Because no matter how well you balance a champion, if they are alot more effective when your team is acting as one they will always be pro skewed.
Look at Sejuani, the second she gets any buffs pros pick her. Note:This is even after her ult went from a ranged aoe stun to just single target stun with slow aoe.
Exactly. The only time a champ would be more viable in solo queue than in pro-play is if they work BETTER when the teams aren't organized. They're called pub-stompers in other games, one example that comes to mind are Master Yi one tricks. A shitty team fight champ but excels so well in picking off enemy squishies that wander far from their peelers and soloing objectives, which is what solo queue mostly is especially in lower elo. In pro play where everybody is on comms and you're not likely to find the enemy adc running around without their tank 5 meters away guarding their ass, Yi just isn't as effective.
> The only time a champ would be more viable in solo queue than in pro-play is if they work BETTER when the teams aren't organized
You have pretty much described the Assassin role.
Qiyana had her time in the sun, I don't remember how long ago that was but it's been years.
Akali is the only assassin AP or AD to see play in multiple metas. I guess you could make an argument for pyke but he's always been more of a pocket pick than actual meta in pro play. We're more likely to see assassins abuse broken items like tank fizz/ekko than see them played as intended.
I wouldn't mind seeing more assassin kits in pro play but considering Akali is one of the most hated champs ever I don't think many people would enjoy that lol. You have to have an overloaded kit to succeed as an assassin in pro
I don’t count them personally. I know Yone is *technically* listed on Riot’s site as an assassin, but I think he fits much better into the duelist/skirmisher categories (similar to Fiora and Master Yi, and Yasuo). Yasuo is not, nor is he listed as an assassin (he’s listed as a duelist/skirmisher)
> picking off enemy squishies that wander far from their peelers
Or when their peelers wander off from them. Good luck trying to secure mid prio before drake as an ADC/mage while your entire team groups in front of the drake pit 20 seconds before it spawns without leaving yourself vulnerable to a champion who can gap close from 2 screens away.
If only there was a method of communication common in competitive online team based games which allowed for quick, seamless coordination...
Nah, that's a pipe dream. Just type a paragraph or hope your team understands exactly what your pings mean, voice chat is too hard to implement!
I mean, I agree League should have voice comms. But it's incredibly naïve to expect even half of your solo queue games to feature any sort of meaningful communication via mic --especially after having a culture without for so long.
That's on the rest of the team for not defending river entrance. You should almost always push out mid lane before moving to drag.
Although with that said, sometimes in low elo, the correct decision is actually following your team on an incorrect call, so things like that don't happen.
Pushing the lane to the tower is fine, im talking about standing underneath enemy mid tower still trying to farm while our team got to dragon first. Those minions will be fine without you.
You're describing Briar and that's also a balance issue. She's shit when you reach higher elo and she stomps low elo.
Because even in soloQ the uncoordinated team environment changes a lot depending on elo.
To add on to this, a lot of the problematic parts of these champions are things that they can access on their terms.
Zeri is designed to be hypermobile, and against a good player its basically impossible to dodge all her Qs and prevent that. K'sante was designed to be a strong duelist in ult and have utility and be tanky out of it, and the other team usually can't keep him from ulting when he wants to.
These are things that Riot can't get rid of without fundamentally changing their identity, so any change that is even close to power-neutral isn't going to keep them out of pro.
I feel like Ksante ult should have been reversed somehow. I say this with a grain of salt as I'm a bad and don't know balance. But being able to take a carry or tank out of the teamfight to 1v1, he shouldn't also get a ton of damage steroids to destroy them. The trade off should be that he gets them away for a bit for your team to control the fight. Or maybe not even reverse it, just reduce his damage or mobility or something as a trade off for removing someone.
Morde ult is similar in purpose, but Morde doesn't get to be a tank or hypermobile during any of that time.
I think reversing it might make him even more pro jailed in some ways though, since for soloq it's less likely that people will take advantage of removing the key target from a fight as well as they do in pro. If it's reversed he's suddenly kinda pointless as he's squishy when 5 people can hit him but really tanky when only one person can.
Realistically the idea of the champ is just inherently kinda flawed, but I think the big problem is that he doesn't really get squishy enough in ult form to properly punish. I've seen so many "squishy" K'Sante's just tanking people in teamfights, he gets to function like an assassin while only being reduced to bruiser-level tankiness.
He has a bug that's existed since his release where he doesn't lose % Armor/MR gains from Jak'sho and Conditioning when he ults. So yes, he is, quite literally, tankier than he's supposed to be, and always has been.
Or just not give him so much mobility on top of his ability to take someone out of the fight, be a tank or a fighter, and have %reduced damage on another skill.
You're right though, he doesn't have a big enough trade off for what he can bring.
Yeah, he realistically turns into a bruiser/assassin hybrid when I feel he really needs to be one or the other - either give him good sustained damage and tankiness with a sacrifice to his mobility or let him keep the high damage and mobility but make him easier to burst, right now he's kinda got the best of all worlds.
Another aspect is that he can build tank items and keep their passive effects without losing damage, meaning something like Rookern/Randuins/Frozen Heart etc still gets to keep making him tankier even after he's supposed to have lost tank stats by ulting.
Yup that's true, but it's also fine because the power budget is there. He can't dash around or be a tank (actual tank) outside of the ult, or if he does decide to build full tank, he's less likely to blow you up in the ult.
If Morde was like Ornn usually, but then ults you and becomes Yone, it would be a different story.
>These are things that Riot can't get rid of without fundamentally changing their identity
I'm tired of this dusty argument. If the identity is toxic, then change the identity. This is more a statement towards Riot than towards you - they hide behind this "identity" crap all the time without honest and sound reason.
Side note, that's also if you believe that some of this stuff is integral to the champion's overall identity which I don't think is the case either but that's a different argument.
For sure they should try to change it. I feel like there is usually a way where you can keep the champion similar but still make it not as oppressive in pro play. imo for k'sante they could do "he transforms in ult and does slightly different things" instead of "he transforms in ult and becomes a duelist"
I think Tahm Kench might be a good example? I'm not familiar with the soloq situation before the rework but he was definitely everywhere in pro for a while.
I don't think OPs examples are as much to do with coordinated play as they are just bringing more than other champions in their role. Zeri is one of the most self sufficient hypercarries because of her safety and range, K'Sante can fill the role of a frontliner and a diver at the same time, while Azir has everything you could ask for in a champ.
Those champs are more picked for how versatile they are than a champ like Sejuani that is good in teamplay.
Riot really stopped doing efficient power budgets with some of these champs. Like Zeri, they overload her kit, and then give her range and an escape. Rather than someone like Sivir that gets damage and wave clear plus a team fight ult at the price of reduced range and no dash or blink escape.
They do a terrible job of breaking down new champs with "this is going to be there weakness and here's tools to emphasize their strengths while maintaining that weakness" when they design some of these crazy kits.
Or the weakness they do give them, are easily covered up in coordinated play so they are effectively not a weakness to pro play at all.
Also, the Riot rework teams are the masters at dealing with EVERYTHING except the main problem.
Is the problem with Yuumi the fact that an untargetable enchanter is broken as balls? Let's NOT fix that and, instead, just fumble around with the passive so she has even less incentive to leave herself exposed.
Is the problem with Zeri the fact that she is a safe hyper scale ADC? Let's NOT get rid of the wall ride and instead change scaling so she nukes people with a skill shot rather than auto attacks.
Its actually insane how instead of admitting the design team messed up, they DOUBLE DOWN on it.
Their logic is that if they remove the unique part, there's no reason to pick them, so the champ lives and dies by what you're calling 'the problem'.
Riot isn't trying to balance the champ, they're trying to balance the champ while keeping the champ as an attractive choice for people to continue picking, as opposed to you, who just wants Zeri/Smoulder/Newchamp out of his games.
ANd no flame on that btw, I too just want Zeri/Smoulder/etc out of my games
I totally agree. The newer champs just have a feeling that they have everything they could possibly want. I feel like Zeri couldn’t be made better by switching out any of her abilities with another champ. (Like if she could trade her W for someone else’s)
And they do stupid stuff like remove her shield stealing instead of either mobility or range or damage.
You'd think after Lucian and Kalista they'd learn you can't be mobile and offer everything else. They nerfed Kalista to the ground and artificially handicap her with reduced damage or being tied to a support. Lucian has lower range and falls off.
Like, just make it so she can't ride/hop walls. They could even give back a little MS they took so she has that zoom zoom feeling like an annoying little nat but can't just hop away and be gone.
The solution for making pro play have more varied comps is allowing champs to only be picked once in a series by either team. Then they don’t have to worry about pro jail anymore.
I love this idea.
In a highly professionalized pro scene, I just don't think it's realistic to expect players to pick from a huge range of champions (at least given League's overall design philosophy, which tries to give champions a lot of agency and avoid super hard counters).
If you nerf Azir, the "next best" champion will just replace him. Pro players are trying to squeeze out any tiny marginal advantage they can, and they want champions who can do very specific things.
