The Complicated History of League’s 200 Years Champion | League of Legends

roughly around last year or so i made a video talking about confusing champion design with the target of focus being a felios someone who at the time was the most confounding release to ever exist probably even now since then we've had to go through 2020 and 2021's rather interesting lineup of champions many of whom had kids that were so overloaded it spawned the meme of a 200 years champion fortunately for us ride has since then been pulling things back a bit with the recent additions to the roster being vex zari and renata all three of them have made quite the first impression especially this one but even so their over performance was a byproduct of being overtuned a simple number rebalancing would make them write as rain that's the big thing separating a 200 year champion from a well-designed one if they're still frustrating or annoying to deal with even after they've been dialed to a level playing field what's strange though is that ifelius appears to be in that situation he was once the freak of nature making headlines about how new champions are turning into 1v9 death machines with every bell and whistle you can think of but now no one really talks about him we still see him every so often at the time of writing the script he's enjoying a very comfortable 8 pick rate sure his win rate is abysmal but we kind of established that for champions like him win rate isn't a very accurate way to determine his power level what exactly happened to him that made him turn into a loki marksman and is he potentially an example of an overloaded champion that riot was able to fix or was he always fine and our reactions to his release were exaggerated today's video is going to be sort of a retrospective look on him actually first a word from her sponsor wealthfront in this day and age with the ever rising cost of living and the newer generations desire to learn more financial literacy is on the rise and if you're looking to start saving and investing for your future but don't 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the rest and if by chance you're also considering getting exposure to crypto they can get you set up for that as well it's very well trusted with over 27 billion dollars in assets and was voted the best robo advisor by both investopedia and nerdwall should you be interested in wasting less money on skins and more on saving for your future feel free to check out wealthfront by heading over to the link on screen or in the description for a special bonus but thanks again to wealthfront for sponsoring the video whenever someone new comes out their first year usually sets the tone for the rest of their career going forward if they go live and need only a patch or two of number adjustments before stabilizing we can expect them to remain that way for a while if they have to go through a myriad of patches where they get over-nerfed and then over-buffed or no matter what they do the champion still feels like a pain in the ass to deal with then for the next few years they'll probably experience a situation of being pick ban op or completely useless cases of the former would be vex and fiddlesticks a new champion rework after his relaunch in patch 10.7 fiddlesticks didn't really need major adjustments to anything besides bountiful harvest which was mostly designed to nerf his mid lane pressure apart from that he's been untouched for well over a year vex as well the only thing she got was a small hotfix to lower her base damage no changes to d currently both are in a more or less healthy position vex does have a high band rate but that's par for their course she's still a new champion for reworks we have akali who went through literally two years of balance problems before the community became used to her or just jaded as for new champions there's good older fellows from the start of season 10 all the way until late season 11 he went through so many buffs and nerfs that sent him up and down and up and down but what's interesting about his case as opposed to other turbulent watches is that a felios didn't actually have a single thing removed from his kit if you remember akali she lost the healing on her q energy region on her passive the turret stealth on her w the stun on the first cast of veralt etc silas was another he lost the shield on his e and the bonus missing health damage on his w samira lost the ability to dash through allies on her e yetifelios for all the ridicule he got for being right's biggest balanced nightmare ever never actually had things stripped from him which is rare to see for an overloaded champion such as him not gonna lie i myself was one of those people who at the time thought certainly t was out of his mind even for his standards to create a champion with five weapons that could each do different things such an arsenal would imply he could theoretically outperform any other marksman in the game and i think that's the mindset everyone else had throughout the first year at least his statistics would give off that impression because ryde wasn't exactly sure how strong each weapon needed to be for him to compete against other marksmen they went ahead and made each weapon operate at the same relative capacity as a full-on champion now in fairness that was a logical approach befellus would be the first ever champion in the game who essentially had more than two transformations chase released nidalee and such are not as difficult to balance because they have only two three abilities in one form and three in the other they were allowed to have six active abilities instead of four at the expense of not having a real ultimate the power budget of which would then be funneled into the two new basic abilities athelios case is a little different he has five forms calibrum severum graviton infernum and crestendom but unlike other shapeshifters he didn't get three new abilities with each weapon type or even two for that matter he only got one so in reality he had five basic abilities and an ultimate instead of six basic abilities but he also got five different passives for a total of 11 abilities except his attacks had different interactions depending on the offhand weapon so it was