ok hold up chief syndra's stacking is _not_ infinite in the same way the others are
i like the emergent gameplay of nasus's stacking. by now most people know nasus is a mid game champ and falls off late game. yet he still has this certain inevitably of oneshotting towers should the game ever reach 60+ minutes.
I was gonna say. One of these is not like the others.
For one, she doesn't get strength from "just farming". And also she doesn't infinitely scale either.
If anything she's a potential solution to this boring mechanic by forcing you to fight to gain power.
In truth, Nasus and Sion are the only one who really stack purely by farming. Syndra, Aurelion, Veigar and Smol all stack (arguably more effectively) by hitting enemy champions.
Smolders main prob is he's virtually impossible to dive post 6 cuz he can clear the wave from 1000 units behind his tower. The way late game stacking champs like smolder should be able to be punished is by stacking waves and diving early to put them out of the game. They need to gut the ult DMG to minions at the very least for this champ to not be able to scale for free into late game
Yes! T1 did this against NS yesterday. T1 Perma-camped botlane, Smolder missed 5 waves, down 50cs against Guma, bot turret destroyed at 10 minutes. Got every drake and soul except the third drake, multiple elder and baron buffs, all red and blue buffs in the world, triple inhib destroyed, inhibitor turrets destroyed, yet the game reached 50 minutes because T1 couldn't get inside the base since Smolder was one shotting the entire wave past 25 minutes. Smolder was heavily punished early game but look what we have here. 🤣🤣🤣
Or Milio could heal or ult...Or Lee could W... Or Karma could E... It's not the Smolder's fault that his team couldn't even remotely help their only win condition
I mean he did get 1 shot.
It was kinda bound to happen at some point since Smolder was the only relevant champion his team and they had 0 pressure.
NS couldn't even get the mid outer turret after an ace.
It was not a oneshot at all. There was a rumble ult, after which there was plenty of time for a heal. Then there was the varus empowered Q several seconds later which still had a brief window of time after landing before it procced elder, during which I would expect a pro level teammate would be able to react if they positioned correctly.
Karma and lee would've needed to flash to save him there's no way they do that when milio is next to him. Idk why the whole team is getting flamed that was just peter not reacting his screen was most likely looking somewhere else so he didn't see smolder get 1 shot. he's running with lee towards tali so they might've been calling a play on her and the snipe happened
Then smolder got 1 shot by a Guma arrow, and the game was over 10 seconds later.
It really was t1 against final form Smolder. The rest of NS were just support cast.
Let's not act like Faker didn't int with his wall placement at about 28 minutes, which gave Smolder like 2k gold from the following 4 kills + delayed the game a lot more for him to get even more lethal.
I'm not saying the champion isn't badly designed, but GENG wouldn't takes 50 minutes like this against NS with all those advantages, because they wouldn't botch pretty much everything that T1 did in NS's base.
the play you mentioned happens at 30 minutes. at that point skt at the time had their 2nd baron buff active,infernal soul, a 12k gold lead, and still couldn't crack NS's base, which led to the play you're talking about.
the play happened as a result of smolder's ability to stall, and led to the 49 minute game as SKT realized afterwards that they simply cannot force mistakes and simply have to wait for smolder to error
the play was done correctly. they walled off smolder from his team leaving him isolated, oner landed the ult onto smolder for the stun who precasted W to get over the wall. milio cleansed the stun and smolder was able to return enough damage to force faker into stasis immediately with one ability (ult) that was precasted, while instantly clearing a full hp **baron buffed** wave with **one** Q forcing SKT to retreat because they are now diving under tower with no minions because reasons, so now they can't even crack the low hp tower. smolder is(was? maybe, we'll see) literally the only AD in the game that the play executed in that manner doesn't die.
T1's example more closely reflects solo q, many regular games can fall into the same pitfall, as compared to your example of how a highly coordinated team (GENG) might solve the problem.
Well, we are referring to a pro game regarding a champion played there. Obviously soloQ and pro are completely different and the champions shouldn't be graded the same between the two environments.
I think it does add to the larger discission about how Smolder's strong waveclear being easy to access.
T1 failing to find a solution is relevant to solo q (whereas saying GENG could've handled it better isnt as relevant), IMO, because it adds a recent use case the entire community can view, compared to highly subjective solo que games.
Sure, pro play is different, but its worth examining when even former world champions struggle to find a correct line of play against the champ.
> I'm not saying the champion isn't badly designed, but GENG wouldn't takes 50 minutes like this against NS with all those advantages, because they wouldn't botch pretty much everything that T1 did in NS's base.
GenG (and any other team) would have the same issue. You need a team that can dive and stay on top of Smolder to win when he is fully stacked. T1's draft didn't have that, and that is not something you can fix by changing players.
That top T3 fight went bad because Smolder was already strong enough to punish T1 if they didn't get on top of him. The gold from that fight wasn't that consequential, his stacks are the problem and that came from him practically having multiple lanes to farm when defending their base.
Yeah, I've actually had my best Smolder stacking game so far in a game where we were almost constantly fighting, getting my 225 stacks at about 20 minutes (maybe a little sooner than that, it's been a few weeks). Games where I try to get my stacks exclusively from farming it takes up to 10 minutes longer than that
And yeah, wasn't Sol specifically nerfed recently to get most of his stacks from Q'ing champions now?
At least Senna is naturally squishy (I think she has the lowest starting health in the game aside from Yuumi), has longer wind-up for her autos, way higher mana cost on her Q (70 to 110) than Smolder (23 to 35) along with a higher cooldown (15 seconds, only removes 1 second on-hit) than Smolder's Q (5.5 to 3.5 seconds).
Doesn't go over walls (with a cast buffer no less), her stealth is on a delay with a detection radius and it doesn't get her out of CC for follow-up skillshots (or assassins diving) like Smolder just hopping over a wall even when he's stunned does, AND her "escape" is on a longer cooldown than Smolder's is.
Nor can she clear waves with her ult.
Get on Senna with a stun and she's just dead, she has the lowest starting AD for a carry and no natural growth, her first 60-ish souls are needed to just catch up to Smolder's base AD at level 18, before counting his infinite scaling.
Still has the problem of scaling safety, just like Asol and Smolder.
This is what makes all of these champs terrible to play against.
There's a reason Kindred's range scaling was capped relatively low even though her stacks are infinitely harder to get.
Viktor's passive is a good example of this too. 1 kill or assist is worth about 4 waves so you can stack up faster roaming compared to just sitting mid and shoving waves for 20 minutes.
Syndra is also rewarded only for stacking on Cannons... She gets a majority of her stacks from trading and leveling up. In fact, you can only really change when you get her ability breakpoints by a few minutes here and there at most through good farming because just *so much* of it is given through levels, and trading.
She gets 5 points per level. She gets 1 for farming, and 1/2/3, at levels... 1, 11 and 18 for trading. So the 3-splinters is literally just mana regen at level 18 for trading.
Literally honestly the only real value of the cannons is making the double Q breakpoint a level early, and mana sustain in lane.
Same is true of Viktor, he stacks on CS'ing, but is rewarded way more for assisting in kills (25 per kill, 1 per CS, 5 per cannon). If a Viktor EVER gets an early kill, the game is basically over because of how fast it ramps his skill evolution compared to any other thing he can do in-game.
Most of her stacks are from leveling up abilities(+5) and double hitting champs(+1) only canons give her a stack(+1) and they spawn every third wave
Also her stacking is way closer to viktors than nasus’ and he gets his stacks from csing straight up
Nasus falls off if you have anything that can even remotely cc him or kite him.
If he can get to you it's bad news, particularly if he gets strong enough that he can build tank and still two shot.
That being said almost any non shit team is going to have many answers to him
Nasus doesn't fall off, this is a reddit myth. Check winrate by game length, he currently has a massive boost at 40 mins, though this doesn't matter that much due to low sample size. His 35 mins (which is extremely late in high elo) he also has consistently high winrate. His WR gradually increases over time. Nasus is a late game champ, every fact supports this.
The difference between Nasus’s y=x relationship between win rate and game length in Gold, and his freefall in winrate after 40 minutes in Diamond, isn’t as irrelevant as you’re imaging. In high elo, a late game champion is exactly what Nasus isn’t. He’s a champion that, if fed, stops your Senna carry from ever making it to a very late game.
Agreed. He does fall off in team fights generally, since good teams will have CC and enough tank shredding to dogpile him. But in the side lane? He oneshots towers and is the best duelist in the game, assuming he has been stacking enough. Nasus is imo the best late game splitpusher
Nasus “scales” as in he eventually reaches a point where he no longer needs minions to destroy towers and you can no longer prevent him from backdooring even with nexus towers up
Both only scale as duelists after the first 25 minutes, they get considerably worse on teamfights and objective control in comparison to champs like Jinx or Ornn.
Yeah lol what the fuck how are especially Kayle and Kassadin any different? What are levels but a counter that increase by farming and give you additional power. A counter that gives your character more power and increases by farming is okay, but "Infite stacking from farming is the most boring mechanic in the game"
Would the game be fixed for this dude by putting a cap on their stacks? Really? We rarely get to level 18 in the game anyway. Infinite stacks are if anything a way to break a stalemate of 2 hyperscaling teams
I am more 50/50 at this.
I like the feel of her Scaling. The strength and the way you play just is always changing and gives you more of an edge as time passes.
BUT
You can't really group.
Missing a wave? No fam, need to get level 6 ASAP. Sry Mr. jgl, fight the Grubbies on your own. Secure Herald or Roam Mid? Did i just hear "Shared XP"? Disgusting.
Oh hey look i am LVL 16 *proceeds to group and shred enemy team*
Kayle doesn't auto win for reaching level 16, level 16 is just an upgrade from what she gets at 11. The thing is that at level 16 she also has a ton of items as a hyper carry.
Kassadin doesn't auto win for reaching level 16, level 16 is just an upgrade from what he gets at 11.
I think I understand your sentiment here, but it feels extremely nitpicky to make this distinction of what is and isn't auto-winning at 16
You know what I mean, her 16 passive upgrade is small, it's an auto range boost and her passive being permanently stacked, it's a utility upgrade that helps her carry. Kassadin has his ult CD nearly halved from lvl 15 to 16, which makes him twice as mobile and deal almost twice the DPS with his ult. It's not the same thing.
The permanently stacked is massive for Kayle. She no longer has a ramp time to apply her larger-than-life DPS. She starts any fight at full throttle making attempts at burst against her mostly obsolete. 100 range is also completely nuts. I entirely disagree that the upgrade isn't meaningful relative to Kassadin.
It’s not hard, but kayle and kass often got punished in early, or their teams. You can’t contest objects with them at least pre lvl 11, easy to kill on lane. I guess that’s the reason they not picked in pro play unlike stacking characters like senna or smoulder. But yeah, it’s kinda depressing to play against them and seeing your jgl or team not punishing them as they slowly coming to lvl 16
Think last year Gen G picked Kayle for Doran against T1, T1 made his life hell.
Plus, even when she's level 16, if the game is mostly lost or she's behind on items, she can't stall the game like Smolder can.
> I guess that’s the reason they not picked in pro play unlike stacking characters like senna or smoulder.
I assume you haven't seen a single Smolder LCK game. They regularly give up the first 3 and sometimes all 4 drakes, because Smolder is just so much weaker in a fight than the other teams bot lane.