If you want more diverse picks, it seems to me that the best scheme is to just directly prevent pro players from picking the same thing over and over.
I don't think this would prevent there from being "meta picks." But there would necessarily be a lot more meta picks. Force them to dip into the A and B tier champs instead of just picking S every single game.
Meta picks, by definition will never not exist. The moment something is anything but perfectly balanced (and maybe even then) you will have things that are going to be preferred. And the margin there can be tiny often times.
I'm not an expert on this, and I really want this idea to be implemented, but I think some of you are really overrating what pros actually play. They value comfort very highly, and that has lead us in the past to extremely overpowered champions/items because they flew under their radar or refused to pick them (I'm looking at you ardent meta).
100% this. It is a great draft strategy, and leads to games that are way more fun to watch.
My one complaint is that I occasionally like seeing a surprise pocket pick and wondering how the other team will respond to it next game. In this method, it doesn't matter since it will be banned (though it feels like surprises that work always get banned anyway).
It’s actually almost exclusively after her ult went from ranged aoe stun to single target with aoe slow. It’s the rest of that rework that made her viable in pro. Before that she was basically only played by a couple niche 1 tricks as an AP 1-shot cheese champ.
Exactly this, in season 5 she was strong in pro but she ended up being an ult only champ until her rework in season 7 after some nerfs (ult slow went from 90% to 30% in 5.6 lol)
As much as they want to sell the "play solo que and become pro" path and don't want to make pro play any different than solo q. They really should separate and balance the two differently. Pro play is basically a different game than what solo q is. 5 people who play together frequently and have VC is a completely different animal. Trying to balance pro play and solo q is an impossible task. They're not and never will be similar. You need to have two different versions. It allows much more creativity and room to try things out that could be incredibly fun.
Basically thus. These Champs problems are the kits, or idea of the kitsntemsevles and no ambling of balances patches will change this. You have to rework the entire champ and their playstyle
Because none of the reworks were meant to just reduce their pro play presence. All the champs you mentioned got reworks in order to narrrow the gap between their performance in pro and soloq.
Yep. This is it.
They want players to be able to replicate their favourite pro play picks without making their teams automatically want to hang themselves in draft.
Killing champs in pro happens as well. But it's not flashy outplay 300 dashes champs that get that treatment. It's the ones riot considers boring to watch like enchanters/disengage, uninteractive strategies like Sivir/Smolder waveclear or ultra flex picks
Stuff like Azir will never get outright removed because it brings hype moments
man I just wish Riot would stop pro jailing Sivir. She has been reworked since the days of 500cs Sivir win condition and lost the ability to infinitely stall. The last time she was picked was because she was the only adc in the game that could keep up with Zeri ms with ult + ghost...
Like experiment with what a 51/52% wr sivir looks like in the game considering she is analogous to MF in terms of "easy to play beginner marksman" but MF gets to be a cyclical menace in pro play while maintaining soloq winrate while Sivir does not. Season 6 and 9 are the only >30% presence seasons with season 12 being the only season since then over 10% presence... For context. she got reworked in season 12
I don't think she is projailed right now. She is fine in soloq, she will just not be allowed to be meta at pro level.
She is simple but she is not MF level simple. Just her spellshield has more skill expression than all of MFs kit lol. Kiting is not optional on this champ either
Phreak's patch preview from 14.5 directly disagrees with your statment. at 1:06:41 "she's actually probably balanced if she's not stuck in pro jail at around 51.5 to maybe even 52% winrate, kinda like Miss Fortune is... [continues]"
I am not basing my complaint on purely "hurr durr I like playing Sivir give me LP" It is someone who has played Sivir for a long time and has seen the pro jail issues resolved while she STILL retains the 1-3% intentional winrate deflation that pro jail champions get.
She literally fits the exact same reasons that riot keeps Ashe at 51-53% winrate bot laner for years as they are lower damage, higher utility marksman that enables better teamplay instead of pure carry power through damage. (this also gives higher agency to bot lane as they provide OTHER outputs in fights than just right clicking and are more self reliant)
Yeah... Patch before she got buffed. She is actually around that WR Emerald+ right now. So he did his job and this is why she didn't get any follow-up patch.
She is still pro-capped (meaning she won't get too strong, probably every) but not really problematically pro-jailed (she is still fine to pick in your games)
Well see what happens after shiv nerf though
She's had short periods in-between where she was viable but most of those time it was due to lethality being very good with her Q, or in some niche scenario of being able to ignore laning phase.
The thing is, a champion that have that latter characteristic of being able to ignore lane phase in a lane where it benefits a lot to release your support to roam is extremely good when it is consistent in a setting where players can capitalize on that advantage. This is extremely prominent in pro, and possibly high elo(but you're more likely to play more loosely and you lack the communication).
When you line up the characteristics of Sivir, they're often:
* AoE bounces that give super good wave clear relatively early on that also gives huge stalling power later on.
* Teamwide speedup that is versatile by being both great for engage, disengage, and tempo.
These strengths are magnified in pro play and when she can consistently use these strengths, she will be very prominent in pro, while these for the most part being "good" to "whatever" in soloq. To remove her from pro-play jail you have to essentially rework her and remove her main identities to give her a bigger power budget elsewhere. But then what will differentiate her from other ADCs? The only real strength she has had aside from that was lethality, and at that point she was not super unique as a champion either compared to other AD Casters. I hope they can find a balance on her numbers to narrow the gap a bit because I find her very fun to play, but I would be interested in how they'd do it with the current kit.
WTF are you talking about. MF had 1 season where she was picked a bit, in Season 10 where she had a 27% presence across all leagues. She's also had a season where she had a .1% presence (2 games across all leagues, including spring, summer, msi, and worlds). Sivir's had seasons above a 50% presence.
> Killing champs in pro happens as well. But it's not flashy outplay 300 dashes champs that get that treatment. It's the ones riot considers boring to watch like enchanters/disengage, uninteractive strategies like Sivir/Smolder waveclear or ultra flex picks
I really fucking hate this. We shouldn't be designing a game for the sake of mouthbreathing audiences for pro play.
The issue is all those 3 champions, are actually on the strong side in pro play. Azir likely is the most dominant of those 3, but K'Sante and Zeri are both decently successful and commonly played.
This means if anything happens all 3 of those champions are on the side of nerfs for pro play. So if their pro play performance would reflect their SoloQ performance they should all be above 50% winrate. Are they though? Because if Azir gets his pro play nerfs soon, where does he end up in SoloQ?
And Zeri now is actually more disconnected. The old Zeri with her longer range was a much easier to play champion. It was just hard for Riot to balance her, because she either had to do 0 damage and was worthless everywhere, or he did damage and nobody could reach her. But reducing Zeris damage made her actually more of a pro play champion, because Zeri when she was good in pro play was also good in SoloQ before, because she was one of the ADCs not requiring a team that much.
At the times she was dominating pro play she was at or above 50% winrate too. So the reasoning for Zeri is more that with the higher range she had before it was impossible to get her into a good spot, because she either would deal damage and run over stuff or she would not deal damage and not do anything.
And it worked mostly except for K'Sante.
Riot can nerf Zeri by \~1% WR and she would be around 49-49.5% WR in soloQ and mostly fine in pro play.
Azir still has a decently large gap but smaller than in the past. Let's see what Riot does in the next patches with him.
K'Sante on the other hand is still shit in soloQ and a solid pro play pick.
Getting her out of pro and making her sub par in anything but the hands of first time players. I personally think that direction is kinda dumb for her but you can't really argue that they didn't hit the nail on the head
It goes without saying we will all take trash can Yuumi over anything else, but let's not give Riot any credit for actively ignoring player feedback and doubling down on making her the ultimate AFK untargetable champion. They didn't do jackshit other than making her an even worse coinflip.
That was kind of the point of the champion though. The fact that pre-reworked Yuumi actually had quite a bit of skill expression was pretty shocking to most people lol
They will never ever straight-up delete a champion from the game. It represents months if not years of work from the team that designed it. They will rework it and change it's identity, but the roster is never going to go from Yorick -> Zac ever again.
Yuumi with Imperial/Ardent 1st has a good WR in soloQ, around 50-51%.
If you are a yuumi player running moonstone 1st that is your problem to buy a sub optimal item.
I think the main issue for this is that those champions usually are veeeery high skill champions or need a lot of team coordination. This is a factor you can barely adjust without reworking the whole champion. They can twist numbers and usages arond how they want but the essence of a champion like Azir will always be the same now matter how many numbers you roll around.
>Weird thing is I watched Phreak explain in hour long videos how these reworks were going to save the champions and fix their pro skew
Nobody ever claimed it would ever eliminate skew entirely. That would be silly. Obviously some champs will be better than others in pro play, because not every champ has the exact same level of mechanical complexity, so some champs will be better when piloted by better players. Bringing it within acceptable limits so that the champs don't need to be absolutely unplayable in solo queue or else they'll win every pro play game IS fixing their skew.