more like having 20 different cues as each cue could potentially interface with 4 different weapons bringing us to a total of 26 abilities in theory but then his ultimate would change based on his main hand weapon and you get the idea his kit was the definition of overloaded back then it seemed almost absurd for him to have all this crap in his abilities while literally getting free combat stats just by existing you will get bonus attack damage attack speed and percent armor penetration for free on top of abilities that's skilled like i don't care how progressive you are as the gamer no one could look at day one of failures like he was a balanced champion to explain what i mean let's look at full power calibrum he gained a passive hundred bonus attack range bringing him to 650 the same as caitlyn's which is pretty damn good then look at moonshot the active ability associated with calibra it was a long range skill shot on a moderate cooldown that did damage the first enemy struck if it was a champion the attack would place a mark on them upon which aphelios next basic attack against them would have global range and strike them for bonus physical damage on top of applying the on-hit effects of his offhand weapon yeah that looks just as powerful as a regular ability and that's only one interaction out of dozens he can do so you might be wondering why i said the approach they took was logical why was it smart for him to start off so strong when akali and irelia were the same and we all know what happened to them it was smart for ophelia's specifically because of how he was overloaded his definition of overloaded is different from that of jonah viego gwen and such as he focuses on quantity over quality that actually makes it easier to balance him since you can pinpoint what part of him is overperforming aphelios is a champion with five passives five qs and five ultimates but those abilities are individually very simple moonshot is a simple long-range skill shot that hits one target if you were to read the ability description that's all it says most if not all of its attacks have basic rudimentary effects onside is a quick barrage of attacks alternating between severum and his offhand weapon binding eclipse damages and roots anyone affected by graviton's slow dust wave is a flurry of damage in a cone that locks onto enemies hit before striking them with the soft-hand weapon much like calibrum and finally sentry summons a turret that fires with his offhand weapon since each individual attack does a small thing there's only so much pressure they can apply that includes all of their interactions with offhand as well for all intents and purposes jonah's solan bound or gwen's hollow miss can generate more value than felios's entire kit combined the only reason why aphelios was so oppressive to deal with in the beginning was that he was overtuned not exactly overloaded at the time the general playerbase wasn't aware of what each of his weapons did and they couldn't be bothered to stop and think about it because they were too focused on getting destroyed by him classic instance of sensationalism backed by his high numbers now that his numbers have been tuned down the shock factor has been reduced thus allowing you to rationally examine his abilities in my previous video on him i mentioned that a considerable yet unfair advantage of felios had was his lack of visual clarity unless you were actively paying attention to what weapons he was using and how much ammo was left during the heat of battle you won't be able to ascertain quickly enough which version of his attacks you were going to get hit by that granted ophelious the of surprise as its attacks have multiple layers to them as an example let's say he was armed with calibrum and graviton he manages to tag you with moonshot so he uses the lock on auto attack to hit you with graviton slowing you down he then swaps graviton to his main hand to use binding eclipse and ruchu in place since graviton's ability also has global range if hypothetically he has severum or crest in them as his offhand weapon getting hit by moonshot wouldn't be as deadly but with that specific combination ofelius effectively has a long-range one-second route it's a lot easier to see yasuo with a prime tornado thanks to the shimmering wind around his model but apart from the icons you see next to his health bar trying to figure out which weapons of felios had was difficult this in conjunction with this high base power is what created those montages where he would turbo 1v9 games naturally when a champion is conceptualized with this many moving parts there's bound to be design oversights calibrum's follow-up attack having global range made it way too easy for him to destroy you without even being on your screen in front of splash damage on moonlight visual not having diminishing returns is what caused him to explode entire enemy teams clumped together the fact that all five of his abilities leveled up at level 3 meant he was the equivalent of another champion's level 5 or 7. in other words his mid game was unreasonably strong by the time he was level 9 his basic abilities were all maxed out those oversights were pretty bad and they definitely should have been more prudent and considered the possible edge cases of his vast repertoire that being said it took him a while to get to that point but aphelios is a lot more stable as a result people are starting to pick him up again for much of late season 10 early season 11 players didn't want to use him out of concern for any time invested into him going to waste it almost felt like every month there would be an entire sweep on his abilities fast forward later into summer of 2021 he got just enough correction buffs to where adc main started to feel like they could work on the champion this is a failures version 2 now with 50 less 200 years of collective game design experience with the silver tune kit dialed back significantly players can finally obtain meaningful empirical data on how to play him and play against him at his launch no one had any idea on how to beat him so the very few people who picked him up quickly were able to abuse the crap out of him which is why he looks so terrifying now he's at a point where the