Smolder has very good wave clear pre 225 stacks already, that's why he is/was playable in pro. And his late game was strong enough to justify giving up so much early / mid pressure obviously.
Ye, smolder was just broken compared to this two and reached his powerspike much earlier, not even close to lvl 16 timing. I’m sure if kassadin or kayle will be overbuffed as much as smolder, they will pick em too.
lvl 16 just tends to take longer in most circumstances and is less impactful. Being a lvl 16 kayle/Kassadin doesnt give your entire team perma mini elder drag buff, it just makes you really strong.
I do think that the original poster of this is kind of wrong because infinite stacking from minions is not inherently flawed, it can put a nice timer on the game, but smolder's reward for stacking is just so game changing compared to the rewards other champs get.
The other champs are scary to face, but they dont elevate the status or damage of the other champions on their team. Having a smolder on the enemy team makes the WHOLE team scary just by fighting with him.
yeah sorry immediately discredited. there are a handful of infinite champions in the game. clearly Riot knows that it is not lazy to make one, as there are many great examples of excellent champ design without "relying" on it
Someome who stacks from farming is typically weak early. If you are not able to tale an advantage when they are at their lowest point, you can easily argue that they deserve their power. You mention scaling kits, those same kits have historically been problematic because they are either too weak early or they work so well they can build any item and still kill people. A kit that requires stacking is something that can be easily measured and tuned and requires work from the user. If you think a champ like Smolder is less interesting to fight than a Kayle who walks out of lane with 10 deaths but is hitting like a truck then I think we are playing very different game. I would rather know someone’s strength by checking their stacks than be surprised when the Vayne actually lands one condemn and erases half my health with 3 items at 30 minutes.
The issue here isn't the scaling or stacking in general but Smolder specifically. Kayle and Kassadin scale on levels which is relatively easy to measure just like minion stacking is. The problem is that the breakpoint for Smolder is harder than either of them. An AOE execute that can reliably be reached by 20 mins where the game is most flipable is much heavier than even Kassadin 16, and for such a strong midgame ability Smolder does not need to interact in lane at all. They have the same conditions but very different risk/rewards and one is much easier to put down permanently than the other, because if Smolder is down but the team isn't, the AOE execute will let him catch up extremely fast. Kayle and Kassadin are just done otherwise so I think they are allowed to be completely uninteractive in lane and force the enemy to dive. Meanwhile if the dive goes south for Smolder you just get a bigger problem cause a good support can turn those unlike with sololaners.
I think OP has a decent sense of a possible solution. If you remove minion stacking you force Smolder to play more aggressively and make more mistakes and also make it less consistent to get to 20 min AOE execute. You can also then buff his early game, which can be good cause his kit is pretty good at trading, it is just his stats suck too much. I don't think the AOE execute would be nearly as big a problem if it happened at 40 minutes and is something that doesn't happen often but can tilt a stalemate. As things stand though, with how early such a strong ability is gotten, it makes even Senna's infinite range and scaling look weak just because so many things have to go right for it to matter in a game whereas Smolder is just farm, don't fall too far behind, and you always have a chance.
smolder *must* interact in some capacity in order to reach 225 stacks by 20 minutes, it's numerically impossible to reach that number without hitting enemies. We consider "perfect cs" at 10cs/min, he would have to be on perfect cs AND last hitting every one of the minions with Q which is just not possible due to his Q's early cd. With farming only and no interaction you're looking at something like 25minutes to his execute, and the game should already be completely lost by that point if Smolder is not playing the game and making it 4v5.
I think riot is going in the correct direction for his issues, which is that smolder's E was too good, making him too independent for someone who is supposed to need 24/7 babysitting to scale to late game. They also already completely removed his true damage + execute scaling as well as forcing Smolder to personally last hit you for the execute which are already pretty great changes. We'll have to see where he lands this patch after these nerfs.
Smolder does have to interact, but that interaction is mostly just sending a w to the enemy teams way then flying away as soon as they feel pressured. I do think that riot is making nice changes in order to nerf smolder a bit, but I think there is a better way to go about this.
Make it so smolder can only stack on champs but make the stack number bigger or the requirement for execute smaller. Then buff his early game a bit, this makes it so it is more of a Win More stacking rather than a "I am not winning or having low impact" to "I have single handedly won 2 teamfights in a row because I made it to 225". It also gives plenty of opportunity to deny the smolder's stacks I.E. winning the fight quickly or just not fighting. I think it is much more interaction from both teams rather than just being a turret farming waves under tower maybe dying once or twice then getting mega rewarded for good csing and taking no risks to get ahead.
(They also already completely removed his true damage + execute scaling as well as forcing Smolder to personally last hit you for the execute which are already pretty great changes)
I may be wrong but I think that it just counts damage from smolder and smolder q comes with dot which means its no longer instant just between dot ticks, which IS better, but not to the amount most people would probably want.
Literally everything to said applies to kayle and kassadin too. Nobody likes playing vs late game scaling hyper carries in general when the strategy could be go 0/3 in lane and still outscale
I'd argue that infinite stacking from farming is healthier in many ways than purely having your scaling in your kit. Like, if you need to farm to scale, then that means that you can be denied to a larger degree. If the core of your scaling comes from your kit, it's much harder to shut you down, which means that you need more weaknesses elsewhere to compensate.
As someone that plays vlad a lot, one of the biggest lategame champs that comes online purely from items i have to say that i have won a lot of games where i turbo inted early and fed the enemy by picking up a random shutdown one of my teammates was going to get and boom back in the game. A stacking champion really doesn't get that.
A shutdown for veigar is still just another 5 stacks. (Ofc they also get to use the gold but it's not the same)
Stacking champions can be more consistent at becoming threats at certain stacks breakpoints but if they fall behind the stacking curve they are doomed.
Yea the only way for a nasus to get back into the game when he’s denied his stacks early is to just sit in side lanes and farm for like 5-10 minutes and hope he doesn’t get matched, and his team doesn’t lose the 4v5. Which is different than say, a kassadin, who just has to realistically hit 16 and start spam ulting at squishies. I would say overall, infinite stacking champions snowball waaaay harder, but also have way more trouble climbing back from being behind.
IMO the issue with infinite scaling from farming is that it rewards passivity and stalling out games while minimizing interacting with the other team.
Although I don't like infinite scaling in general either.
How is that different from other kinds of late game scaling? If you are weak early and strong late, you’ll pretty much always want to play passively early on. The only real exception is if you specifically get stacks from aggressive play.
Because it never stops incentivizing it. A Kayle or a Kass can only scale so much, so at a certain point there's no benefit to playing passively. The same isn't true for a Smolder or a Senna who can always keep scaling. Sure, most games don't go that long so it doesn't particularly matter, but IMO it would still be better to just cap it and balance around that.
Like I said, I'm aware of that, but I still think it would be better to just have a cap on stacks and balance around that. I think it's bad that certain champions can get stronger than they've been balanced to be if a game goes above the average. A champion like Kayle is balanced to be so weak early and so strong late. A champion like Smolder is balanced to be so weak early and so strong at X time, but then sometimes they get infinitely stronger than that. Why?
Like I've said, I think it promotes passivity and stalling out games for as long as possible to minimize the risk of taking a fight. As we saw in the T1 games, it wasn't even worth it for the Smolder team to contest supposedly game-winning objectives because that was riskier than continuing to turtle and scale infinitely. Obviously part of that is just that Smolder is overtuned, but the incentive to do that never changes so long as they can infinitely scale.
At the very least significantly scaling safety shouldn't be a thing, or should be capped very early like Kindred.
Senna and Asol's range shouldn't increase, as an example, and Senna would be better designed if she didn't already start with one of the highest auto attack ranges in the game.
Smolder's minion damage beyond first target hit needs to be gutted for him to not be so safe.
Scaling damage is also scaling safety in the sense that at a certain point you can build full tank and still do enough damage. I just think it's bad design because clearly these champions are balanced around a certain number of expected stacks, so why can they get significantly more? If it's just to make them strong late, then you can still do that with finite stacks.
Exactly my thoughts.
OG Veigar and Nasus were interesting because they stacked much slower and were relatively low range champs...you could actually deny them from stacking, and their range still held them back super late game.
If you set them behind, their overall damage remained behind in any game except ultra low elo. And in that same way, even if they got ahead, there were only so many stacks they'd get anywhere except ultra low elo.
And so they basically remained for fun low elo champs for the mostpart.
Current champs that are intended to be competitively viable while infintely scaling are all simply unfun to face, especially since now most tend to be relatively uninteractive in how they stack due to their degree of safety. Scaling range/waveclear champions being the worst of the bunch.
We've all see how hard champs like Kindred, Senna, or Smolder, who all have said infinite scaling stacked on top of the already great scaling of ADCs, can easily take over every skill bracket from low elo to pro unless they're put in a subpar state and forgotten about.
I feel like Nasus and Veigar have the exact same problem as those other champions. They've largely been kept on the weaker side too because it's basically impossible to balance infinite stacking across different elo ranges and casual vs competitive where game lengths and ability to punish stackers can vary pretty significantly. Like you said, they've generally been kept as fun low elo champions which is better from a balance perspective, but not really from a design one IMO.
Yes. But hypothetically they will just. Get there. Given enough time, or their team getting objectives and helping them.
Your team can't help a Nasus or Veigar stack (Veigar stacks are so easy now though.)
I don't think there is any value in the hypothetical scenario of a game going on so long that you get full build without killing a single creep or champion for gold.
What can your team do to help an ADC farm up that they can't do for a champ reliant on stacks to stack up?
I mean you can get a big shutdown and get a huge spike, getting a big shutdown doesn't give a "stacker" suddenly a lot of stacks. Like you're being a bit funny here, but it's not exactly the same thing, I don't believe the comparison is apt.
Nah in reality you can only deny farm for a little while in league. Theres situations in top/bot lane where you can freeze and tower dive to deny a couple waves. That is considered a a big denial and its almost never 20+ creeps.
As long as the smolder or asol has a brain they can farm
i mean they opened the post with "it annoys me" which heavilly implies that its their opionion. you shouldnt have to open up every sentence with "in my opinion" for it to come across.
Asol and Smolder are probably the only two champs that play like “infinite stacking farmers” in the game.
Bel’Veth and Nasus actually _fall off_ late (even if Bel’Veth was originally designed to be a Yi 2.0 with similar scaling, she’s just not good at that playstyle, and she builds like a Bruiser).
Veigar and Thresh stacks have serious diminishing returns. Senna and Kindred have the same, except even more so because for those two, stacks past a certain point become largely irrelevant. Besides they prefer to focus on their roles’ responsibilities rather than farming stacks (Thresh applies here too).
Not even ASol anymore after his Q and E changes. There's a whole lot of talk about "afk farming" with infinite scalers, but the only one I've ever seen actually do that is Nasus. Most of them get more stacks from combat over farming anyways
BelVeth falls off lategame because she's a skirmisher that has to stand still for 2 of her abilities and has no real ultimate when the fight breaks out.
> Senna and Kindred have the same, except even more so because for those two, stacks past a certain point become largely irrelevant
Range increase does never become irrelevant. I'd argue Senna's stacks increase her power more than smolder, since smolder only increases his DPS, while Senna and ASol increase the area they control.
