THE PROBLEM WITH MAGES AND HOW TO FIX THEM (RIOT PLS)

hey everyone Riot has been saying all year that they're taking a look at Majors and trying to increase their satisfaction and in the upcoming patch 13.10 we have a couple changes to rabidon's and last chapter but I don't really think they fix any of the core issues that Mages currently face in this video I'm going to try and explain what I think about Mages currently and how I would go about fixing them so majors are not necessarily weak I think they are strong and competitive and while they are relatively average in solo queue they are also at best a little frustrating and at worst pretty damn unfun currently not all majors are the same either within the Mage class you have a huge variety you know you've got burst Majors like LeBlanc zoo in Vex utility mids something like Ari lissandro more traditional Mages like syndra Victor orianna DPS Majors like Cassiopeia and Swain you could even break it down further and say you know artillery Mages users like support Mages like Karma Etc point being there are a lot of different types so whenever we're discussing Mage changes you have to bear in mind that some of these Champs are actually in pretty good States in solo queue like LeBlanc Ari or Cassiopeia but some of these Champs are a lot worse off so what is the big difference between solo queue and competitive for Majors for me I think there are three differences that are particularly relevant first is just how fed people get in solo queue it's really not uncommon to have some on the opposing team with a nine or maybe even 10 kills and the game isn't really balanced around us some Champs are just really hard to play against when they get that fed unless you have certain defensive items in competitive people naturally don't get as fed as they do in solo queue and so it's much easier to play in a mobile champion and defensive items aren't as required which will be very important for when we talk about atomization the second is damage balance incompetitive you and your teammates will draft together and hopefully make some sort of cohesive comp if you do have a major on your team most likely they will be your solo AP threat which makes it far less likely for the enemy team to itemize lots of magic resist as a result you won't need a void staff as early as you might when you're playing multiple AP threats in solo queue this again will be really really important when we talk about itemization if you do play multiple APS in competitive they might be more utility Champions so they aren't really relying on building full damage anyway examples again being lissandra or Ari so once again void stuff isn't as required and lastly is the pace of the game competitive moves a bit slower there is an increased emphasis on the laning phase since it goes for longer and priority is more important there are also far fewer random skirmishes which benefits Mages as they tend to be pretty strong in the isolated laning phase and because there are less kills the majority of your gold will come from CS instead which once again benefits Mages as they are very good at wave clearing and farming while solo queue still does reward farming you can get a lot more gold from kills and skirmishing in solo queue than you can in competitive knowing the differences then between solo queue and competitive what are the biggest problems facing Mages in solo queue as I kind of hinted at before I think itemization is probably the biggest one so let's take a look at what your kind of typical mage build looks like it's currently going to look something like this you go a Mythic let's say ludens you grab your tier 2 boots from then on you grab a second item of your choice let's just say it's a shadow flame could be a cosmic or something like that after that you will grab rabbitons by the this point you probably do need to void stuff and for your last item you can go to something situational most likely a zombies or something like that now this build is actually fine and I would say that this is like overall like a pretty fine state for Majors to be in if you can build something like this it's perhaps a little low on the AP side like I think 638 total is a bit low obviously I don't have um so you can see my runes here like I wouldn't have Gathering storm stacked up in this situation um I don't have like eyeball um I'd be missing other Buffs from being higher level you know in this case Cinder passage so there's a lot of other modifiers that could make this higher but overall I don't really have a big problem with this build the big problem comes in when you're forced to kind of deviate from this very standard mage build our first deviation that doesn't really feel too good is what if you need to buy a defensive item early so when you're buying defensive items on Majors you can only ever really buy them as your second item or your last item and I'll show you why so pay attention to my AP throughout this if you go for a defensive item third so let's say we go something like Shadow flame and then we go zombies the problem is this delay Lays rabbitons by such a long time and you have so little AP at three items that even if you currently play the game without having lasagnias you're probably better off dying and getting all your cooldowns off by just having more APS so if this for example if this zhonya's in this case were a rabbit on so we go from 288 to 443 and this is not even considering the fact that you might have other multipliers it's just such a DPS loss to go a defensive item anything after the second item because you're just delaying rabbit on some void too much like rabbitons and voids rabbitons especially is just too important so you can go in second you can go zanya's second and then look to go for a rabbit on Third and that's not too bad like obviously you have less damage as a result um but it's not too bad and I think that's like the best way to go with defensive item if you do need one worth noting though is that again at the second item Spike there is a pretty big difference like if you have a shadow flame like lose in Shadow flame compared to lewd and zanyas like the lewd and Shadow flame does a lot more damage and that is actually pretty important because in solo queue if you can get like more kills in snowball further then it's easier to keep getting items right but a lot of the time if you go something like lewd and Sonia's you can actually get stuck on those items for a pretty long time especially if you are building a defensive item like rabbitons and so you might instead go for something a little cheaper you know maybe if you did go for something um like the shadow flame but the problem is again you just have so little damage so you can kind of see already that if we are forced into buying