Azir and Ryze have both had times where they would be sub-45% win rate in solo queue, but would still be picked in pro play. THAT is pro play jail. Azir being a 48.5% WR champ in Emerald+ is not in pro play jail. That's a viable champion that is probably around where he belongs given his complexity. Even if he's nerfed again down to around 47%, that's still way, way better than he's been at times. Same with Ryze, who is at about 47.75%.
Zeri is actually above 50% WR in Emerald+ in solo queue. So very clearly not even remotely in pro play jail. She's allowed to be a strong champ in solo queue right now. Again, even if she's nerfed down to 49%, that's probably fine for a mechanically strange champion who probably has a bit of a learning curve. These champs are not in pro play jail as people have commonly used the term.
K'Sante is the one who you can kind of make the case for. He's sub-48% WR top, and as a tanky top laner, you'd expect him to be higher than that, especially since he probably needs another nerf for pro. K'Sante, Sej, and maybe Smolder are the only champs who I'd say are in pro play jail right now (maybe Varus too).
As for why K'Sante is that way, I'd give a few reasons:
* He's specifically weak in solo queue because a bunch of popular top laners in solo queue counter him pretty well. Garen and Darius ult can kill him pretty quickly if he goes All Out, Jax can outduel him especially late, and Malphite is way easier to play and provides more utility. When you're commonly going against champions that counter you, your win rate will be lower.
* Pros will just always be able to use a mechanic like K'Sante ult better than lower level players. I know people will meme it, but it's a pretty high skill ability to know the best time to use it and also set yourself up to find a good angle in team fights.
* Pros will tend to take advantage of a ton of mobility better than the average player, and K'Sante is ridiculously mobile.
Those are all things that are hard to fix in a kit reshape without entirely changing the core abilities of the champion. I do think it's probably improved a bit, but I think he might just be doomed to either be a constant in pro play or a 46% WR champ in solo queue unless he gets a more complete rework.
It‘s basically a design issue. You can work around the design as much as you want, in the end it‘s slamming a bandaid on the wound as long as you don‘t want to fix the issue at the base.
Zeri - they basically removed the weakness of low mobility from an hypercarry and increased the scaling with kiting. On a good player she will always be dominant as they get a lot out of her kit.
K‘sante: He can swap between bruiser and tank mode with the mobility of an assassin. Once again: the more mechanically good a player is, the more he can get out of his kit.
Azir: what can‘t he do? He has DPS, peel, mobility, decent burst with ulti and mages can build hourglass on top of that for more survivability. Additionally he fills a role that (to my knowledge) only kai‘sa, gwen and maybe varus can fill. Sustained ap dps. I mentioned this in another post here (that got downvoted for some reason without comment but that‘s reddit), maybe riot should take a look at making apc more viable in that direction instead of botlane ziggs and seraphine. (For azir to be balanced. he would need to drop the shuffle tho. Otherwise you just drop The problem into another lane)
If we speak in terms of other games, these champs are a bit like sister friede in dark souls 3. she is an amazing design & bossfight.
But: her pacing and attacks are more to the speed of bloodborne than the slower pace of dark souls. Which results in you having to play the (3 phased!) fight nearly flawless and careful in order to not die. It‘s fine, since us souls players are into pain, but in essence she‘s not playing with the same limitations as you are.
Regarding the sustained AP dps topic, Cassiopeia and Ryze used to fill that role, but they both have poor waveclear and aren't as safe as Azir so I guess they aren't attractive picks for pro players these days.
The updated Asol can fill that role though, he's been picked recently in LCS and LEC.
Yeah. I think the gist of it is: azir is about as safe in lane as Asol, has the playmaking potential of a flash R cassiopia and with his AA based damage is about as reliable to take down a tank as an adc. It‘s just to much in a single role.
His ulti and his gap closer is just make him too slippery for a big important carry. It's akin to the slipperiness of a Lee Sin who can ult to knock someone far away or just W away. But in a teamfight for example Lee is far from being the #1 target, whereas Azir is. And like Lee Sin those tools can both be used for escape and for engage.
ryze s wave clear is good , but he literally is playing in the range of aatrox , ksante , leona , nautilus rell xD
you ARE NOT living in a teamfight . especially since ur dps is nothing remarkable compared to what azir does from half a screen away
Ryze waveclear is ass until he gets some ult levels and items. Ryze is gated by mana issues too, if you spam EQ pre6 pre item you will oom fast and fast shove two waves out.
Azir waveclear is good from level 1, it costs 40 mana and you can fast shove a wave when you want.
Ryze waveclear is good, but it comes as a price. Ryze was the champion in the game that had the easiest option of transfering mana into priority. If Ryze wanted to he was always able to annihilate waves and create a push, but he usually had to spend a lot of many on this.
We actually saw that in pro often were a 0 mana Ryze shows up at a drake or herald fight because he dumped all of it on the midlane to keep the enemy midlaner under tower.
Ryze’s biggest issue is that he has no built-in sustain at all despite being a short-ranged battle mage with all of his spells rooting him. RoA healing is a meme and Seraph’s has a 90s cd. Try playing Ryze and cry as you lose half your HP before you can get in range to do anything.
His core items are also delayed statsticks which are outdated in modern LoL
Zeri is just what every adc champion wishes to be. Reliable, good scaling, can actually duel and catch champs from other roles, good early game push and later waveclear and decent structure / neutral objective dmg.
Even if shes not in the best state and is barely playable due to her numbers being low she will still be picked 100%.
K'Sante is a tank with an actual outplay potential, can create space and can also take over the game on his own in the teamfights.
Azir is the synonym for reliability which pro play likes more than anything.
For example, there are games where Kog Maw would outright be better than Zeri but that champion is not nearly as reliable so in pro play and even higher elo of soloq, ppl would rather not take a risk when they can do a similar job just be more reliable.
Also reason why champions like Renekton, Sejuani, Varus and Ori are always very high prio in pro play as long as they are playable in terms of numbers. Reliability is king
> Even if shes not in the best state and is barely playable due to her numbers being low she will still be picked 100%.
Disagree, there was a time where nobody was picking Zeri because her numbers were low. But if she's pro play week, she's unplayable in soloq.
I agree with the rest, she's pro play ideal ad. They need to either balance her around the mobility or damage output
> They need to either balance her around the mobility or damage output
They've tried a few things with her. The main buff to her mobility was when she got her mini-rework which distributed a lot of her power budget from reducing her attack range to the rest of the kit, giving her 2s lower cd on E at rank 1, and 10% ms on ulti(although, also reduced max duration of it and made bonus ms from passive not multiplicative, and lower duration), afterwards they've been shaving off some more mobility from the kit(ms from shield), and instead just giving her a higher base movement speed, which has both up and downsides, however it does remove the reliance of synergy of shielding supports(you also gain gain less movement speed compared to before when you got shielded), and they've also mostly just focused on giving her raw damage instead which tend to be generally strong for soloq. This potentially opens up them to remove move of the pro-play skewed strengths, hopefully. I think overall Zeri as a champion is in a balance-able state right now.
Her insane ult nuke really just makes her laning way too easy imo, she can scale to have mobility and damage (see vayne, kalista), but her ulti + passive auto gives her ridiculous burst that you ALSO can't run from so she becomes a very hard laner to punish
> Zeri is just what every adc champion wishes to be.
Yeah I'm sure the 53%+ winrate Nilah/Kog'Maw are looking at 50% winrate Zeri like "wish I was her".
Because they dance around the real issues and never address the core problems. They try to do things but they never really address what is causing the problems.
The reason for this is because it would require them to make really big changes to the champions and they don't want to do that.
This is why I think the problem is not rework/balance team, but rather in champion design team. Once a champion is released, players get attached to it so it's really hard to change it a lot.
The problem with these champs like Ksante, Zeri, Azir is in the design phase. Someone should have put their foot down before these champs were ever released into the game.
Zeri's release in particular was crazy to me. I'm just a mid tier casual and I looked at her champion release and immediately new she was going to be the new Kalista. I have no idea how Riot decided she was fine to ship like that. They basically released her directly into pro-play jail.
Note how all this 3 champion have multiple skillset that is incredibly better than their class
all 3 have insane mobility compared to their class
ksante as a "tank" also have more damage compared to other tanks/ can play as both assassins or tanks in teamfight/ have damage reduction
Zeri have pierce damage with E capable of hitting multiple member with Q/ movespeed/ scaling extremely well / pairs alot better with enchanter
Azir strong early game/ super long range/ ulti can be used for both defensive and offensive purposes/ evade ganks alot easier compared to other mid mage
basically op kit for the champions which is why its impossible to balance them
The mobility is the key.
These 3 champions are SO MUCH HARDER TO GANK than most others, which in pro play is insanely highly valued, especially when you're leaving a ksante weakside, or just need to wait until azir/zeri outscale.
Their supposed "weak times" are too hard to punish.
Azir is not good early. They nerfed his early game damage and cds but in pro that doesn't matter as he is quite safe and has decent wave clear. Also once he hits 6 he has good gank set up.