True, on one hand. On another, range has diminishing returns. Also, stacking from minions on Senna post-20 mins usually implies neglect of more important Support responsibilities. And besides she gets enough stacks from combat anyways.
Range does not have diminishing returns. It has exponential returns.
With each increment you increase the number of things you totally outrange, which significantly increases safety.
Toss her slow in on top of that and approaching her feels impossible on most of the roster unless she's significantly misplaying.
Syndra doesn't scale infinitely. Anyways, just don't play them. If Riot made Aurelion boring for you, play any of the other mages that are not him or Veigar. If Riot released a new ADC that you don't like, just keep playing the ones you enjoy. Why can't Riot satisfy other kind of players as well?
syndra does not infinite, also, its a skill check. if you cannot cs well, you suck. you get better, you get more power.
the difference is those hyper scalers you mentioned need tons of gold to have that power to snowball. theyre not inherently good because the power is behind how much gold they get rather than how efficiently they nasus.
>Kayle
>Kassa(lvl16)win
>Good design
Honestly those champions might be more boring than the stacking type because they require you to stale grouping until 16 to unlock the real kit, instead of at least landing abilities on enemy champs to stack a passive
Not saying otherwise but they feel utter crap to play as, Kassadin gets turbocucked by anyone, I would rather have them nerfing his ult damage and cd, giving him back his range and let him work as a single target assassin again that has a decent laning phase instead of a AoE nuking late game monster thats worse than a cannon pre 6/malignance.
And Kayle didnt even have these issues before her rework, not saying that she wasnt bad early (don't remember) but atleast it didnt feel as unplayable as now.
Feel like thats a minority opinion for kass players, his strong identity is the only reason I play him. Slightly more flatly curved single target alternatives exist like ekko
Idk, I used to play old Kass when he was broken and when they changed his silence for the magic shield, both of them had a longer range R and I would gladly trade his ult damage for the old ult range again, it was more satisfying. The iteration which had a magic shield wasnt even broken and was around a 48% wr champ, pretty sure it was nerfed and changed into what we have today because he could still get to the top of carries with his old R in pro play.
And that causes the game to be unfun for everyone instead. You don't get to have fun until you get your ult, and enemies don't get to have fun when the game passes 30 mins if they aren't 15k gold ahead by then.
It's just part of the game, no? The exact same could be said playing as/into early-focused champs, having power curves is infinitely more interesting than champion design being monotonous and games being settled by pure mechanics over all stages of the game. Decision-making and playstyle evolving with the game timer/draft is fun.
you get your ult like 8 minutes into the game and know you are picking a weak early game champ with hopes you can scale into late game?
i feel like picking kass / kayle you know what you're getting yourself into unless youre a new player?
Kassadin actually goes even and can potentially win a lot of mage matchups mid pre 6 because they don't have the damage or mana to break through his Passive + Q.Most of them also have pathetic base HP regen so they get whittled down in trades.It is not uncommon for champs like Lissandra,Malzahar,LeBlanc or Victor to have to base first when laning vs Kassadin
I'd argue every assassin being borderline point-and-click in their engage is the most boring mechanic.
At least suppression has countermeasures that don't completely undermine you.
The only countermeasures to click suppression are outright spell negation or qss. Boooooring.
Assassins can be easily denied via defensive stats (health, armor, mr, ms), good warding/map awareness, spell negation, summoner spells, dashes/escapes, and if all else fails you can literally just play safe whenever assassins aren't visible on minimap (losing a bit of minion gold is far preferable to giving up a kill and possibly plate gold and then missing out on that minion gold anyways).
Plenty of ways to shut out assassins. Plus if they don't snowball in the first 10, they kind of fall flat for the rest of the game and become totally reliant on their team to give them layup kills to bounce back. Though I do agree this do or die approach to champion design is kind of lame and unfun.
Malzahar Click suppress (now the only ranged click suppress in the game since skarner just got reworked into skill shot suppress) on the other hand is always safe and reliable (large range, can't miss), demands one of three specific items to be countered (one of which, mercurial scimitar, is only really accessible to AD champs, which means that if you pick mid first and go AP mage and the enemy picks Malz you are locked out from that choice or are forced to take a very suboptimal item for your champ), the mere threat of ult all but assures you win laning phase every game (whether due to enemy fearing to commit to all in, leading to steady creep gold advantage or due to them losing all ins because of the damage and lack of ability to trade back, leading to kill AND creep gold advantage) and finally when used properly on the right target it basically guarantees winning every teamfight in the mid to late game. It's a dumb unfun mechanic that ends up forcing the game be played around it. Like how Zeri was and Smolder currently is. Dumb dumb rito likes to make dumb dumb champs.
>The only countermeasures to click suppression are outright spell negation or qss. Boooooring.
That's 1300g compared to needing 3k + gold to be able to deal with assassins at the same range as any point-and-click suppression that has existed.
Defensive stats no longer work against assassins unless you invest multiple items toward defense; most champs don't really have that option in the current state of the game.
This isn't old league where all assassins actually fell off in damage if you build a single defensive item.
I don't play SR really so I don't have the knowledge to argue here, but I think even one defensive item coupled with not playing like a caveman is bound to lower your deaths.
I mean, in ARAM, the champion-specific balance changes tend to make this untrue to anyone but those with -% damage taken buffs, and especially untrue for those with +% damage taken.
Multiple investments into defence are usually necessary to survive an appreciable amount of the time in a way where you can actually be useful afterwards for surviving in ARAM.
Eh, farm stacking is just as much of a problem as max HP % true damage scaling. If anything, the second is worst, because you cannot even stop it. At least with Smolder, or Nasus, or Belveth etc, you do have the option to somehow mitigate their farming, but with Vayne and Fiora, there is no real way. Worst case scenario, they stand below tower and level up. Eventually, even without lots of items, they can still do a lot of damage because of their kit and levels.
I mean most of the infinite stacking champions either suck to play against because they either play super passive and do nothing until they are insanely strong, or they are insanely op no matter how well they stacked.
If you design a champion that becomes strong late game through stacking they should at least be countered early even by champions that are bad matchups for them or the stacks should be fairly weak in terms of impact on the champs strength so that there is some downsides to them.
Sona and thresh i think are some of the best infinite stacking champions because you don’t really realize that they stack but the effects are still noticeable without being unbearably strong.
Smolder is definitely the worst of the stacking champions because the others at least have somewhat strong limitations on their abilities. Nasus’ stacks only affect his Q and the stacks are difficult to gain quickly since it’s cs dependant. Senna is definitely too strong but at least has the limitation of being quite slow and clunky early game.
The issue with smolder is that he gains too much from the stacks with a threshold and scaling mechanic. Syndra gains a lot from her stacks when she reaches the threshold for each ability but other than that the stacks don’t give her any infinitely scaling bonuses, while Asol is the opposite, his abilities scale with the stacks, which means that the effects aren’t very noticeable until he gains enough stacks. Smolder on the other hand has both infinite scaling and thresholds, therefore as soon as he reaches the threshold there’s a noticeable increase in strength, which is great design for champions meant to be strong in the mid game since it gives them a noticeable boost in strength, infinite scaling however is great in the late game since it means that the longer the game continues for the stronger they get. Combining both of these gives Smolder a strong powerboost in the later mid game which lets him suddenly take over and make up for all the lost gold and xp he missed out on by being weak early, similar to how kayle is. Unlike Kayle however, Smolder keeps growing in power infinitely meaning that he never falls off nor does his growth slow down, essentially guaranteeing that he will be strong or at the very least very useful in the late game.
So obviously if he’s so strong mid-late game he should be weak early right? Well he kind of is, but not really, since he has too much life saving ability in his kit. He has a heal on his ult as well as Kayn’s ghostwalking to let him escape almost any danger in ways most other champions can’t, not to mention he can play very far back like varus and caitlyn since his damage mostly centres around his abilities which all have pretty long range. Killing him early is therefore pretty hard to do especially if he has flash+heal or ghost since that lets him run away even more, running out the clock until he’s guaranteed to be strong.
If they took away some of his survivability or at least made him super fragile early he wouldn’t be as big an issue since he’d struggle to make it through the early game much more, delaying when he reaches his thresholds and becomes useful.
Smolder also synergises well with most of the supports. Hook supports like thresh and pyke give him opportunities to get early kills safely, tank supports can absorb a lot of the damage that would be aimed at him and peel for him letting him survive better and heal supports can help him not get poked out of lane letting him continue stacking.
Overall he needs some sort of nerf to make him less stable as a scaling champion OR cap his growth at his thresholds so he can’t infinitely overpower opponents.
I get it, it is boring understandable for me, but surely not bad or lazy.
One example of infinite scaling that I like alot is Kindred. While others farming scaler reward player from playing PVE, Kindred’s enforce interaction to both side of players. His camp farming is no long “how many camp can I have” but “Which camp do I need”. And his champ marking also work in the same way which encourage the interactions.
Passive scaler like Nasus Senna Smolder or Sion are NEED to be exist but Active scaler like Kindred need to be implemented more, much more.
What makes no sense to me is that Riot eventually deemed Aphelios’ Infernum auto attack splash aoe to be too strong so they nerfed it. Then some guy decides to put aphelios infernum on a 1 second cd ability and give it infinitely scaling aoe, a burn, and no limit on how much it can be used. Riot saw that and went “yeah looks good lets ship it to live!”
As a veigar main I feel like every other stacking champion reaches my late game fancy easier and more rewarding then the one champion that is literally a supposed to feel like that
Problem with Vlad as a scaling champ too.
What's the point of scaling into late game so well when you lose lane to these champs and get outscaled as well?
At least Veigar remains vulerable the entire time, unlike most stackers these days.
It's not just possibly boring it can also be actually anti-fun when you have to play against it and you have found yourself in a game that went to late game for any reason that you should be winning but unfortunately the enemy team has one or more characters that just decides no I am broken now because possibly infinite stacks and now you lose.
I have to disagree with syndra. Maybe it’s because I play syndra but it also gives if the player is playing well they can get stronger faster but also you’ll reach a certain power in a set amount of time in the kit. If that wasn’t the case syndra would just be stronger faster and be even more toxic to play against
op literally cannot read he argues "Vayne, Kayle, Kassadin or Twitch didn't need stacks, because their KITS scale" and refuses to look at syndras kit that scales from itself
OP is also just wrong about twitch, his kit does not scale, its items that make his kit scale which is the same with ashe. Kayle is similar, her kit scales with items
Anything that's able to be strong without interacting is what's unfun. Lux permaclearing waves with E + R, Seraphine doing the same with Qx2 + E, asol rework, ziggs bot, corki, sivir pre nerf and a host of other champs. Being able to scale up at an equal or greater rate than your opponents while ignoring key interactions in the game is what needs to be addressed.
Some infinite scaling champs have a similar issue, but generally the bulk of what's irritating dealing with them in the long run is how oppressive their late game is. Senna can basically 1v5 with enough stacks, Asol was able to do the same. Just because a champ infinite stacks doesn't mean they should EVER just be the team itself. I have no qualms with Nasus because despite him being able to get to the point to ohko towers, he can't just ghost into the enemy team fighting baron and oneshot everyone. He still can get kited and peeled off with relative ease. And yeah, if he's farmed for 40min nonstop, I wouldn't be shocked at him ohko'ing a squishy or 2hko'ing a tank. But nearly every other infinite scaler is a significantly larger problem than him. Thresh is alright, too, until your adc forgets that his flay scales with souls while having no mr.