average player is able to play around with him his existence has become normalized you know what this reminds me of the garner hype cycle is typically used in cases of technology where some new idea is brought to attention that has the potential to revolutionize humanity quote unquote as we know it and sort of what happened with uh bitcoin and cryptocurrency back in 2017. everyone's all hyped about it and expectations go through the roof before they come crashing down due to losing interest or some pr disaster like a self-driving car running straight off a cliff the general public then completely discards it as too good to be true and then several years later actual progress is made on that technology and finds gradual widespread acceptance the garner hype cycle perfectly illustrates athalios's situation when he first came out there was a firestorm of controversy surrounding his design and balance clips of pro players were decimating entire teams with a single ultimate etc then he was slammed with a cascade of nerfs plummeting him from top tier to bottom tier where he sat in obscurity his presence in pro play and solo queue stayed down for quite a while until he was given a few correction buffs that would bring him in line with other marksmen the chain of events he went through was a doozy to say the least over the past year i have come to view a felios in a different light in all honesty when you really dissect his kit he's not as overloaded as that of akshan viega jonas sumida and such even those different weapons can interact with each other all in different ways there's only so much he can do in one single situation given that he holds only two weapons at a time at a basic level you can understand each one quite well if you see purple you know to be careful about getting rooted if you see blue he has a titanic hydropassive if you see white avoid fighting him up close and kill his turret thingy if you see red lots of lifesteal if you see aqua then dodge a long-range bolt but what about his ultimate wouldn't moonlight visuals still pose a problem in regards to clarity most definitely but the effects of getting hit by it are not as ruinous as they used to be there has to be a balance of clarity and potency the more threatening an attack is the more it should give a warning of some sort for the receiver that's why global ultimates have really long delays or alert the enemy team that danger is imminent comparatively moonlight visual is a strong ability but not something you need to be afraid of in the same way you would fiddle sticks or malphite ultimate the explosion itself does a minuscule amount of damage then a follow-up attack from his main weapon plus an additional effect also while it's very subtle the wave has a different color based on his main weapon it's not moonlight vigil itself that's a problem it's what happens after graviton cannon allows him to root all target's struck for longer infernum as you know that remember is the aoe splash damage one and crescendo gives him a ton of chakras to start a fight regardless of which one your attention should be focused on the felios not the initial blast so to bring it all together here's the timeline ophelious came out with extremely inflated numbers people had no idea what he did the first to learn how he works were able to use him against those who didn't overwhelming them with those inflated numbers and that generated all the controversy surrounding how broken he was wright then imposed seemingly huge nerfs on him which weren't actually all that bad but since no one knew what he did they just saw a whole bunch of texts and thought wow look how many nerfs he's getting that proves he's super overpowered so it was kind of a feedback loop of confirmation bias and by seeing right struggle to figure out where they wanted to put him players were hesitant to try him out further delaying how long it took to figure out how strong he really was this led him to getting over nerfed plunging him into 43 to 45 win rate literally unplayable because he was so weak no one wanted to play him and so we as the league community never had the chance to break him in the same way we did for other champions yes his pick grid was very high for the first eight or so months of his career but there were far more players than 10 feeding than players 1v90 so the only somewhat trustworthy reference material we had on his estimated capability was from high elo solo queue games or pro play games but that's not an accurate representation or sufficient sample size to know what his average power is it wasn't until they brought a little more attention to him by buffing him just a little that he finally found proper footing within the marksman roster we're still in the early stages of that though but now that we have a better grasp on where he stands i think ryan can afford to give him a bit more love from what i can tell his early in mid game still needs some work but apart from that it's nice to finally see him with some semblance of normalcy i was very close to making a wine on plays episode on him but i wanted to wait a little more to see how it panned out and i'm glad i did anyways that's going to be it for today hope you guys enjoyed this little retrospective on him if you did please be sure to leave a like and subscribe consider following me on twitter joining my discord server and if you still have time why not take a look at my rework retrospective series where i discuss champions before and after their rework for now though thank you so much for watching and i'll see you again soon in the next video take care [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: Vars

Views: 158,412

Keywords: league of legends, riot games, league of legends pro guides, league of legends 12.5 changes, league of legends guide, lol aphelios, aphelios montage, aphelios gameplay, aphelios season 12, aphelios buffs, lol discussion, why no one plays aphelios, aphelios, aphelios 200 years, aphelios broken, aphelios pentakill, vars league of legends, what happened to aphelios, aphelios history, aphelios documentary, lol documentary, enemy, msi, arcane, tyler1, kda

Id: QxVH2FwvYPk

Length: 15min 21sec (921 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 18 2022