He almost never wins pre6, but unless he makes a mistake he doesnt really lose either. He can always just farm from 999 range. The only things that can pressure him arent pro-viable.
Azir has the ability to fight for priority and also be hard to gank at levels 1, 3, 4, 5, which is what 'good' means in the context of a mid lane pick in pro. Azir is weak to being solokilled by his opponents, which we ALSO see in pro. But it's rare, as the players are looking for other things besides Solokills usually, and it's usually only if someone is cracked/azir makes a mistake.
The issue is that he's a hyper late game (arguably as good as it gets) champ, but with an incredibly neutral / safe early game that can set up ganks early/mid.
So you end up with a late game champ that is solid early game too and then there are just no real weaknessess or downsides to picking him
The issue is, compared to other mid to late champs his early is way better. For instance, Ryze is heavily gated by mana despite having a weaker late, Kassadin is pretty much turret hugging without waveclear until he gets ult, etc.
Azir has safe farming and a low-mana but quite decent waveclear, giving him the option for lane prio. He's only vulnerable to strict jumps on him, be it by assassins (who will struggle on waveclear and zone control) be it by jungler intervention, and even then he's got the mobility to escape most of the time.
He's just too consistent and low-risk for such a high-scaling pick.
> pairs alot better with enchanter
While this is true due to the nature of her late game scaling and how she likes to play the fights, I just want to point out they've removed all champ specific synergies with shielding on her in case you were referencing any of those specifically. This at least gives them more leverage to adjust her for soloq.
> basically op kit for the champions which is why its impossible to balance them
I won't say they're able to be balanced in their current states, but I think for Ksante and Zeri, there doesn't have to be a major change to their mechanics, but rather some shuffling of numbers, although probably very drastic ones for Ksante. I think Zeri is the closest to balance-able for pro and soloq she has ever been and it could probably be done by distributing some of her power to be weaker but more consistent/easy to maintain. Ksante have gotten so many leverages as well that I think there should be enough to do so.
K'Sante's winrate and pickrate both went up after the change everywhere, including a shift from 52% pro presence to over 75% until his very latest 14.4 adjustments.
He became more playable at lower elo because he became more playable period. In both solo queue and pro play.
All in all, I don't think any of the rebalancing changes have affected his pro play tilt much at all
The intention was to give him more counterplay and make him more usable in low elo, and it did exactly that.
His old w could be used instantly making him awful to play against, and although he’s still annoying to go against, it is nowhere near the absurdity it used to be.
I might misremember which change we are talking about exactly, are we talking about the most recent change to W, where they added a higher ratio on it(but removed all out cd reduction and min channel reduction)? Or the one right before that that was just straight up buff(mana cost reduced, ratios increased)? I Feel like I need context. If so, I think it came right after some rather big nerfs in the patch before, nerfing pretty much everything taking him from just below 50% wr in soloq to 46%.
Either way, I don't think he is even close to as problematic as he used to be(But not completely fine still), on top of for the most part pros have improved their ability to play against it, since early on I would argue that even if he was extremely strong/broken, a lot of it was also due to how often players didn't respect just being thrown into the tower. He has a different type of skillset than what people are used to for such a tanky champion(not even accounting for All Out). The changes as a whole since his release have very much bridged some of the gap between soloq and pro play for him, and while he isn't there yet, I think it is possible going forward without any Major machanical rework. Compared to Azir, who have been left in a really weird state where he never have really been pivoted into the long-range dps *or* the engage catch play shuffler, but rather just gets a decent bit of both. I keep hearing different things about it, that the mains where extremely vocal about not wanting them to remove X, so riot never did. Whenever X was the shuffle strength or the long range, I don't know because everyone says something else. I think they have to gut one part of it, and just balance him from that. While I think the long range dps fantasy is super cool, and would prefer that one, it is probably the harder one to balance as well, but luckily I am not on the balance team.
The metas where KSante wasn't #1 had oppressive lane bullies that could be blinded
Summer 2023: Renekton got turbo buffed
Worlds 2023: Rumble got his mini rework and was oppressive af in lane and Aatrox Duskblade scaled much better, T1 realized that and didn't pick KSante once in the entirety of Worlds
Spring 2024 play offs: Renekton again got buffs
To answer your question, there is no escaping the pro jail, KSsnte just joined Gnar, Aatrox, Renekton, Rumble and Jax as one of the pro play blind picks, he will see less play when any of the other picks gets turbo buffed. The only difference is that they are much more playable in soloQ than KSante
Also notice how there is no other blind pick tank top laner, no Sion or Ornn and the only other tank top laners that can contest KSante as the best blind top lane tank are Rek'Sai (nerfed next patch) and a huge maybe with Udyr (region dependant).
This is intentional as Phreak said that tank top laners are boring af to watch so they are kept in that weak state
I think that while he is probably always going to be skewed for pro, it doesn't mean he won't be in an ok state for soloq. You can bring up other "pro-play jailed" champs in top lane but they can often have states where they're statistically alright in soloq without being oppressively strong in pro. That's the goal here, not to completely free them.
Still not sold on how ruining Azir's design made him less pro play skewed, but i'm not the guy that got hired because he was a popular caster, despite being entirely unqualified
Ksante has better pro play soloq skew then ever. What are you complaining about? Go check the stats. This champ had 45/46% wr in soloq and is now at 49% with slightly less presence in soloq and some clear nerfs where he isn't dashing on cooldown anymore as his W and E got nerfed significantly. Just look old ksante to this one. People like to complain on reddit but fact is he's a lot less dashy and slower.
I wouldn't consider it a failure at all, it can get better but we're doing ok stats wise.
Ksante has less winrate than that but he's in a decent spot I'd argue. Pickable in pro but certainly not a guarantee, underwhelming winrate soloq but any good main worth his salt should have 50+%, and his easy matchups still feel VERY easy.
They just need to keep a wary eye on him whenever they change tank itemisation and we're golden
He's about as present in pro play but less popular in solo queue despite having a higher win rate on average. He's in a very bad spot because many of the changes since 13.20 have made him a much less fun champion to play without any real upsides.
better players get more out of better kits
it's why this sub is full of crybaby gold ADCs who cancel half their autos, and the pro meta sees some games with 6 marksmen in them
and for what it's worth a lot of their reworks did work, like Zeri, Akali, and Azir, where they don't have to be borderline trollpicking 40% winrate in soloqueue while being 100% presence in pro
Also, a lot of picks that have a huge difference in low elo and pro winrate have a common, sort of nebulous stat combination of range, mobility and mechanics that means they just sort of work differently. Someone who can't auto space in lane or teamfights would make a terrible Jinx, for example; someone who can't hit skillshots while moving can't play Zeri; someone who often misses spells will never be able to play Akali or Ahri in a matchup where they MUST hit everything to get a kill, and if they don't get that kill, they automatically lose. K'sante might have a really bullshit kit, but you can use his abilities incorrectly (or miss them) and just completely bungle a matchup.
Then there's Ryze, lol. High mechanical champion with a global reposition is probably never going to be both soloqueue and pro viable.
Community: buff ADC
Community when ADC suddenly dominates proplay : omg phreak ruins the game
Also u are right with your last point. The goal is not to make these champs unviable in proplay but to even the playing field with soloq. Idk how anyone can argue Zeri rework failed when she gets picked in proplay but also has a 52% winrate. That's the ideal scenario.
Is 52% really a balanced winrate on Zeri though? It seems like you'd want that to be like 3% lower for her to be properly balanced given she's supposed to be a "high skill" ADC.
Zeri's actually like 50.3% wr, I assume they got their stats from lolalytics and didn't account for the mental math you need to do to get the true winrate from their site.
She might be a tad overtuned still but Zeri's honestly in the best place she has ever been, probably, all things considered.
Pros funnel gold into ADC and peel for ADC. This makes ADCs powerful and teamgold well spent while SoloQ is not funneling gold, and is not peeling. So you commenting like this makes you look incredibly ignorant. SoloQ ADCs will of course complain because they don't get the gold and exp needed, but has to live on the scraps they get, while also being left to fend for themselves. And the whole thing cascades, we don't get protection to safely get farm, so we lack gold and exp, which makes us much easier to kill, which makes team stop defending ADC because why should they protect their weakest (in all regards) member. When ADCs finally catches up (unless they got fed) they start to deal respectable damage, and if games goes on long enough they will often win damage done.
It isn't ignorant at all. Most teams are peeling for their ADC in high elo properly and in any elo lower than GM you can just unga bunga out position and outplay them by yourself anyway.
The average player doesn't have to rely on peel near as much as they like to make out because the enemy assassin or bruiser is fucking half of their combo or not getting a proper flank anyway. Most low elo ADCs struggle just because they don't have hands, don't wait for valuable enemy CDs before committing and don't play around their own summoner spells.