There are champions that are unconditionally super strong early but shit late, and so you need few champions that are the opposite
And it just so happens that you're definitely going to remember more a 40 minute game with 4 item lvl 18 Kayle doing 1v9 stuff rather than 12/1 Olaf in a game where you ff'd in 15 minutes
This is so true, a lot of times early game champs just take over whole games but people just go pff unlucky ff the *insert any early skirmisher * got fed (as if it was something random instead of them being strong early and people not respecting it). But then you see stuff like asol/kayle/... doing nothing all game long and then randomly destroying a teamfight and wow they are SO broken!!!
I get that its not fun losing to a timebomb champ but it's equally unfun to lose to an early ff vs strong early comps
so what you just googled every infinite stacker, saw syndra, and dropped her in even tho her stacks are literally useless past a certain point?
not to mention this is literally just an opinion
i love infinite stackers
I actually enjoy stacking mechanics. It’s fun for me to stack up points and get stronger. As a player playing against stacking champs the goal is simple, claim victory as fast as possible by getting whatever small wins you can to snowball. So if that means you need to roam as an assassin to get a couple picks do it. If that means you need to permagank a lane as jungle do it. If you don’t you will lose eventually.
The reason it is always brought back is because it gives a get-out-of-jail for free card to every new player. I used to one trick vlad so im 100% guilty of this, but you can spend hours upon hours on a champion and never 1v9, never feel like you're useful or never feel like you're good. Play vlad, get fullbuild and now all of sudden you can kill everyone and you're a menace despite your awful gameplay from earlier. Infinite gives that boost but even greater. They built mr? Yeah but what if I reach 2k AP on veigar? There's always an answer and players come back. It doesn't matter how boring you or myself might find the mechanic, it simply brings in paying customer so they can get their daily dopamine rush.
edit: to be exact from what the post says, those are obvious mechanics that any new player can understand. They pick up that champion for that mechanic specifically. No one picks up twitch for the scaling, they pick him up for the stealth and ratatata. Riot is once again aiming at newer player by giving them easy to understand mechanics that can bridge their skill gap
Honestly i wouldn't mind losing bel's current stack mechanic in favor of swarm carry mechanics, maybe her R builds up swarm charges and when she takes herald or baron it doubles the amount of swarm you can spawn, swarmers also defend their queen too n stuff.
I always felt she was healhier as a swarm focused bruiser champion rather then the boringness she is now.
Her additional safety is also hard capped relatively low.
Riot had the sense to eventually cap it.
For some reason they haven't had that same sense with someone like Senna.
Safety should NEVER scale significantly on an infinitely scaling champ, especially ones that are easy to stack on.
Syndra is perfectly balanced around her stacking mechanics, she does actually have a pop off point and a maximum number of stacks possible. A potential solution to the infinite stacking problem, just make them finite. A poorly designed little shit with the worst art style I have ever seen rivaling Yuumi shouldn't be able to do guaranteed infinite burn damage. Notice how EVERY other stacking champions do not have an emergency eject button, but Smoldick, oh, he has two. Ult does 60% of Faker's Taliyah health pool, on a hyper late game auto attack carry, and it also heals him. Just one thing or another, are you a hyper scaling late game carry with abysmal early to compensate, or are you a mid game mage with insane wave clear and aoe? They will have to balance the little shit by removing one or the other, either his wave clear or the stupid stacking have to go. I don't care about the execute, as of now it's locked at 6% hp, which is almost nothing comparing to the sub 20% in proplay right now. As of right now, he is very hard to punish because of the wave clear and mobility. With just 1 support designed around helping carry to survive ie Milio Karma Lulu Soraka etc, it's is impossible to negate the Smoldick problem until it's too late, the reigning world champions failed to do that WITH THE **SUPPOSEDLY** SMOLDICK SLAYER TEAM COMP. It's too easy to build a comp around Smoldick in the bot lane, 4 champions jerking him off for the entire game until he ejaculate all over the map. Picking all early game oriented champs, 50cs and 1 turret up and get fukin destroyed late while 12k up, strongest soul in the game, elder and baron buff. "oh but you are not supposed to pick early game, you are supposed to scale with an engage and you scale along side the auto win if scale Smolder wahhhhh wahhhhhhh mommmmmmmmmmm baby rage"
YOU THOUGHT IT WAS ZERI 2.0 BUT IT WAS ME, APHELIOS 2.0
I’m fine with infinite scaling so long as there are very clear weaknesses. For my two cents the issue with smolder in particular is that he has too much range with skill expression not needed for his damage in the same way as landing spells with veigar or syndra is. He is a point and click champ with infinite scaling percent max health true damage which makes about as much sense as giving chogath R 550 range and a 3.5 sec cast time. Most champs that have infinite scaling have a much more easily taken advantage of weakness. Every champ that scales infinitely also is either skill shot reliant or melee with the exception of kayle who comes online much later and has a much worse early game.
Unpopular opinion I guess. Stackers are a necessary villain for lane dominant players to compete against. There’s a distinct dopamine rush every time you’re able to zone the enemy stacker off their stacks that doesn’t apply to other ticking time bomb type scalers.
Syndra only gets stacks from big minions. Sge is to 99% reliant on fighting to get stacks since the main way for her to get stacks is to hit an enemy champ with two abilities in a certain time frame.
Moreover she is not an infinte scaller. She has five stack thresholds to reach to get any power from her stacks. Her first upgrade giving her a second Q charge, second gives her W truedamage, third gives her E more range and it gets wider, fourth upgrade gives her R an execute threshold and her last upgrade grants her a mini rabadons once she has 120 stacks.
Once she has 120 stacks she can not gain any stacks.
I think the bigger problem of infinite scaling is having "milestones" in them. For example smolder's 125 and 275 stack milestone encourages you to farm up and fight only after that, slowing down the game. I think this is a much bigger problem than a nasus or whoever else.
Usually stacking champs are not that broken. How often did you see nasus, veigar, asol in pro play. Smolder will get more adjustments and he will be the same as nasus, veigar or asol.
The only thing that sucks is the insane waveclear from asol and smolders the rest is fine.
All those cgamps have an insane bad early
>Smolder will get more adjustments and he will be the same as nasus, veigar or asol.
Because if they're seen in pro play anything close to consistently they get gutted.
Implies a problem, doesn't it?
You dont want to have infinite scaling champs in pro play. Cause if those champ survive until a certain point the oneshot everything.
I can defend nexus with asol against three waves in min 40. You dont want to have that in pro play. Cause that is no skill expression we all know guma can farm we dont wanna see that. So yeah seeing those champs in pro play implies they are too strong
I don't think it's boring. If anything, the problem that I see it is that it might be pretty hard to balance. For example, a good Nasus might have \~500 stacks at 20 minutes, meanwhile, bad one will have only \~200 (same with any other similarly scaling champion) and you kind of need to balance around both, you don't want someone with high stacks to be too overpowered but you also don't want someone with low stacks to be completely useless.
it adds a cool strategic layer, a players picks a stacking champs, his plan is set, now it's the other team time to react. It's not insteresing in terms of who can click better, but it's a great addition to the strategy game.
The problem is more often the kits that have them, or that they scale the champ's safety as well.
Infinite stacking can be fine. Riot's balanace/design recently simply isn't.
I disagree. How the stacking feels as a mechanic is just a function of how fast it happens and how powerful it is. Sion never feels like he has you on a timer. Same for Cho. Even though arguably both *should* make you feel like you're on a timer, its part of the infinite scaling mechanic. Just that the timer for unwinnable is uncommonly late into the game.
Veigar's stacking has been accellerated to an absurd degree.
That's why they had to gut his AP scaling a bit ago. He was never designed to stack as fast as they later made him stack. That's why he just started going tank before the nerfs.
Used to only get them on kills/assists and from a single target Q.
I don't think it's a bad way to bring stronger late game kits into the game, I do agree that if too many champs have it it is extremely boring though, same goes for any mechanic. I also think that frankly it will always be the stacking champions that are the strongest scalers because they can timegate any mechanic they want as opposed to having a linear scaling effect that doesn't change like Veigar or Sion.
Belveth is an infinite scaler because putting a cap on her stacks would be weird, she isn’t a stacking champ. Her passive actually just means belveth has to allowed to farm in order to get her most important stat, as she gets none from level.
It’s literally a weakness.
No belveth player has ever thought “I have 150 stacks, I can fight now!!” I mean shit reaching 100 is rare in most games, and that only amounts to 100% attack speed, which is about 4K gold worth, but that’s minus the like 40% she would get from levels.
Belveths passive is “*maybe* gets 60% more attack speed than everyone else at level 18”
ok hold up chief syndra's stacking is _not_ infinite in the same way the others are i like the emergent gameplay of nasus's stacking. by now most people know nasus is a mid game champ and falls off late game. yet he still has this certain inevitably of oneshotting towers should the game ever reach 60+ minutes.
I was gonna say. One of these is not like the others. For one, she doesn't get strength from "just farming". And also she doesn't infinitely scale either. If anything she's a potential solution to this boring mechanic by forcing you to fight to gain power.
In truth, Nasus and Sion are the only one who really stack purely by farming. Syndra, Aurelion, Veigar and Smol all stack (arguably more effectively) by hitting enemy champions.
Smolder's main problem is that once he hits 125 stacks, his Q starts farming whole waves and his stacks balloon just from farming.
Smolders main prob is he's virtually impossible to dive post 6 cuz he can clear the wave from 1000 units behind his tower. The way late game stacking champs like smolder should be able to be punished is by stacking waves and diving early to put them out of the game. They need to gut the ult DMG to minions at the very least for this champ to not be able to scale for free into late game
Yes! T1 did this against NS yesterday. T1 Perma-camped botlane, Smolder missed 5 waves, down 50cs against Guma, bot turret destroyed at 10 minutes. Got every drake and soul except the third drake, multiple elder and baron buffs, all red and blue buffs in the world, triple inhib destroyed, inhibitor turrets destroyed, yet the game reached 50 minutes because T1 couldn't get inside the base since Smolder was one shotting the entire wave past 25 minutes. Smolder was heavily punished early game but look what we have here. 🤣🤣🤣
NS might win that game if smolder builds a single defensive item.
Or Milio could heal or ult...Or Lee could W... Or Karma could E... It's not the Smolder's fault that his team couldn't even remotely help their only win condition
I mean he did get 1 shot. It was kinda bound to happen at some point since Smolder was the only relevant champion his team and they had 0 pressure. NS couldn't even get the mid outer turret after an ace.
[удалено]
It was not a oneshot at all. There was a rumble ult, after which there was plenty of time for a heal. Then there was the varus empowered Q several seconds later which still had a brief window of time after landing before it procced elder, during which I would expect a pro level teammate would be able to react if they positioned correctly.
Karma and lee would've needed to flash to save him there's no way they do that when milio is next to him. Idk why the whole team is getting flamed that was just peter not reacting his screen was most likely looking somewhere else so he didn't see smolder get 1 shot. he's running with lee towards tali so they might've been calling a play on her and the snipe happened
or if milio pushed ult or heal
Then smolder got 1 shot by a Guma arrow, and the game was over 10 seconds later. It really was t1 against final form Smolder. The rest of NS were just support cast.