a defensive item early you basically can only ever buy a second like you really don't have a choice and if you do buy it third you're like you deal no damage and even when you buy it second is such a significant DPS loss that it often feels like it's not really viable to buy a defensive item like you're really only buying it because you literally can't play the game without it rather than like it's good for the for the game itself and I think the reason that feels like more problematic on Mages compared to other Champs is it feels like it's not a choice that some of the other classes make like you often see uh similar like bruises for example going something like sunderer Cleaver and then they can build like whatever they want after that like they basically have all the damage they need at those two items and then can just itemize whatever they want um it's kind of the same with tanks where uh once again they kind of get um pretty much like their tank items and can itemize purely situationally like don't need to worry about booting towards specific items even 80 carries now obviously it's like a bit different but 80 carries get their core on two items as well they can go uh you know you go Mythic and then I you on a worry and you've got all the damage and while you can't build defensive items so to speak after that you can still build somewhat situationally whereas it feels like for Majors you want not reaching your core until like three items maybe even four if you include a rabbitons so it's much harder to build situationally another deviation from the standard build that can happen is if the enemy team buys a lot of magic resist in the early game you're probably forced to go for a void stuff and this is very very common if you're playing multiple AP Champs on a team as we kind of talked about before because magic resist items are very strong and they're very accessible you can get Merck shreds and hex Drinker really really easily so what are your options when you come up against a lot of magic resist well you can kind of continue with your normal build so let's say that you went for a second item something like a shadow Flame or something like that you can go for a void third and you should go for a void third but it still feels very bad because you end up again with such a small amount of AP and a delaysia rabbitons all the way to Fourth item and a lot of solicit games don't even go all the way to four items so like these are gonna be your Three core items for the game and you're going to be selling less than 300 AP for the majority of it now your other option is if you realize that they're going to build Mr really early because either you've got lots of AP on your team or they're already showing Mr items you can look to go for a void stuff second into a rabidon's third once again add two items you you have like a bare amount of damage in terms of pen but again in raw AP you don't have a whole lot and while you can go rabbit on Stern which gets you up to a nice amount of AP the problem with this again is that you essentially are just full damage like you have no ability Haze other than like what your Mythic and runes are providing you you have no form of other defensive or HP like in order to do damage you've had to itemize full glass Cannon which again I think feels bad because I don't think that's a decision that other classes really make to be clear on that I think that while there should be a difference between you know naturally something that builds um full damage should deal more than someone who builds like defensive items like I'm not saying that by building zhonyas you should be doing the same damage what I am saying is that the difference between building a defensive item and building full damage is too large I think you almost don't deal damage if you build defensive items and you only deal damage by building damage items and it feels like a lot of the other classes can build you know tankier like something like sunroof Cleaver and still do very competitive damage and I guess to kind of summarize like both of these situations of either buying a defensive item second or buying avoid stuff second they don't occur as often in competitive books like I said before typically you're playing a solo at threat so you don't really need the void staff or the enemy team just isn't as fed or you've got like peeling tools and stuff so you don't need those defensive items as much as you do in solo queue one question you might have is why can't you go rabbit on second and the answer is that you can sometimes but it's just you can't all the time so the thing with buying rabbit on second is that it's somewhat reliant on having extra AP from other sources so an example being like if you have a dark seal or a magi's if you have stacked eyeball collection if you have absolute Focus Gathering storm you know some other way to kind of make it more efficient you can go for rabbit on second it's also pretty awkward to kind of build towards this like it's very expensive and just basing with a full 1250 gold on every base is quite difficult so while you can go for rabbit on second it's kind of reliant on being at least a little ahead in the game so that you can consistently you know itemize towards these and that you do have AP from other sources whether that's you know from your runes again kind of like a full AP setup here um or from having you know fully stacked Magis or something maybe I'll show some examples of games where I have done that so the answer is like you can sometimes and then you could go something like a zhonya's third or you could do something like avoid stuff there but it's just more difficult to go rabbit on second than other items what then are our solutions to these issues I think you could fix defensive itemization and open up room for more situational items in couple different ways you could just remove rabbitons completely and spread out the power to all the other items so for example making Shadow Flame or something like 130 or 140 AP it possibly comes with the issue of individual AP items maybe being too strong I think there are solutions to that too though like you could have some sort of set bonus effect where shatter flame for example is worth 100 AP when you buy it but once you have like two AP items that gives you 120 once you have three it gives you 140 or some sort of something like that just something to make it so you have more AP without having rabbitons overall I think some sort of change like that would make defensive items not so painful to buy and broaden the amount of items that are actually Available to You alternatively if you didn't want to remove rabbitons and spread the power out you could just make rabbitons a really strong second item like how IE and novori work as