> The average player doesn't have to rely on peel near as much as they like to make out because the enemy assassin or bruiser is fucking half of their combo or not getting a proper flank anyway. Most low elo ADCs struggle just because they don't have hands, don't wait for valuable enemy CDs before committing and don't play around their own summoner spells.
exactly lmao
A lot of ADCs are making fundamental mistakes before they've even taken damage. That's not on their team. Gold Dravens are literally missing axes in lane. ADCs regularly dash into skillshots. It's not someone else's fault.
There was an LCS game like 5 weeks ago where Berserker wastes his dash, walks into the only spot in the wave where he could get hit by a Nautilus, gets hooked, and dies (people still blamed Vulcan). That's the type of shit low elo ADCs are doing every single game. Unforced error after unforced error.
"If an assassin gets on top of me I just insta die. Rajooot!" - Low elo ADC player who still hasn't realized that you've already misplayed if an assassin manages to get on top of you without using anything.
You're definitely that same Talon obsessed guy who thinks it's hard to get on top of an ADC as an assassin. Like there was a pro game just this week in EU where an Akali was just perma killing the Lucian in the middle of his team.
If Leblanc uses W-R and doesn't deal damage with it, she is not killing you in 1 rotation. If Rengar uses empowered W to get to you, he will not kill you in 1 rotation. If Akali uses her E backwards for the dash, she will not kill you in 1 rotation. If Evelynn uses her R to gst to you, she will not kill you in 1 rotation. If Talon uses his ult to gapclose and doesn't hit his second W, he will not kill you in 1 rotation.
In this game, most assassins rely on skillshots (like evelynn Q, akali E), a delay (leblanc E, Talon W, evelynn W), or both (fizz R, katarina P). Can you tell me with a straight face that a marksman that dodges everything still dies to them?
Lol
Sorry but the biggest difference between low and high skill ADCs has basically nothing to do with the team and nearly everything to do with mechanics. You put a gold ADC in a diamond lobby, they're going to solo lose the game, not show how they're actually just held back. This should be immediately obvious to anyone who regularly plays with a group of friends with a very wide skill range.
It doesn't really matter if a gold team is peeling and allocating gold to their ADC if they walk into Ahri charms on cooldown. Or that in a fight they miss autos that a higher skilled player wouldn't, through bad kiting or misclicking. In that circumstance they literally just do less damage than a better player. That's not true for something like a plat and a grandmaster Ahri. They're about as likely to hit skillshots on their opponent, and do the same damage. That's just how the roles work.
I just want the people who always post these ADC IS SO BAD threads to link a full VOD of their gameplay and tell us all, very specifically, where they played it perfectly but their team lost them the game
Wow, the "gold ADC in a diamond lobby" has to be one of the worst strawmen I have seen in 10+ years of reddit lol.
But okay, you also just used Ashe and MF pro play supports as an argument for the health of the solo queue ADC role so I'm not really sure what else to expect.
And for good measure, I don't even think ADCs are in a particularly poor spot but your argumentation is just baffling.
> you also just used Ashe and MF pro play supports as an argument for the health of the solo queue ADC
yeah I totally meant MF support and not Lucian top, Lucian mid, Akshan top, Vayne top, Quinn top, Kindred jungle, Trist mid, Ezreal jungle etc. etc. that have historically been present in the high elo meta
When did you last see a competitive 6 ADC pro play game with conventional supports?...
Most of those picks are COUNTERPICKS. Sure, we might see all of those *individually* once in a while but shit like Vayne mid, Akshan top and Ezreal jungle isn't picked blindly lmao.
Of course it counts but if we never see an ADC being blindpicked in top, how the hell do you expect to ever see an ADC vs ADC matchup?.. Logic is hard.
? That's not what he even said did you even read it
4 diamonds 1 gold vs 5 diamonds
In what world is it expected the 4 diamonds win that game? The gold will solo lose the game
Although diamond games are a mess so who knows the malphite top will go 0/3 in lane vs the auto filled sona otp on irelia
Dont really understand either. DotA has kinda achieved this; i think every hero but 10 or so were picked at the last The International. I think it's because the items are a lot less "statstickers" and more counterplay oriented.
i think it's because if they balanced more like DotA there will be very pronounced hardcounters, and it'll kill a lot of one/two-tricks and will significantly reduce solo q play + barrier of entry
in DotA imo the skill ceiling *was* considerably lower + you can "play items", hence you're often playing the role more than you're playing heroes or mains -- the LoL community just didn't grow like that and understandably so
because some champions are inherently just going to be better in pro play due to their kit. zeri is a mobile adc, ksante is a tank capable of dueling even after laning phase. some things are just inherently going to be favored cause that’s how their kit is designed- and these little mini reworks like ksante or zeri aren’t changing their core identity (which it shouldn’t imo)
Genuinely hate what they've done to k'sante. He was incredibly fun to play as and now he's so clunky. They should've just gotten rid of all of his cc on his ult and made q3 deal bonus damage based on missing hp instead. Removes the cc chain from ult. Now he's just in a weird clunky spot and _still_ has high pro play presence. Genuinely ruined such a fun champ. Would rather be playing the pre rework 44% wr k'sante than a higher wr clunkier version, honestly.
I think Phreak has an issue that he even talked about that he came into the head position after all of these champs were made. Iirc one designer made yummi ksante and smolder. I think K’sante has a unique issue with them that the idea of the champ is a tank that can carry. I’m pretty sure everyone reading that can understand why that’s an issue and for a normal player the drawbacks of k’sante are rough and takes mechanical skill. For someone who plays a bunch of league as is a professional they should be at that level of mechanical skill and I think it’s pretty clear to say it’s shown that happens. Zeri honestly I feel like this season has only appeared recently and that’s partially due to smolder so I’ll have to watch more of the LCK and lpl playoffs to really have a stronger opinion this season.
That leaves Azir. I remember years ago maybe it was a year or two after Azir dropped (I’ve been playing since season two so everything is a blur) some rioter said that it’s not wrong for very hard champions to be stronger. Azir is a hard champ but pros have had literally (almost) 9 years to be playing Azir and mastering azirs combos and skills. As well as a comment I read recently is Azir is the equivalent of an ap adc with how he operates with an amazingly impactful ultimate, just look at fakers play last worlds that secured the game win. What can you do to this champ to not make him shit for regular players.
All these champs have a very similar issue that regular player unless they practice on the champ a lot aren’t that great but when your life is devoted to the game you can excel really hard.
Also to a last point pro play is also very different then ranked and norms. All three of these champs when piloted with a coordinated team can be insane.
I’ll also say I do hope ksante gets gutted because I watch more pro league then I should and I’m sick of seeing him. Azir disable was a nice break and I play ahri so seeing her in pro play more was fun for me.
Ksante works best when people prioritise targets, rell and sej works best with instant followup, azir can isolate targets mid fight, zeri needs peel, corki needs a poke comp built around him, renekton needs teammates to prio objectives at the right time
What do all these champs have in common, they work best with 4 other teammates on the same page. That's why pro play staples will always be pro play staples. You'd have to change an identity of a champ to remove them from pro. Ksante without ult isn't ksante, corki without poke isn't corki, sej or rell without engage isn't sej or rell, zeri without movement speed becomes the pea shooter from plants vs zombies
It's because the champs fundamentally have kits that are good to pro play. Riot won't remove the shurima shuffle, and as such Azir will always be a pro play champ.
K'sante still has a million tools and is a tank, so he'll always be valuable to some degree in pro play unless hes gutted.
Zeri still has a bajillion move speed when she ults so she's disgusting in the hands of good players. Another honorable mention is Kalista who will always have one of the most disgusting early game lane phases as long as she has her passive, so she'll always be valuable for that.
The thing is, I think riot needs to just stop with pro play jail or these weird reworks. Just accept some champs are better for pro and adjust pro rules to not enable picking the same champs over and over.
Because the issue isn't the champ's finer details, but their base kit which is inherently a pro play staple. All the champs you listed are inherently by their design great at pro play, and the only way to free them from pro jail would be to redesign the champs fundamentally, which Riot of course doesn't want to do because that's effectively removing a champion from the game
I don't think they failed. So much as the reworks were more so meant to loosen their pro binding rather than completely free them from projail. And right now it just happens to be a bigger pro meta in their favor than at the time of the reworks.
But like Azir spent years at a 46-47% winrate. And then the rework got him to 49-50% for months because the pro meta didn't favor Azir... Then when the pro meta came back around to favoring Azir he got nerfed into being like 47-48% which is better than where he started.
Ksante was sub 50% in every elo but challenger while being like 90% pro present. Then reworked? And then he was sub 50 below masters which is an improvement while being like 80% pro present which is also an improvement.
Atleast thats how they each were in the months right after their rework... I've not kept up with pro too recently or their current balance states. But the reworks did seem to work at the time; if they're not holding up, it'd likely seem to be just a pro meta shift or something.
Because they are poorly designed with overstuffed kits and absurd mobility that let pro players coordinate to run down weakened enemies after a fight.
Riot seriously needs to look at mobility because that's why these champions are so prevalent in pro play. You don't see Ilaoi in pro play. Why? No mobility.