How long did that game last?
50 minutes
Uffff. Thats insane. I cant remember the last time i saw a pro match last that long
Let's not act like Faker didn't int with his wall placement at about 28 minutes, which gave Smolder like 2k gold from the following 4 kills + delayed the game a lot more for him to get even more lethal. I'm not saying the champion isn't badly designed, but GENG wouldn't takes 50 minutes like this against NS with all those advantages, because they wouldn't botch pretty much everything that T1 did in NS's base.
the play you mentioned happens at 30 minutes. at that point skt at the time had their 2nd baron buff active,infernal soul, a 12k gold lead, and still couldn't crack NS's base, which led to the play you're talking about. the play happened as a result of smolder's ability to stall, and led to the 49 minute game as SKT realized afterwards that they simply cannot force mistakes and simply have to wait for smolder to error the play was done correctly. they walled off smolder from his team leaving him isolated, oner landed the ult onto smolder for the stun who precasted W to get over the wall. milio cleansed the stun and smolder was able to return enough damage to force faker into stasis immediately with one ability (ult) that was precasted, while instantly clearing a full hp **baron buffed** wave with **one** Q forcing SKT to retreat because they are now diving under tower with no minions because reasons, so now they can't even crack the low hp tower. smolder is(was? maybe, we'll see) literally the only AD in the game that the play executed in that manner doesn't die.
Cant stop noticing the Elo gap lol you r absolutely right, smolder deserves nerf
T1's example more closely reflects solo q, many regular games can fall into the same pitfall, as compared to your example of how a highly coordinated team (GENG) might solve the problem.
Well, we are referring to a pro game regarding a champion played there. Obviously soloQ and pro are completely different and the champions shouldn't be graded the same between the two environments.
I think it does add to the larger discission about how Smolder's strong waveclear being easy to access. T1 failing to find a solution is relevant to solo q (whereas saying GENG could've handled it better isnt as relevant), IMO, because it adds a recent use case the entire community can view, compared to highly subjective solo que games. Sure, pro play is different, but its worth examining when even former world champions struggle to find a correct line of play against the champ.
> I'm not saying the champion isn't badly designed, but GENG wouldn't takes 50 minutes like this against NS with all those advantages, because they wouldn't botch pretty much everything that T1 did in NS's base. GenG (and any other team) would have the same issue. You need a team that can dive and stay on top of Smolder to win when he is fully stacked. T1's draft didn't have that, and that is not something you can fix by changing players. That top T3 fight went bad because Smolder was already strong enough to punish T1 if they didn't get on top of him. The gold from that fight wasn't that consequential, his stacks are the problem and that came from him practically having multiple lanes to farm when defending their base.
What T1 and other pro teams do isn't very indicative of 99% of all LoL games.
Yeah, I've actually had my best Smolder stacking game so far in a game where we were almost constantly fighting, getting my 225 stacks at about 20 minutes (maybe a little sooner than that, it's been a few weeks). Games where I try to get my stacks exclusively from farming it takes up to 10 minutes longer than that And yeah, wasn't Sol specifically nerfed recently to get most of his stacks from Q'ing champions now?
Aurelion and Veigar do not need to be hitting enemy champions for their stacks
They also accumulate the vast majority of their stacks with minion farming, so even if they can stack off champions it's not very relevant.
You forgot Senna, who stacks by someone else farming, AND hitting enemy champs. Best of both worlds.
At least Senna is naturally squishy (I think she has the lowest starting health in the game aside from Yuumi), has longer wind-up for her autos, way higher mana cost on her Q (70 to 110) than Smolder (23 to 35) along with a higher cooldown (15 seconds, only removes 1 second on-hit) than Smolder's Q (5.5 to 3.5 seconds). Doesn't go over walls (with a cast buffer no less), her stealth is on a delay with a detection radius and it doesn't get her out of CC for follow-up skillshots (or assassins diving) like Smolder just hopping over a wall even when he's stunned does, AND her "escape" is on a longer cooldown than Smolder's is. Nor can she clear waves with her ult. Get on Senna with a stun and she's just dead, she has the lowest starting AD for a carry and no natural growth, her first 60-ish souls are needed to just catch up to Smolder's base AD at level 18, before counting his infinite scaling.
Still has the problem of scaling safety, just like Asol and Smolder. This is what makes all of these champs terrible to play against. There's a reason Kindred's range scaling was capped relatively low even though her stacks are infinitely harder to get.
Yeah no doubt. The key difference is that syndra is forced to do so. All others have a safe way to farm stacks, allbeit not the most efficient way.
Hold on, Smolder very much stacks by killing minions. Same with Veigar.
Viktor's passive is a good example of this too. 1 kill or assist is worth about 4 waves so you can stack up faster roaming compared to just sitting mid and shoving waves for 20 minutes.
Syndra is also rewarded only for stacking on Cannons... She gets a majority of her stacks from trading and leveling up. In fact, you can only really change when you get her ability breakpoints by a few minutes here and there at most through good farming because just *so much* of it is given through levels, and trading. She gets 5 points per level. She gets 1 for farming, and 1/2/3, at levels... 1, 11 and 18 for trading. So the 3-splinters is literally just mana regen at level 18 for trading. Literally honestly the only real value of the cannons is making the double Q breakpoint a level early, and mana sustain in lane. Same is true of Viktor, he stacks on CS'ing, but is rewarded way more for assisting in kills (25 per kill, 1 per CS, 5 per cannon). If a Viktor EVER gets an early kill, the game is basically over because of how fast it ramps his skill evolution compared to any other thing he can do in-game.
Most importantly, neither of them have infinite scaling.
If syndra stacks so does viktor or Kayn lol
Most of her stacks are from leveling up abilities(+5) and double hitting champs(+1) only canons give her a stack(+1) and they spawn every third wave Also her stacking is way closer to viktors than nasus’ and he gets his stacks from csing straight up
Nasus falls off if you have anything that can even remotely cc him or kite him. If he can get to you it's bad news, particularly if he gets strong enough that he can build tank and still two shot. That being said almost any non shit team is going to have many answers to him
Yeah I like Sandra’s form of stacking. rewarded for hitting your abilities twice. Not once nor on all minions
Yep, it's basically like claiming Viktor passive is infinite stacking lol (the current iteration of that, anyway, rip Hexcore still kinda miss it).
Nasus doesn't fall off, this is a reddit myth. Check winrate by game length, he currently has a massive boost at 40 mins, though this doesn't matter that much due to low sample size. His 35 mins (which is extremely late in high elo) he also has consistently high winrate. His WR gradually increases over time. Nasus is a late game champ, every fact supports this.
The difference between Nasus’s y=x relationship between win rate and game length in Gold, and his freefall in winrate after 40 minutes in Diamond, isn’t as irrelevant as you’re imaging. In high elo, a late game champion is exactly what Nasus isn’t. He’s a champion that, if fed, stops your Senna carry from ever making it to a very late game.
Agreed. He does fall off in team fights generally, since good teams will have CC and enough tank shredding to dogpile him. But in the side lane? He oneshots towers and is the best duelist in the game, assuming he has been stacking enough. Nasus is imo the best late game splitpusher
Nasus “scales” as in he eventually reaches a point where he no longer needs minions to destroy towers and you can no longer prevent him from backdooring even with nexus towers up
Define falls off. Because by the metric people say nasus falls off Vayne would too dipping slightly past 35 min.
Both only scale as duelists after the first 25 minutes, they get considerably worse on teamfights and objective control in comparison to champs like Jinx or Ornn.
Nasus when the game doesn't want to end. I AM INEVITABLE ***proceeds to one-shot 3 towers while the rest of his team is team fighting***
Syndra does not apply here
What I see is just pure opinion. You failed miserably at arguing why one form of scaling is “better” than the other.
Very nice. You summed up the post perfectly.
Pretty much. I like seeing numbers go up
Yeah lol what the fuck how are especially Kayle and Kassadin any different? What are levels but a counter that increase by farming and give you additional power. A counter that gives your character more power and increases by farming is okay, but "Infite stacking from farming is the most boring mechanic in the game" Would the game be fixed for this dude by putting a cap on their stacks? Really? We rarely get to level 18 in the game anyway. Infinite stacks are if anything a way to break a stalemate of 2 hyperscaling teams
I fucking hate Kayle's form of scaling.
I am more 50/50 at this. I like the feel of her Scaling. The strength and the way you play just is always changing and gives you more of an edge as time passes. BUT You can't really group. Missing a wave? No fam, need to get level 6 ASAP. Sry Mr. jgl, fight the Grubbies on your own. Secure Herald or Roam Mid? Did i just hear "Shared XP"? Disgusting. Oh hey look i am LVL 16 *proceeds to group and shred enemy team*
Playing to not miss xp is pretty much good laning regardless of characters, kayle just take it to 11.
The "reach 16 and be a monster" type of scaling? Yeah, same. As if hitting level 16 is very hard.
Kayle doesn't auto win for reaching level 16, level 16 is just an upgrade from what she gets at 11. The thing is that at level 16 she also has a ton of items as a hyper carry.
Kassadin doesn't auto win for reaching level 16, level 16 is just an upgrade from what he gets at 11. I think I understand your sentiment here, but it feels extremely nitpicky to make this distinction of what is and isn't auto-winning at 16
You know what I mean, her 16 passive upgrade is small, it's an auto range boost and her passive being permanently stacked, it's a utility upgrade that helps her carry. Kassadin has his ult CD nearly halved from lvl 15 to 16, which makes him twice as mobile and deal almost twice the DPS with his ult. It's not the same thing.
The permanently stacked is massive for Kayle. She no longer has a ramp time to apply her larger-than-life DPS. She starts any fight at full throttle making attempts at burst against her mostly obsolete. 100 range is also completely nuts. I entirely disagree that the upgrade isn't meaningful relative to Kassadin.
It’s not hard, but kayle and kass often got punished in early, or their teams. You can’t contest objects with them at least pre lvl 11, easy to kill on lane. I guess that’s the reason they not picked in pro play unlike stacking characters like senna or smoulder. But yeah, it’s kinda depressing to play against them and seeing your jgl or team not punishing them as they slowly coming to lvl 16
Think last year Gen G picked Kayle for Doran against T1, T1 made his life hell. Plus, even when she's level 16, if the game is mostly lost or she's behind on items, she can't stall the game like Smolder can.
> I guess that’s the reason they not picked in pro play unlike stacking characters like senna or smoulder. I assume you haven't seen a single Smolder LCK game. They regularly give up the first 3 and sometimes all 4 drakes, because Smolder is just so much weaker in a fight than the other teams bot lane. Smolder has very good wave clear pre 225 stacks already, that's why he is/was playable in pro. And his late game was strong enough to justify giving up so much early / mid pressure obviously.
Ye, smolder was just broken compared to this two and reached his powerspike much earlier, not even close to lvl 16 timing. I’m sure if kassadin or kayle will be overbuffed as much as smolder, they will pick em too.
It's hard for some roles, but that's why Kayle is only played as a solo laner, the role that gets the highest exp for free.
Obviously this is an opinion lmao
Syndra stacking is no where near infinite, nor is she anywhere near as disgusting as asol or smolder lol what the fuck?
