simply tweaked it in a way to have stuff that looks like scarner such as impale and sassing fashion I'm actually really curious as to what scarner meanss think about the rework for the sake of clarity I like the gameplay from a pragmatic standpoint I thinks scarner might become more M relevant now that his moonet has more playmaking potential and a higher impact ceiling overall but from a design standpoint a part of me feels as if they missed the mark on what Starner was all about it's like HX new HX has a fantastic design that's so much more practical than old day trucks but the design feels so different that you can't even call them the same Champion anymore to their credit scarner wasn't needed radical changes to fix up his gameplay no one can deny that it's not like fiddle STI and volly bear who already had Fairly cohesive gameplay beforehand and just needed a touchup I wonder though did they strip away more than what was necessary what do you guys think I'm torn I'm happy with this in the sense that they had an image of the champion and executed on it very well but disappointed that they traded the Speedy funky nature of impale for a more practical yes slow and plotting tank maybe I'm just too biased in favor of Holt Garner regardless let me know in the comments down below if you agree or disagree with my stance on this apart from that if you enjoyed the video it would be great if you could leave a like And subscribe don't forget to follow me on Twitter at varsam join my Discord server and check out my other Champion first impressions videos if you haven't yet until next time thanks so much for watching and I look forward to seeing you again soon take care [Music] [Music]

Channel: Vars

Views: 122,497

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 skarner, skarner rework, skarner vgu, lol skarner rework gameplay, league of legends skarner, why no one plays skarner, lol why no one plays skarner, skarner, skarner new abilities, skarner first impressions, skarner 2024, skarner season 14, skarner rework gameplay, skarner rework reaction, nickyboi skarner rework

Id: XjMBOeJ7iIU

Length: 14min 30sec (870 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 02 2024