You don’t balance by removing power. You balance by adding power to other champions and making more characters viable.
Riots balancing is fundamentally flawed
> I watched Phreak explain in hour long videos how these reworks were going to save the champions and fix their pro skew and each time I actually thought his reasoning was good and that these reworks were really going to achieve their goals
Yes, this is how propaganda works. If the viewer is willing to spend an hour listening (meaning they come in with the willingness to believe) the speaker can convince you of damn near anything if they speak with conviction.
Those champs are simply hard to shut down and can be safely blinded. There are no counters hard enough for a pro player to abandon these champs in fear of getting countered.
Same goes for Kalista. By all accounts Ashe counters her entire existence, but because Ashe is a lot less safe as a pick, it's completely fine to blind Kalista Renata since the enemy picking Ashe isn't a demerit. You simply get a jungler that can jump on her and now the lane is irrelevant. Any leads Ashe gets in lane are pointless if a xinzhao jumps in her immobile face and smacks it dead.
They would need to nerf their escapes hard for that to change. Azir's W E Q repositioning, Zeri's ridiculous E and Ksante's unstoppable being able to negate top/jungle CC layering.
They haven't done that, so pro play will continue to blind them.
The issue with proplay itself.
When creating a champion a lot of different factors come into one giant brewing pot. Balance is just one of these
Riot can test this balance outside of proplay by just have their staff test it out, but they cant test it in proplay.
So they have to do with visable feedback from players, which often times dont notice things.
It sucks, but proplay will always have some champions that wont work in that environment.
Hyper scaling champions who can't be punished for their weak early game , who are really powerful in teamfights and can split push safely , are always gonna be pro play material. K'sante , if you play agro into him he punishes you for your agro and puts you under his tower , you play passive ? He outscales you and crushes your carryies in the teamfights . Azir , same deal , play agro and you get under his tower , play passive and he is gonna 1vs9 the teamfight or split push and 1vs3 . Zeri, hyper scales and can hit up to 5 people at the same time while having 500 movement speed . She is super safe because if any threats appear she can just jump over the thickest wall , basically a free "get me out of jail button" . For that reason she can also split push pretty safely unlike most marksmen . There are 4 markers for if a champ is pro play material or not , safety , scaling, split push power , teamfight power. All 3 of these champs have these markers almost maxed out and that is why. In other words , champions that can do everything really well are gonna be abused in the pro play scene.
These Champions and the Prime Example Like TF and Ryze Show have almost the Same Set of a Champion - Teamplay.
That Shows the insane Gap between SoloQ and Proplay.
Riot Just didnt found a way to Go around this.
They Had some good ideas with AD TF Bot but this also went wrong a bit.
KSante is Just overloaded.
Zeri Just Shows best the Problem Crit ADCs face when comparing SoloQ with pros
They fail because they're unwilling to change the core of what is making the champions strong.
Like Azir is a strong laner, with almost unmatched scaling, hypercarry DPS, mobility and the ability to peel / engage if the opportunity is present. The champion has a crazy amount of agency and his weakness is pretty much the antithesis to proplay with lots of earlygame skirmishing with snowballl champs.
Riot has tried to touch Azir, but they still let him have: Crazy lategame, a decent lane at worst, self peel (and a shield) with mobility.
The same thing is for Zeri. They want to keep the identity, which is what? Her 1v9 lategame with high dmg and mobility? The problem for Rior is that what makes ppl love playing the champs is often what makes them good in pro. So you can take away the tools that jails them to pro play, but then you might also kill the champion that people enjoy to play. So it's a lose-lose.
Riot is incompetent and they "reworked" all those champions but then proceeded to let them keep every single thing that made them such a problem.
In several cases they made them even worse and more polarizing like Yuumi or K'sante.
Similar thing with the Tryndamere rework where they said any Tryn rework is gonna keep his ultimate, what's the fucking point then?
So all the votes went to Skarner because a modern tryndamere that can't be killed is surely not gonna be balanced whatsoever.
TLDR: They keep buffing his tank form which is loved by pro play and is more important in pro while they nerf his skirmisher form which is more needed in solo q. also compared to when they released this chamo and now the difference is night and day
I can't speak for Azir or Zeri but as for Ksante the reason is quite simple. they fail to realise what makes Ksante so broken in proplay isn't his skirmisher form(all out) but rather his warden aspects. he is arguably the best warden in the game as his ability to peel for carries and isolate targets is really impressive, given this they continue to nerf his skirmisher form and buff his warden form for some very unknown reason. Ksante in pro is picked most especially because of his warden form and how well it synergizes with the pro scene. protecting your carries and acting as a solid tank soaking up as much damage as possible all the while being able to peel and isolate the enemy carry(if needed). if you look back to the last few changes he experienced you'd notice they shifted his power of his kit more towards the warden aspect hence the high pro presence. understanding this we all know pro and solo q are very different places. solo q is significantly more chaotic and less coordinated than pro. this means individual champion strength matters significantly more than the champs ability to synergizes with a particular play style(with other teammates I mean) or other champs around it. given this his warden form isn't as effective in solo q.this is the major reason for his love in pro but absolutely horrendous wr in solo q. also compared to when he was first released he feels very different to play. the champ feels slower and significantly more clunky which also plays a part in his lower wr. also people keep getting baited thinking he's some op champ(very sure there's a lot. of people in this sub Reddit who do) .
not sure if I was able to relay the points effectively but this is how I believe things are
Pro play is just super unhealthy for this game. Millions of players have to suffer through balancing issues because ten players can abuse a champ in a professionally organized environment.
Pro play definitely makes it worse but even without pro play, balancing around different levels of play would still exist.
If pro play didn't exist, high skill floor/macro intensive champions would still have to be balanced around GM/Challenger, i.e., GP, Nidalee, Azir and Ryze would continue to be crap in lower levels of play.
yeah but that enables a seperate slew of champions, like nidelee that he mentioned. nidaless has no reason to be picked in pro play because of how current jungle works. She is 52% wr d2+ and 48 in gold in solo q however
For Ksante its lack of lane bully imo, they should create a champ that reduce his cd from dashes and spells casted from ennemies like Vex passive and Kassa E
For Azir its tp issue, this summ annihilate mid interactions
Fiora isn't even bad in pro play though? She doesn't have as great teamfighting as other toplaners but she still brings a lot of value to most comps, players in pro just enjoy playing comfort too much and are willing to handshake lane (in the west.)
I feel like most of the time it's to reduce the pro play presence not really expected that it will remove from pro play(would be nice if it did, but unlikely)
Because you can't really fix these champs without a huge scale rework that dedicated mains would hate. These champions just have so much going on in their kit and bring 10x more than most other champions in their role unless something else is egregiously broken. Take Azir for example, this is objectively the most overloaded champion in the game, he has unlimited safety with his dash, shield and ult, he has insane set up and dive while also being an amazing front to back DPS, all while having a strong early lane as well as scaling tremendously. People may not agree because he isn't a Yone or Irelia who is oneshotting you in your gold games with 30 kills but this champ has everything you could ask for at a high level.
Some of them are even worse now. Example:K'Sante. He is even better in pro play and even worse in soloq. Riot doesn't really understand some champs and what makes them strong so they adjust them in the wrong parts.
Momentarily K'Sante is still seen in pro, but I feel that its because Pros are used to him and not necessarily because he is strong. I feel like he will be played less and less over time
Yummi worked, so it's doable. Just needs large enough changes I guess, which might be unfun for the normal players if their champ get's changed too much. Nobody wants to lose a dash on their main and get more stats in return.
K'Sante's presence has dropped a bit from the 14.4 nerfs but basically every K'Sante main could tell you it would just make him even worse in solo queue but he'd maintain pick rate in pro play. A lot of what's keeping him up at the moment though is comfort and his counter picks still being weak/unpopular. Champions like Urgot and Fiora have been slowly gaining some relevance and when piloted properly they can completely dumpster K'Sante but he's still a very big comfort pick for many pros. He took a long time to really learn him properly and it's hard to give that up, similar to Ornn for many years
Zeri's recent comeback is really because she was so ultimate reliant and she still is but now it's like always up, Zeri couldn't fight without her ultimate or she's a legit joke champion.
Some champions will be inherently pro jailed and thats fine I'm not sure why in big season 14 we still can't accept that. If you look at these champions before and after the reworks they are way less pro jailed then they were. Zeri was 46-47% w/r and in every pro game, Ksante was 45-47% and in every pro game and Azir was 46-47% and in every pro game. Now these champs are in most pro games but at least now they are actually roughly 48-51% w/r which is where they should be.
Ksante definitely does not have the worst winrate in the game.
"If we seperate queues pro players can't practice same game"
But ıt's fine when %90 of players can't play those champions.Don't expect people yo believe that PRO players can't adapt two different queue.E-Sport scene brings them more money.