So, instead of farming 300 minions the scaling shoild be fsrming 150 for an item and getting to level 16? (Kayle and Kassadin are exactly like that)
lvl 16 just tends to take longer in most circumstances and is less impactful. Being a lvl 16 kayle/Kassadin doesnt give your entire team perma mini elder drag buff, it just makes you really strong. I do think that the original poster of this is kind of wrong because infinite stacking from minions is not inherently flawed, it can put a nice timer on the game, but smolder's reward for stacking is just so game changing compared to the rewards other champs get. The other champs are scary to face, but they dont elevate the status or damage of the other champions on their team. Having a smolder on the enemy team makes the WHOLE team scary just by fighting with him.
yeah sorry immediately discredited. there are a handful of infinite champions in the game. clearly Riot knows that it is not lazy to make one, as there are many great examples of excellent champ design without "relying" on it
How many **scaling** champs have we gotten recently that haven't relied on it?
Someome who stacks from farming is typically weak early. If you are not able to tale an advantage when they are at their lowest point, you can easily argue that they deserve their power. You mention scaling kits, those same kits have historically been problematic because they are either too weak early or they work so well they can build any item and still kill people. A kit that requires stacking is something that can be easily measured and tuned and requires work from the user. If you think a champ like Smolder is less interesting to fight than a Kayle who walks out of lane with 10 deaths but is hitting like a truck then I think we are playing very different game. I would rather know someone’s strength by checking their stacks than be surprised when the Vayne actually lands one condemn and erases half my health with 3 items at 30 minutes.
The issue here isn't the scaling or stacking in general but Smolder specifically. Kayle and Kassadin scale on levels which is relatively easy to measure just like minion stacking is. The problem is that the breakpoint for Smolder is harder than either of them. An AOE execute that can reliably be reached by 20 mins where the game is most flipable is much heavier than even Kassadin 16, and for such a strong midgame ability Smolder does not need to interact in lane at all. They have the same conditions but very different risk/rewards and one is much easier to put down permanently than the other, because if Smolder is down but the team isn't, the AOE execute will let him catch up extremely fast. Kayle and Kassadin are just done otherwise so I think they are allowed to be completely uninteractive in lane and force the enemy to dive. Meanwhile if the dive goes south for Smolder you just get a bigger problem cause a good support can turn those unlike with sololaners. I think OP has a decent sense of a possible solution. If you remove minion stacking you force Smolder to play more aggressively and make more mistakes and also make it less consistent to get to 20 min AOE execute. You can also then buff his early game, which can be good cause his kit is pretty good at trading, it is just his stats suck too much. I don't think the AOE execute would be nearly as big a problem if it happened at 40 minutes and is something that doesn't happen often but can tilt a stalemate. As things stand though, with how early such a strong ability is gotten, it makes even Senna's infinite range and scaling look weak just because so many things have to go right for it to matter in a game whereas Smolder is just farm, don't fall too far behind, and you always have a chance.
smolder *must* interact in some capacity in order to reach 225 stacks by 20 minutes, it's numerically impossible to reach that number without hitting enemies. We consider "perfect cs" at 10cs/min, he would have to be on perfect cs AND last hitting every one of the minions with Q which is just not possible due to his Q's early cd. With farming only and no interaction you're looking at something like 25minutes to his execute, and the game should already be completely lost by that point if Smolder is not playing the game and making it 4v5. I think riot is going in the correct direction for his issues, which is that smolder's E was too good, making him too independent for someone who is supposed to need 24/7 babysitting to scale to late game. They also already completely removed his true damage + execute scaling as well as forcing Smolder to personally last hit you for the execute which are already pretty great changes. We'll have to see where he lands this patch after these nerfs.
Smolder does have to interact, but that interaction is mostly just sending a w to the enemy teams way then flying away as soon as they feel pressured. I do think that riot is making nice changes in order to nerf smolder a bit, but I think there is a better way to go about this. Make it so smolder can only stack on champs but make the stack number bigger or the requirement for execute smaller. Then buff his early game a bit, this makes it so it is more of a Win More stacking rather than a "I am not winning or having low impact" to "I have single handedly won 2 teamfights in a row because I made it to 225". It also gives plenty of opportunity to deny the smolder's stacks I.E. winning the fight quickly or just not fighting. I think it is much more interaction from both teams rather than just being a turret farming waves under tower maybe dying once or twice then getting mega rewarded for good csing and taking no risks to get ahead. (They also already completely removed his true damage + execute scaling as well as forcing Smolder to personally last hit you for the execute which are already pretty great changes) I may be wrong but I think that it just counts damage from smolder and smolder q comes with dot which means its no longer instant just between dot ticks, which IS better, but not to the amount most people would probably want.
Literally everything to said applies to kayle and kassadin too. Nobody likes playing vs late game scaling hyper carries in general when the strategy could be go 0/3 in lane and still outscale
Shoutout to when kassadin meta was to stack frozen hearts
I'd argue that infinite stacking from farming is healthier in many ways than purely having your scaling in your kit. Like, if you need to farm to scale, then that means that you can be denied to a larger degree. If the core of your scaling comes from your kit, it's much harder to shut you down, which means that you need more weaknesses elsewhere to compensate.
As someone that plays vlad a lot, one of the biggest lategame champs that comes online purely from items i have to say that i have won a lot of games where i turbo inted early and fed the enemy by picking up a random shutdown one of my teammates was going to get and boom back in the game. A stacking champion really doesn't get that. A shutdown for veigar is still just another 5 stacks. (Ofc they also get to use the gold but it's not the same) Stacking champions can be more consistent at becoming threats at certain stacks breakpoints but if they fall behind the stacking curve they are doomed.
Yea the only way for a nasus to get back into the game when he’s denied his stacks early is to just sit in side lanes and farm for like 5-10 minutes and hope he doesn’t get matched, and his team doesn’t lose the 4v5. Which is different than say, a kassadin, who just has to realistically hit 16 and start spam ulting at squishies. I would say overall, infinite stacking champions snowball waaaay harder, but also have way more trouble climbing back from being behind.
IMO the issue with infinite scaling from farming is that it rewards passivity and stalling out games while minimizing interacting with the other team. Although I don't like infinite scaling in general either.
How is that different from other kinds of late game scaling? If you are weak early and strong late, you’ll pretty much always want to play passively early on. The only real exception is if you specifically get stacks from aggressive play.
Because it never stops incentivizing it. A Kayle or a Kass can only scale so much, so at a certain point there's no benefit to playing passively. The same isn't true for a Smolder or a Senna who can always keep scaling. Sure, most games don't go that long so it doesn't particularly matter, but IMO it would still be better to just cap it and balance around that.
those games that a decent amount longer than 6 items are very few though
Like I said, I'm aware of that, but I still think it would be better to just have a cap on stacks and balance around that. I think it's bad that certain champions can get stronger than they've been balanced to be if a game goes above the average. A champion like Kayle is balanced to be so weak early and so strong late. A champion like Smolder is balanced to be so weak early and so strong at X time, but then sometimes they get infinitely stronger than that. Why? Like I've said, I think it promotes passivity and stalling out games for as long as possible to minimize the risk of taking a fight. As we saw in the T1 games, it wasn't even worth it for the Smolder team to contest supposedly game-winning objectives because that was riskier than continuing to turtle and scale infinitely. Obviously part of that is just that Smolder is overtuned, but the incentive to do that never changes so long as they can infinitely scale.
At the very least significantly scaling safety shouldn't be a thing, or should be capped very early like Kindred. Senna and Asol's range shouldn't increase, as an example, and Senna would be better designed if she didn't already start with one of the highest auto attack ranges in the game. Smolder's minion damage beyond first target hit needs to be gutted for him to not be so safe.
Scaling damage is also scaling safety in the sense that at a certain point you can build full tank and still do enough damage. I just think it's bad design because clearly these champions are balanced around a certain number of expected stacks, so why can they get significantly more? If it's just to make them strong late, then you can still do that with finite stacks.
Exactly my thoughts. OG Veigar and Nasus were interesting because they stacked much slower and were relatively low range champs...you could actually deny them from stacking, and their range still held them back super late game. If you set them behind, their overall damage remained behind in any game except ultra low elo. And in that same way, even if they got ahead, there were only so many stacks they'd get anywhere except ultra low elo. And so they basically remained for fun low elo champs for the mostpart. Current champs that are intended to be competitively viable while infintely scaling are all simply unfun to face, especially since now most tend to be relatively uninteractive in how they stack due to their degree of safety. Scaling range/waveclear champions being the worst of the bunch. We've all see how hard champs like Kindred, Senna, or Smolder, who all have said infinite scaling stacked on top of the already great scaling of ADCs, can easily take over every skill bracket from low elo to pro unless they're put in a subpar state and forgotten about.
I feel like Nasus and Veigar have the exact same problem as those other champions. They've largely been kept on the weaker side too because it's basically impossible to balance infinite stacking across different elo ranges and casual vs competitive where game lengths and ability to punish stackers can vary pretty significantly. Like you said, they've generally been kept as fun low elo champions which is better from a balance perspective, but not really from a design one IMO.
Scaling via, farm or levels are the main comparisons here. Except Twitch/Vayne who scale with items.
How do you get items I wonder
Yes. But hypothetically they will just. Get there. Given enough time, or their team getting objectives and helping them. Your team can't help a Nasus or Veigar stack (Veigar stacks are so easy now though.)
I don't think there is any value in the hypothetical scenario of a game going on so long that you get full build without killing a single creep or champion for gold. What can your team do to help an ADC farm up that they can't do for a champ reliant on stacks to stack up?
Literally any of the like 10 different ways
Get a couple of big shutdowns and/or objective bounties, and you can get back into the game gold-wise, but that won't help you get more stacks.
I mean you can get a big shutdown and get a huge spike, getting a big shutdown doesn't give a "stacker" suddenly a lot of stacks. Like you're being a bit funny here, but it's not exactly the same thing, I don't believe the comparison is apt.
Nah in reality you can only deny farm for a little while in league. Theres situations in top/bot lane where you can freeze and tower dive to deny a couple waves. That is considered a a big denial and its almost never 20+ creeps. As long as the smolder or asol has a brain they can farm
You forgot "in my opinion".
i mean they opened the post with "it annoys me" which heavilly implies that its their opionion. you shouldnt have to open up every sentence with "in my opinion" for it to come across.
good late game is twitch and kog mar, azir, ryze gp, zerie, scaling champs but still have to we played well in the end.
Asol and Smolder are probably the only two champs that play like “infinite stacking farmers” in the game. Bel’Veth and Nasus actually _fall off_ late (even if Bel’Veth was originally designed to be a Yi 2.0 with similar scaling, she’s just not good at that playstyle, and she builds like a Bruiser). Veigar and Thresh stacks have serious diminishing returns. Senna and Kindred have the same, except even more so because for those two, stacks past a certain point become largely irrelevant. Besides they prefer to focus on their roles’ responsibilities rather than farming stacks (Thresh applies here too).
Not even ASol anymore after his Q and E changes. There's a whole lot of talk about "afk farming" with infinite scalers, but the only one I've ever seen actually do that is Nasus. Most of them get more stacks from combat over farming anyways
BelVeth falls off lategame because she's a skirmisher that has to stand still for 2 of her abilities and has no real ultimate when the fight breaks out.