like a linchpin of the crypt builds it might make itemization a little boring but it would provide a really consistent path to making sure Majors have consistent access to damage and can then build situationally from there to fix the Mr stacking or void stuff problem there's several Solutions you could just buff void stuff a lot by increasing the AP which I think is more of a Band-Aid solution but it would probably work I'd like to see something like splitting void into several different items maybe two or three I think you can make one for burst Mages that kind of just need to kill a squishy that has their mind maybe one for kind of like the Mages that need to deal with the tanks that have a lot of HP and Mr you know something that maybe shreds magic resist like percent wise or something like that the alternative approach is just to Nerf magic resist which seems to be the approach riots taking in 13.10 personally I think it's better to reduce the accessibility of Mr as opposed to actually reducing the values because I think that if someone buys Mr you don't want it to feel like buying Mr is actually useless right like it just doesn't do anything I think more the issue is just how much sort of like ambient Mr is in the game like for example people will buy um like a Merc Treads or a hex Drinker and you don't really need to invest like a lot into that but you still have enough Mr that it sort of warrants going avoid stuff so I think maybe hitting that sort of accessibility you know maybe making it so mercs are just bought for the tenacity as opposed to the magic resist which I kind of already are but the fact they give 25 Mr on top of it is really annoying and making hex Drinker like not as strong a component or something I think that would be better than outright nerfing I guess like force of nature like the nerfing in 13.10 does need to change but I think the accessibility should be more the target as opposed to the raw Mr value a smaller problem I have with Mages is the laning phase so as I said before in competitive 1v1 laning tends to be more important and most traditional majors are quite good at the isolated 1v1 Lane but they don't want to Skirmish too much in the current meta early game is really important however it's more about early skirmishing and priority usage as opposed to 1v1 laning in competitive skirmishing is still of course important but it's often decided by who gets priority over the lane which is determined by obviously Landing strength most of the player and the champion but you also have to factor in junglers you know gang setups supports Vision Etc at the moment in both competitive and in solo queue you can get away with playing some of the weaker laning champion ends or neutralizes like lissandra orari because you can't put them far enough behind to stop them from just playing for the 2v2 or playing towards other land riots seem to be looking at this with the upcoming minion changes which I think should make laning a bit more important since roaming seems like it's not as easy Honestly though not a huge fan of the change because I think it will make the game a bit more boring overall but I do like the thought of trying to promote the 1v1 action a bit more for me the biggest problem with laning and holding back the 1v1 is actually teleport because teleport just makes the laning phase far too forgiving when you think about it teleport gives you a second health bar and it amplifies any existing sustain you have for example a corrupting pot you can just buy corrupting you go back you get a second health bar and you refill all your corrupting Parts even with the sustained Nerfs you can make a lot of mistakes in the landing phase and still be fine just because of the sheer amount of Health that you have and even if you do die a lot of time your first death is not too bad because again you can base TP and get back to the way TP also reduces the snowball potential for both players in a kind of prisoners dilemma concept essentially mid lane would prefer to take a combat summer like ghost ignite or exhaust but you kind of can't because playing it to someone with TP if you don't have TP almost guarantees you lose Lane as a result both mid laners are forced to go TP and it means it's much harder to kill one another and you both have so much extra HP that you just can't really poke each other out you can sometimes get away with combat sums in solitude because people don't know what they're doing but that's the main reason why every mid and competitive has to take TP so what are some possible solutions to that I've thought about this quite a bit actually I think one solution is to make it so you just can't use teleport before six minutes it would mean that if you do get chunked out or lose really hard early on that that first base would be much more punishing alternatively I think removing TP is a sum completely and making it into an item that people can buy come mid game as like a boot enchantment or something could be really interesting both would require some Champs to be rebalanced of course like a champ like akali wouldn't be able to Lane mid without TP I think it is easier to rebalance Champs though with health regen and sustain in their early game without having to worry about balancing also for their second health bar it would be a pretty big undertaking honestly but I think it would make the game much more exciting if mid and top laners were able to take combat sums like ignite again and you'd probably see a lot more action in the laning phase in competitive as well with that all being said and in conclusion I am not a game designer and while I've proposed some solutions I'm sure there are problems with these and right could probably do better than me to reiterate I think the biggest problems with Mages at the moment are the itemization feels like it lacks choice and is too reliant on rabadons I think buying void and defensive items is often necessary but feels like it really destroys your damage output finally I think the laning phase is far too forgiving in the 1v1 and I think that's something that makes the game not as fun to play or to watch and it hurts Mages as well if you guys have any solutions to these problems feel free to share them in the comments and I'm looking forward to seeing what you guys think

Channel: Shok

Views: 10,126

Keywords: Shok, ShokLoL, Rank 1, Challenger, OCE, NA, Professor, Mid, Midlane, Pro, Mages season 13, 13.10 mages, 13.10 mage changes, Riot fix mages, Plz riot stop reading my tags and fix mages, Employ me I will fix mages, The rift is under construction, Walls around mid lane (junglers removed), Mage itemization LoL, mage itemization season 13, Teleport is OP AS FUCK

Id: 07A5HJbc7Tg

Length: 15min 58sec (958 seconds)

Published: Thu May 11 2023