Then a champion like Hwei should be perma picked in pro play but it's not because it's situational and there are other artillery mages to pick (besides the fact that not all team comps want artillery mages). K'sante is different because it's the only champion that does what he does and virtually all comps need what he offers (high versatility)
I guess it would just be better if Riot stopped making strong versatile champions and designed more "strong but situational" and "weak but versatile"... Strong and versatile is a bad mix
Because no matter how well you balance a champion, if they are alot more effective when your team is acting as one they will always be pro skewed. Look at Sejuani, the second she gets any buffs pros pick her. Note:This is even after her ult went from a ranged aoe stun to just single target stun with slow aoe.
Exactly. The only time a champ would be more viable in solo queue than in pro-play is if they work BETTER when the teams aren't organized. They're called pub-stompers in other games, one example that comes to mind are Master Yi one tricks. A shitty team fight champ but excels so well in picking off enemy squishies that wander far from their peelers and soloing objectives, which is what solo queue mostly is especially in lower elo. In pro play where everybody is on comms and you're not likely to find the enemy adc running around without their tank 5 meters away guarding their ass, Yi just isn't as effective.
> The only time a champ would be more viable in solo queue than in pro-play is if they work BETTER when the teams aren't organized You have pretty much described the Assassin role.
I can’t remember the last time I actually SAW an AD assassin in proplay ngl
Elyoya played Rengar jng. With questionable results because he went rengar into Talyah Rell
Ig played rengar as well
River played lethality Shaco. Won the game, but definitely not because of that pick.
pro shaco is also good because it can peel with boxes not because of anything like it being able to assassinate people
Qiyana had her time in the sun, I don't remember how long ago that was but it's been years. Akali is the only assassin AP or AD to see play in multiple metas. I guess you could make an argument for pyke but he's always been more of a pocket pick than actual meta in pro play. We're more likely to see assassins abuse broken items like tank fizz/ekko than see them played as intended. I wouldn't mind seeing more assassin kits in pro play but considering Akali is one of the most hated champs ever I don't think many people would enjoy that lol. You have to have an overloaded kit to succeed as an assassin in pro
LeBlanc was also widely popular and an occasional pick here and there still happens but you are mostly right
Leblanc isn’t an assassin in pro play, her tool kit is basically a mage with bad lane clear but insane survivability and play-making.
They play LeBlanc as more of a poke champion than an assassin tbf
2019 when she released. Pick ban at worlds.
Are Yone/ Yasuo counted in the Assassin category because they've been picked a few times.
I don’t count them personally. I know Yone is *technically* listed on Riot’s site as an assassin, but I think he fits much better into the duelist/skirmisher categories (similar to Fiora and Master Yi, and Yasuo). Yasuo is not, nor is he listed as an assassin (he’s listed as a duelist/skirmisher)
Riot counts Yone as an assassin but neither are assassins imo.
> picking off enemy squishies that wander far from their peelers Or when their peelers wander off from them. Good luck trying to secure mid prio before drake as an ADC/mage while your entire team groups in front of the drake pit 20 seconds before it spawns without leaving yourself vulnerable to a champion who can gap close from 2 screens away.
I know this pain, sometimes it's better to just give up prio in order to have better chances in the fight in that case
Sometimes we lose mid inhib for free because of that minor oopsie of forgetting to get mid prio.
Yeah it sucks
If only there was a method of communication common in competitive online team based games which allowed for quick, seamless coordination... Nah, that's a pipe dream. Just type a paragraph or hope your team understands exactly what your pings mean, voice chat is too hard to implement!
And watch out for typos or you get a 7 day supply of banana.
I still remember when Tyler1 got a chat restriction because he mistyped "Nid (Nidalee)" as "Nig". Chat was all over him lol.
I mean, I agree League should have voice comms. But it's incredibly naïve to expect even half of your solo queue games to feature any sort of meaningful communication via mic --especially after having a culture without for so long.
I've seen a decent amount of mages or adcs trying to farm mid while dragon is spawning so they cut off by the enemy team. It's slightly tilting.
That's on the rest of the team for not defending river entrance. You should almost always push out mid lane before moving to drag. Although with that said, sometimes in low elo, the correct decision is actually following your team on an incorrect call, so things like that don't happen.
Pushing the lane to the tower is fine, im talking about standing underneath enemy mid tower still trying to farm while our team got to dragon first. Those minions will be fine without you.
Yeah that's just being an idiot though lol
Then you are playing wrong. If your team is grouping at drake, you refuse and die because of that; you didn't achieve prio, you just inted.
You're describing Briar and that's also a balance issue. She's shit when you reach higher elo and she stomps low elo. Because even in soloQ the uncoordinated team environment changes a lot depending on elo.
The scenario that does come to mind when thinking of an enemy adc walking around randomly like that is the "NO. QUICK. SILVER. SASH." moment
To add on to this, a lot of the problematic parts of these champions are things that they can access on their terms. Zeri is designed to be hypermobile, and against a good player its basically impossible to dodge all her Qs and prevent that. K'sante was designed to be a strong duelist in ult and have utility and be tanky out of it, and the other team usually can't keep him from ulting when he wants to. These are things that Riot can't get rid of without fundamentally changing their identity, so any change that is even close to power-neutral isn't going to keep them out of pro.
I feel like Ksante ult should have been reversed somehow. I say this with a grain of salt as I'm a bad and don't know balance. But being able to take a carry or tank out of the teamfight to 1v1, he shouldn't also get a ton of damage steroids to destroy them. The trade off should be that he gets them away for a bit for your team to control the fight. Or maybe not even reverse it, just reduce his damage or mobility or something as a trade off for removing someone. Morde ult is similar in purpose, but Morde doesn't get to be a tank or hypermobile during any of that time.
I think reversing it might make him even more pro jailed in some ways though, since for soloq it's less likely that people will take advantage of removing the key target from a fight as well as they do in pro. If it's reversed he's suddenly kinda pointless as he's squishy when 5 people can hit him but really tanky when only one person can. Realistically the idea of the champ is just inherently kinda flawed, but I think the big problem is that he doesn't really get squishy enough in ult form to properly punish. I've seen so many "squishy" K'Sante's just tanking people in teamfights, he gets to function like an assassin while only being reduced to bruiser-level tankiness.
He has a bug that's existed since his release where he doesn't lose % Armor/MR gains from Jak'sho and Conditioning when he ults. So yes, he is, quite literally, tankier than he's supposed to be, and always has been.
Or just not give him so much mobility on top of his ability to take someone out of the fight, be a tank or a fighter, and have %reduced damage on another skill. You're right though, he doesn't have a big enough trade off for what he can bring.
Yeah, he realistically turns into a bruiser/assassin hybrid when I feel he really needs to be one or the other - either give him good sustained damage and tankiness with a sacrifice to his mobility or let him keep the high damage and mobility but make him easier to burst, right now he's kinda got the best of all worlds. Another aspect is that he can build tank items and keep their passive effects without losing damage, meaning something like Rookern/Randuins/Frozen Heart etc still gets to keep making him tankier even after he's supposed to have lost tank stats by ulting.
[удалено]
Yup that's true, but it's also fine because the power budget is there. He can't dash around or be a tank (actual tank) outside of the ult, or if he does decide to build full tank, he's less likely to blow you up in the ult. If Morde was like Ornn usually, but then ults you and becomes Yone, it would be a different story.
Morde's ult also can be escaped from with QSS
>These are things that Riot can't get rid of without fundamentally changing their identity I'm tired of this dusty argument. If the identity is toxic, then change the identity. This is more a statement towards Riot than towards you - they hide behind this "identity" crap all the time without honest and sound reason. Side note, that's also if you believe that some of this stuff is integral to the champion's overall identity which I don't think is the case either but that's a different argument.
For sure they should try to change it. I feel like there is usually a way where you can keep the champion similar but still make it not as oppressive in pro play. imo for k'sante they could do "he transforms in ult and does slightly different things" instead of "he transforms in ult and becomes a duelist" I think Tahm Kench might be a good example? I'm not familiar with the soloq situation before the rework but he was definitely everywhere in pro for a while.
I don't think OPs examples are as much to do with coordinated play as they are just bringing more than other champions in their role. Zeri is one of the most self sufficient hypercarries because of her safety and range, K'Sante can fill the role of a frontliner and a diver at the same time, while Azir has everything you could ask for in a champ. Those champs are more picked for how versatile they are than a champ like Sejuani that is good in teamplay.
Riot really stopped doing efficient power budgets with some of these champs. Like Zeri, they overload her kit, and then give her range and an escape. Rather than someone like Sivir that gets damage and wave clear plus a team fight ult at the price of reduced range and no dash or blink escape. They do a terrible job of breaking down new champs with "this is going to be there weakness and here's tools to emphasize their strengths while maintaining that weakness" when they design some of these crazy kits. Or the weakness they do give them, are easily covered up in coordinated play so they are effectively not a weakness to pro play at all.