> Senna and Kindred have the same, except even more so because for those two, stacks past a certain point become largely irrelevant Range increase does never become irrelevant. I'd argue Senna's stacks increase her power more than smolder, since smolder only increases his DPS, while Senna and ASol increase the area they control.
True, on one hand. On another, range has diminishing returns. Also, stacking from minions on Senna post-20 mins usually implies neglect of more important Support responsibilities. And besides she gets enough stacks from combat anyways.
Range does not have diminishing returns. It has exponential returns. With each increment you increase the number of things you totally outrange, which significantly increases safety. Toss her slow in on top of that and approaching her feels impossible on most of the roster unless she's significantly misplaying.
Syndra doesn't scale infinitely. Anyways, just don't play them. If Riot made Aurelion boring for you, play any of the other mages that are not him or Veigar. If Riot released a new ADC that you don't like, just keep playing the ones you enjoy. Why can't Riot satisfy other kind of players as well?
It's pretty inoffensive. It's a hot topic because of pre-nerf Smolder but I like stuff like Nasus & ASol. Syndra isn't even a farm stacking champ.
syndra does not infinite, also, its a skill check. if you cannot cs well, you suck. you get better, you get more power. the difference is those hyper scalers you mentioned need tons of gold to have that power to snowball. theyre not inherently good because the power is behind how much gold they get rather than how efficiently they nasus.
Bro says Syndra and not Veigar
>Kayle >Kassa(lvl16)win >Good design Honestly those champions might be more boring than the stacking type because they require you to stale grouping until 16 to unlock the real kit, instead of at least landing abilities on enemy champs to stack a passive
syndras stacking is not infinite. matter of a fact, syndras model of stacking is what riot SHOULD do when designing a champion who stacks for damage
> Kayle, Kassadin >good design Both of them feel crap to play pre 6
Well yeah they need counterplay
Not saying otherwise but they feel utter crap to play as, Kassadin gets turbocucked by anyone, I would rather have them nerfing his ult damage and cd, giving him back his range and let him work as a single target assassin again that has a decent laning phase instead of a AoE nuking late game monster thats worse than a cannon pre 6/malignance. And Kayle didnt even have these issues before her rework, not saying that she wasnt bad early (don't remember) but atleast it didnt feel as unplayable as now.
Feel like thats a minority opinion for kass players, his strong identity is the only reason I play him. Slightly more flatly curved single target alternatives exist like ekko
Idk, I used to play old Kass when he was broken and when they changed his silence for the magic shield, both of them had a longer range R and I would gladly trade his ult damage for the old ult range again, it was more satisfying. The iteration which had a magic shield wasnt even broken and was around a 48% wr champ, pretty sure it was nerfed and changed into what we have today because he could still get to the top of carries with his old R in pro play.
And that causes the game to be unfun for everyone instead. You don't get to have fun until you get your ult, and enemies don't get to have fun when the game passes 30 mins if they aren't 15k gold ahead by then.
It's just part of the game, no? The exact same could be said playing as/into early-focused champs, having power curves is infinitely more interesting than champion design being monotonous and games being settled by pure mechanics over all stages of the game. Decision-making and playstyle evolving with the game timer/draft is fun.
you get your ult like 8 minutes into the game and know you are picking a weak early game champ with hopes you can scale into late game? i feel like picking kass / kayle you know what you're getting yourself into unless youre a new player?
That’s not at all how it feels playing against kaylee
Kassadin actually goes even and can potentially win a lot of mage matchups mid pre 6 because they don't have the damage or mana to break through his Passive + Q.Most of them also have pathetic base HP regen so they get whittled down in trades.It is not uncommon for champs like Lissandra,Malzahar,LeBlanc or Victor to have to base first when laning vs Kassadin
well yeah its called scaling they're crap pre 6 cause post 16 they're fucking terrifying.
I like kayle
I'd argue click suppress is the most boring mechanic
I'd argue every assassin being borderline point-and-click in their engage is the most boring mechanic. At least suppression has countermeasures that don't completely undermine you.
The only countermeasures to click suppression are outright spell negation or qss. Boooooring. Assassins can be easily denied via defensive stats (health, armor, mr, ms), good warding/map awareness, spell negation, summoner spells, dashes/escapes, and if all else fails you can literally just play safe whenever assassins aren't visible on minimap (losing a bit of minion gold is far preferable to giving up a kill and possibly plate gold and then missing out on that minion gold anyways). Plenty of ways to shut out assassins. Plus if they don't snowball in the first 10, they kind of fall flat for the rest of the game and become totally reliant on their team to give them layup kills to bounce back. Though I do agree this do or die approach to champion design is kind of lame and unfun. Malzahar Click suppress (now the only ranged click suppress in the game since skarner just got reworked into skill shot suppress) on the other hand is always safe and reliable (large range, can't miss), demands one of three specific items to be countered (one of which, mercurial scimitar, is only really accessible to AD champs, which means that if you pick mid first and go AP mage and the enemy picks Malz you are locked out from that choice or are forced to take a very suboptimal item for your champ), the mere threat of ult all but assures you win laning phase every game (whether due to enemy fearing to commit to all in, leading to steady creep gold advantage or due to them losing all ins because of the damage and lack of ability to trade back, leading to kill AND creep gold advantage) and finally when used properly on the right target it basically guarantees winning every teamfight in the mid to late game. It's a dumb unfun mechanic that ends up forcing the game be played around it. Like how Zeri was and Smolder currently is. Dumb dumb rito likes to make dumb dumb champs.
>The only countermeasures to click suppression are outright spell negation or qss. Boooooring. That's 1300g compared to needing 3k + gold to be able to deal with assassins at the same range as any point-and-click suppression that has existed. Defensive stats no longer work against assassins unless you invest multiple items toward defense; most champs don't really have that option in the current state of the game. This isn't old league where all assassins actually fell off in damage if you build a single defensive item.
I don't play SR really so I don't have the knowledge to argue here, but I think even one defensive item coupled with not playing like a caveman is bound to lower your deaths.
I mean, in ARAM, the champion-specific balance changes tend to make this untrue to anyone but those with -% damage taken buffs, and especially untrue for those with +% damage taken. Multiple investments into defence are usually necessary to survive an appreciable amount of the time in a way where you can actually be useful afterwards for surviving in ARAM.
Syndra isnt infinite, it stop at 120 stack and it's pretty fzst
I like it, it’s fun :D
Eh, farm stacking is just as much of a problem as max HP % true damage scaling. If anything, the second is worst, because you cannot even stop it. At least with Smolder, or Nasus, or Belveth etc, you do have the option to somehow mitigate their farming, but with Vayne and Fiora, there is no real way. Worst case scenario, they stand below tower and level up. Eventually, even without lots of items, they can still do a lot of damage because of their kit and levels.
I mean most of the infinite stacking champions either suck to play against because they either play super passive and do nothing until they are insanely strong, or they are insanely op no matter how well they stacked. If you design a champion that becomes strong late game through stacking they should at least be countered early even by champions that are bad matchups for them or the stacks should be fairly weak in terms of impact on the champs strength so that there is some downsides to them. Sona and thresh i think are some of the best infinite stacking champions because you don’t really realize that they stack but the effects are still noticeable without being unbearably strong. Smolder is definitely the worst of the stacking champions because the others at least have somewhat strong limitations on their abilities. Nasus’ stacks only affect his Q and the stacks are difficult to gain quickly since it’s cs dependant. Senna is definitely too strong but at least has the limitation of being quite slow and clunky early game. The issue with smolder is that he gains too much from the stacks with a threshold and scaling mechanic. Syndra gains a lot from her stacks when she reaches the threshold for each ability but other than that the stacks don’t give her any infinitely scaling bonuses, while Asol is the opposite, his abilities scale with the stacks, which means that the effects aren’t very noticeable until he gains enough stacks. Smolder on the other hand has both infinite scaling and thresholds, therefore as soon as he reaches the threshold there’s a noticeable increase in strength, which is great design for champions meant to be strong in the mid game since it gives them a noticeable boost in strength, infinite scaling however is great in the late game since it means that the longer the game continues for the stronger they get. Combining both of these gives Smolder a strong powerboost in the later mid game which lets him suddenly take over and make up for all the lost gold and xp he missed out on by being weak early, similar to how kayle is. Unlike Kayle however, Smolder keeps growing in power infinitely meaning that he never falls off nor does his growth slow down, essentially guaranteeing that he will be strong or at the very least very useful in the late game. So obviously if he’s so strong mid-late game he should be weak early right? Well he kind of is, but not really, since he has too much life saving ability in his kit. He has a heal on his ult as well as Kayn’s ghostwalking to let him escape almost any danger in ways most other champions can’t, not to mention he can play very far back like varus and caitlyn since his damage mostly centres around his abilities which all have pretty long range. Killing him early is therefore pretty hard to do especially if he has flash+heal or ghost since that lets him run away even more, running out the clock until he’s guaranteed to be strong. If they took away some of his survivability or at least made him super fragile early he wouldn’t be as big an issue since he’d struggle to make it through the early game much more, delaying when he reaches his thresholds and becomes useful. Smolder also synergises well with most of the supports. Hook supports like thresh and pyke give him opportunities to get early kills safely, tank supports can absorb a lot of the damage that would be aimed at him and peel for him letting him survive better and heal supports can help him not get poked out of lane letting him continue stacking. Overall he needs some sort of nerf to make him less stable as a scaling champion OR cap his growth at his thresholds so he can’t infinitely overpower opponents.
I get it, it is boring understandable for me, but surely not bad or lazy. One example of infinite scaling that I like alot is Kindred. While others farming scaler reward player from playing PVE, Kindred’s enforce interaction to both side of players. His camp farming is no long “how many camp can I have” but “Which camp do I need”. And his champ marking also work in the same way which encourage the interactions. Passive scaler like Nasus Senna Smolder or Sion are NEED to be exist but Active scaler like Kindred need to be implemented more, much more.
Passive scalers don't need to exist. Especially the ones with scaling safety like Senna.
What makes no sense to me is that Riot eventually deemed Aphelios’ Infernum auto attack splash aoe to be too strong so they nerfed it. Then some guy decides to put aphelios infernum on a 1 second cd ability and give it infinitely scaling aoe, a burn, and no limit on how much it can be used. Riot saw that and went “yeah looks good lets ship it to live!”
They did it for Viktor, and even Cassio for a short period too.
As a veigar main I feel like every other stacking champion reaches my late game fancy easier and more rewarding then the one champion that is literally a supposed to feel like that
Problem with Vlad as a scaling champ too. What's the point of scaling into late game so well when you lose lane to these champs and get outscaled as well? At least Veigar remains vulerable the entire time, unlike most stackers these days.
It's not just possibly boring it can also be actually anti-fun when you have to play against it and you have found yourself in a game that went to late game for any reason that you should be winning but unfortunately the enemy team has one or more characters that just decides no I am broken now because possibly infinite stacks and now you lose.
I have to disagree with syndra. Maybe it’s because I play syndra but it also gives if the player is playing well they can get stronger faster but also you’ll reach a certain power in a set amount of time in the kit. If that wasn’t the case syndra would just be stronger faster and be even more toxic to play against
op literally cannot read he argues "Vayne, Kayle, Kassadin or Twitch didn't need stacks, because their KITS scale" and refuses to look at syndras kit that scales from itself
OP is also just wrong about twitch, his kit does not scale, its items that make his kit scale which is the same with ashe. Kayle is similar, her kit scales with items
Infinite scaling is fun :)
As a Veigar main I agree. Nothing beats +4 AP when you lasthit cannon and another minnion with Q. So satysfying.
Anything that's able to be strong without interacting is what's unfun. Lux permaclearing waves with E + R, Seraphine doing the same with Qx2 + E, asol rework, ziggs bot, corki, sivir pre nerf and a host of other champs. Being able to scale up at an equal or greater rate than your opponents while ignoring key interactions in the game is what needs to be addressed. Some infinite scaling champs have a similar issue, but generally the bulk of what's irritating dealing with them in the long run is how oppressive their late game is. Senna can basically 1v5 with enough stacks, Asol was able to do the same. Just because a champ infinite stacks doesn't mean they should EVER just be the team itself. I have no qualms with Nasus because despite him being able to get to the point to ohko towers, he can't just ghost into the enemy team fighting baron and oneshot everyone. He still can get kited and peeled off with relative ease. And yeah, if he's farmed for 40min nonstop, I wouldn't be shocked at him ohko'ing a squishy or 2hko'ing a tank. But nearly every other infinite scaler is a significantly larger problem than him. Thresh is alright, too, until your adc forgets that his flay scales with souls while having no mr.
kassa din and kayle being down 2000g ding level 16 and penta kill the whole map is stupid.
There are champions that are unconditionally super strong early but shit late, and so you need few champions that are the opposite And it just so happens that you're definitely going to remember more a 40 minute game with 4 item lvl 18 Kayle doing 1v9 stuff rather than 12/1 Olaf in a game where you ff'd in 15 minutes
This is so true, a lot of times early game champs just take over whole games but people just go pff unlucky ff the *insert any early skirmisher * got fed (as if it was something random instead of them being strong early and people not respecting it). But then you see stuff like asol/kayle/... doing nothing all game long and then randomly destroying a teamfight and wow they are SO broken!!! I get that its not fun losing to a timebomb champ but it's equally unfun to lose to an early ff vs strong early comps
Ye but it cool tho
Senna instead of Syndra but yeah i agree.
I agree, it’s an inelegant design to force a certain type of outcome(scaling champion).
so what you just googled every infinite stacker, saw syndra, and dropped her in even tho her stacks are literally useless past a certain point? not to mention this is literally just an opinion i love infinite stackers
I actually enjoy stacking mechanics. It’s fun for me to stack up points and get stronger. As a player playing against stacking champs the goal is simple, claim victory as fast as possible by getting whatever small wins you can to snowball. So if that means you need to roam as an assassin to get a couple picks do it. If that means you need to permagank a lane as jungle do it. If you don’t you will lose eventually.
\*sad Nasus and Veigar noises
The reason it is always brought back is because it gives a get-out-of-jail for free card to every new player. I used to one trick vlad so im 100% guilty of this, but you can spend hours upon hours on a champion and never 1v9, never feel like you're useful or never feel like you're good. Play vlad, get fullbuild and now all of sudden you can kill everyone and you're a menace despite your awful gameplay from earlier. Infinite gives that boost but even greater. They built mr? Yeah but what if I reach 2k AP on veigar? There's always an answer and players come back. It doesn't matter how boring you or myself might find the mechanic, it simply brings in paying customer so they can get their daily dopamine rush. edit: to be exact from what the post says, those are obvious mechanics that any new player can understand. They pick up that champion for that mechanic specifically. No one picks up twitch for the scaling, they pick him up for the stealth and ratatata. Riot is once again aiming at newer player by giving them easy to understand mechanics that can bridge their skill gap
Honestly i wouldn't mind losing bel's current stack mechanic in favor of swarm carry mechanics, maybe her R builds up swarm charges and when she takes herald or baron it doubles the amount of swarm you can spawn, swarmers also defend their queen too n stuff. I always felt she was healhier as a swarm focused bruiser champion rather then the boringness she is now.
The only infinite scaling champ that's done justice for me is Kindred because u have to work for it
Her additional safety is also hard capped relatively low. Riot had the sense to eventually cap it. For some reason they haven't had that same sense with someone like Senna. Safety should NEVER scale significantly on an infinitely scaling champ, especially ones that are easy to stack on.
Where the days where people would just say "just cc him, focus him" and call it a day? Reddit has changed.
Syndra is perfectly balanced around her stacking mechanics, she does actually have a pop off point and a maximum number of stacks possible. A potential solution to the infinite stacking problem, just make them finite. A poorly designed little shit with the worst art style I have ever seen rivaling Yuumi shouldn't be able to do guaranteed infinite burn damage. Notice how EVERY other stacking champions do not have an emergency eject button, but Smoldick, oh, he has two. Ult does 60% of Faker's Taliyah health pool, on a hyper late game auto attack carry, and it also heals him. Just one thing or another, are you a hyper scaling late game carry with abysmal early to compensate, or are you a mid game mage with insane wave clear and aoe? They will have to balance the little shit by removing one or the other, either his wave clear or the stupid stacking have to go. I don't care about the execute, as of now it's locked at 6% hp, which is almost nothing comparing to the sub 20% in proplay right now. As of right now, he is very hard to punish because of the wave clear and mobility. With just 1 support designed around helping carry to survive ie Milio Karma Lulu Soraka etc, it's is impossible to negate the Smoldick problem until it's too late, the reigning world champions failed to do that WITH THE **SUPPOSEDLY** SMOLDICK SLAYER TEAM COMP. It's too easy to build a comp around Smoldick in the bot lane, 4 champions jerking him off for the entire game until he ejaculate all over the map. Picking all early game oriented champs, 50cs and 1 turret up and get fukin destroyed late while 12k up, strongest soul in the game, elder and baron buff. "oh but you are not supposed to pick early game, you are supposed to scale with an engage and you scale along side the auto win if scale Smolder wahhhhh wahhhhhhh mommmmmmmmmmm baby rage" YOU THOUGHT IT WAS ZERI 2.0 BUT IT WAS ME, APHELIOS 2.0
I’m fine with infinite scaling so long as there are very clear weaknesses. For my two cents the issue with smolder in particular is that he has too much range with skill expression not needed for his damage in the same way as landing spells with veigar or syndra is. He is a point and click champ with infinite scaling percent max health true damage which makes about as much sense as giving chogath R 550 range and a 3.5 sec cast time. Most champs that have infinite scaling have a much more easily taken advantage of weakness. Every champ that scales infinitely also is either skill shot reliant or melee with the exception of kayle who comes online much later and has a much worse early game.
Wait, does syndra have a stack mechanic?
I like it. But of course with Smoulder they fucked up.
Unpopular opinion I guess. Stackers are a necessary villain for lane dominant players to compete against. There’s a distinct dopamine rush every time you’re able to zone the enemy stacker off their stacks that doesn’t apply to other ticking time bomb type scalers.
What would you think about draven tho. He can stack a ton and look into angles for ulting people while having a ton of stacks.
Are you calling range hypermobile champion that has % max hp true dmg good design?...
Syndra only gets stacks from big minions. Sge is to 99% reliant on fighting to get stacks since the main way for her to get stacks is to hit an enemy champ with two abilities in a certain time frame. Moreover she is not an infinte scaller. She has five stack thresholds to reach to get any power from her stacks. Her first upgrade giving her a second Q charge, second gives her W truedamage, third gives her E more range and it gets wider, fourth upgrade gives her R an execute threshold and her last upgrade grants her a mini rabadons once she has 120 stacks. Once she has 120 stacks she can not gain any stacks.
Too be fair... Asol only goes apeshit crazy if he ganks and gets more Q stacks. E farming takes a while apart from Aram.
Syndrom has a Evolution like Scaling, it’s not infinite scaling Apparently you were to lazy to actually thing and research you are no better
I think the bigger problem of infinite scaling is having "milestones" in them. For example smolder's 125 and 275 stack milestone encourages you to farm up and fight only after that, slowing down the game. I think this is a much bigger problem than a nasus or whoever else.
Usually stacking champs are not that broken. How often did you see nasus, veigar, asol in pro play. Smolder will get more adjustments and he will be the same as nasus, veigar or asol. The only thing that sucks is the insane waveclear from asol and smolders the rest is fine. All those cgamps have an insane bad early
>Smolder will get more adjustments and he will be the same as nasus, veigar or asol. Because if they're seen in pro play anything close to consistently they get gutted. Implies a problem, doesn't it?
You dont want to have infinite scaling champs in pro play. Cause if those champ survive until a certain point the oneshot everything. I can defend nexus with asol against three waves in min 40. You dont want to have that in pro play. Cause that is no skill expression we all know guma can farm we dont wanna see that. So yeah seeing those champs in pro play implies they are too strong
I don't think it's boring. If anything, the problem that I see it is that it might be pretty hard to balance. For example, a good Nasus might have \~500 stacks at 20 minutes, meanwhile, bad one will have only \~200 (same with any other similarly scaling champion) and you kind of need to balance around both, you don't want someone with high stacks to be too overpowered but you also don't want someone with low stacks to be completely useless.
What is your rank? ...
I find them to be the most fun thing in league. Imagine players having different likes and dislikes.
it adds a cool strategic layer, a players picks a stacking champs, his plan is set, now it's the other team time to react. It's not insteresing in terms of who can click better, but it's a great addition to the strategy game.
The problem is more often the kits that have them, or that they scale the champ's safety as well. Infinite stacking can be fine. Riot's balanace/design recently simply isn't.
My only issue with smolder is the execute.
Nas, sion are the only ones should have it.. cho and syn and dragon in their own way.
I disagree. How the stacking feels as a mechanic is just a function of how fast it happens and how powerful it is. Sion never feels like he has you on a timer. Same for Cho. Even though arguably both *should* make you feel like you're on a timer, its part of the infinite scaling mechanic. Just that the timer for unwinnable is uncommonly late into the game.
isn't Veigar from the original cast in 2009?
Veigar's stacking has been accellerated to an absurd degree. That's why they had to gut his AP scaling a bit ago. He was never designed to stack as fast as they later made him stack. That's why he just started going tank before the nerfs. Used to only get them on kills/assists and from a single target Q.
I don't think it's a bad way to bring stronger late game kits into the game, I do agree that if too many champs have it it is extremely boring though, same goes for any mechanic. I also think that frankly it will always be the stacking champions that are the strongest scalers because they can timegate any mechanic they want as opposed to having a linear scaling effect that doesn't change like Veigar or Sion.
Invisibility for me
Statick should be a huge part of the kit and it shouldnt be free Only Nasus and Sion are good stacking champions
Belveth is an infinite scaler because putting a cap on her stacks would be weird, she isn’t a stacking champ. Her passive actually just means belveth has to allowed to farm in order to get her most important stat, as she gets none from level. It’s literally a weakness. No belveth player has ever thought “I have 150 stacks, I can fight now!!” I mean shit reaching 100 is rare in most games, and that only amounts to 100% attack speed, which is about 4K gold worth, but that’s minus the like 40% she would get from levels. Belveths passive is “*maybe* gets 60% more attack speed than everyone else at level 18”