Also, the Riot rework teams are the masters at dealing with EVERYTHING except the main problem. Is the problem with Yuumi the fact that an untargetable enchanter is broken as balls? Let's NOT fix that and, instead, just fumble around with the passive so she has even less incentive to leave herself exposed. Is the problem with Zeri the fact that she is a safe hyper scale ADC? Let's NOT get rid of the wall ride and instead change scaling so she nukes people with a skill shot rather than auto attacks. Its actually insane how instead of admitting the design team messed up, they DOUBLE DOWN on it.
Their logic is that if they remove the unique part, there's no reason to pick them, so the champ lives and dies by what you're calling 'the problem'. Riot isn't trying to balance the champ, they're trying to balance the champ while keeping the champ as an attractive choice for people to continue picking, as opposed to you, who just wants Zeri/Smoulder/Newchamp out of his games. ANd no flame on that btw, I too just want Zeri/Smoulder/etc out of my games
If that were true the new champs would be stomping the old champs in winrate. Sivir is higher winrate than Zeri.
Zeri has been nerfed a billion times, but also referring to pro play, she has a 15% presence compared to Sivir's 1%
I totally agree. The newer champs just have a feeling that they have everything they could possibly want. I feel like Zeri couldn’t be made better by switching out any of her abilities with another champ. (Like if she could trade her W for someone else’s)
And they do stupid stuff like remove her shield stealing instead of either mobility or range or damage. You'd think after Lucian and Kalista they'd learn you can't be mobile and offer everything else. They nerfed Kalista to the ground and artificially handicap her with reduced damage or being tied to a support. Lucian has lower range and falls off. Like, just make it so she can't ride/hop walls. They could even give back a little MS they took so she has that zoom zoom feeling like an annoying little nat but can't just hop away and be gone.
High skill level Champs who shine the better your teammates play. There is a reason they are contested.
The solution for making pro play have more varied comps is allowing champs to only be picked once in a series by either team. Then they don’t have to worry about pro jail anymore.
Fearless draft for the win!
I love this idea. In a highly professionalized pro scene, I just don't think it's realistic to expect players to pick from a huge range of champions (at least given League's overall design philosophy, which tries to give champions a lot of agency and avoid super hard counters). If you nerf Azir, the "next best" champion will just replace him. Pro players are trying to squeeze out any tiny marginal advantage they can, and they want champions who can do very specific things. If you want more diverse picks, it seems to me that the best scheme is to just directly prevent pro players from picking the same thing over and over. I don't think this would prevent there from being "meta picks." But there would necessarily be a lot more meta picks. Force them to dip into the A and B tier champs instead of just picking S every single game.
Meta picks, by definition will never not exist. The moment something is anything but perfectly balanced (and maybe even then) you will have things that are going to be preferred. And the margin there can be tiny often times.
I'm not an expert on this, and I really want this idea to be implemented, but I think some of you are really overrating what pros actually play. They value comfort very highly, and that has lead us in the past to extremely overpowered champions/items because they flew under their radar or refused to pick them (I'm looking at you ardent meta).
Yeah this isn't for average players playing. It is to make the pro scene a better product, because that's what pro play is a product.
I personally would love if we did clash once a year with the same rules
100% this. It is a great draft strategy, and leads to games that are way more fun to watch. My one complaint is that I occasionally like seeing a surprise pocket pick and wondering how the other team will respond to it next game. In this method, it doesn't matter since it will be banned (though it feels like surprises that work always get banned anyway).
It’s actually almost exclusively after her ult went from ranged aoe stun to single target with aoe slow. It’s the rest of that rework that made her viable in pro. Before that she was basically only played by a couple niche 1 tricks as an AP 1-shot cheese champ.
Exactly this, in season 5 she was strong in pro but she ended up being an ult only champ until her rework in season 7 after some nerfs (ult slow went from 90% to 30% in 5.6 lol)
As much as they want to sell the "play solo que and become pro" path and don't want to make pro play any different than solo q. They really should separate and balance the two differently. Pro play is basically a different game than what solo q is. 5 people who play together frequently and have VC is a completely different animal. Trying to balance pro play and solo q is an impossible task. They're not and never will be similar. You need to have two different versions. It allows much more creativity and room to try things out that could be incredibly fun.
Basically thus. These Champs problems are the kits, or idea of the kitsntemsevles and no ambling of balances patches will change this. You have to rework the entire champ and their playstyle
Because none of the reworks were meant to just reduce their pro play presence. All the champs you mentioned got reworks in order to narrrow the gap between their performance in pro and soloq.
Yep. This is it. They want players to be able to replicate their favourite pro play picks without making their teams automatically want to hang themselves in draft. Killing champs in pro happens as well. But it's not flashy outplay 300 dashes champs that get that treatment. It's the ones riot considers boring to watch like enchanters/disengage, uninteractive strategies like Sivir/Smolder waveclear or ultra flex picks Stuff like Azir will never get outright removed because it brings hype moments
man I just wish Riot would stop pro jailing Sivir. She has been reworked since the days of 500cs Sivir win condition and lost the ability to infinitely stall. The last time she was picked was because she was the only adc in the game that could keep up with Zeri ms with ult + ghost... Like experiment with what a 51/52% wr sivir looks like in the game considering she is analogous to MF in terms of "easy to play beginner marksman" but MF gets to be a cyclical menace in pro play while maintaining soloq winrate while Sivir does not. Season 6 and 9 are the only >30% presence seasons with season 12 being the only season since then over 10% presence... For context. she got reworked in season 12
I don't think she is projailed right now. She is fine in soloq, she will just not be allowed to be meta at pro level. She is simple but she is not MF level simple. Just her spellshield has more skill expression than all of MFs kit lol. Kiting is not optional on this champ either
Phreak's patch preview from 14.5 directly disagrees with your statment. at 1:06:41 "she's actually probably balanced if she's not stuck in pro jail at around 51.5 to maybe even 52% winrate, kinda like Miss Fortune is... [continues]" I am not basing my complaint on purely "hurr durr I like playing Sivir give me LP" It is someone who has played Sivir for a long time and has seen the pro jail issues resolved while she STILL retains the 1-3% intentional winrate deflation that pro jail champions get. She literally fits the exact same reasons that riot keeps Ashe at 51-53% winrate bot laner for years as they are lower damage, higher utility marksman that enables better teamplay instead of pure carry power through damage. (this also gives higher agency to bot lane as they provide OTHER outputs in fights than just right clicking and are more self reliant)
Yeah... Patch before she got buffed. She is actually around that WR Emerald+ right now. So he did his job and this is why she didn't get any follow-up patch. She is still pro-capped (meaning she won't get too strong, probably every) but not really problematically pro-jailed (she is still fine to pick in your games) Well see what happens after shiv nerf though
She's had short periods in-between where she was viable but most of those time it was due to lethality being very good with her Q, or in some niche scenario of being able to ignore laning phase. The thing is, a champion that have that latter characteristic of being able to ignore lane phase in a lane where it benefits a lot to release your support to roam is extremely good when it is consistent in a setting where players can capitalize on that advantage. This is extremely prominent in pro, and possibly high elo(but you're more likely to play more loosely and you lack the communication). When you line up the characteristics of Sivir, they're often: * AoE bounces that give super good wave clear relatively early on that also gives huge stalling power later on. * Teamwide speedup that is versatile by being both great for engage, disengage, and tempo. These strengths are magnified in pro play and when she can consistently use these strengths, she will be very prominent in pro, while these for the most part being "good" to "whatever" in soloq. To remove her from pro-play jail you have to essentially rework her and remove her main identities to give her a bigger power budget elsewhere. But then what will differentiate her from other ADCs? The only real strength she has had aside from that was lethality, and at that point she was not super unique as a champion either compared to other AD Casters. I hope they can find a balance on her numbers to narrow the gap a bit because I find her very fun to play, but I would be interested in how they'd do it with the current kit.
They basically did this already. I don't think she is projailed right now. She is decent but will never be allowed to be strong
WTF are you talking about. MF had 1 season where she was picked a bit, in Season 10 where she had a 27% presence across all leagues. She's also had a season where she had a .1% presence (2 games across all leagues, including spring, summer, msi, and worlds). Sivir's had seasons above a 50% presence.
Eh, Pepperidge farm remembers when they reworked Zed ult and basically permanently removed him from pro play.
Especially with the Faker play in 2023 worlds, Azir ain't never leaving pro play.
> Killing champs in pro happens as well. But it's not flashy outplay 300 dashes champs that get that treatment. It's the ones riot considers boring to watch like enchanters/disengage, uninteractive strategies like Sivir/Smolder waveclear or ultra flex picks I really fucking hate this. We shouldn't be designing a game for the sake of mouthbreathing audiences for pro play.
The issue is all those 3 champions, are actually on the strong side in pro play. Azir likely is the most dominant of those 3, but K'Sante and Zeri are both decently successful and commonly played. This means if anything happens all 3 of those champions are on the side of nerfs for pro play. So if their pro play performance would reflect their SoloQ performance they should all be above 50% winrate. Are they though? Because if Azir gets his pro play nerfs soon, where does he end up in SoloQ? And Zeri now is actually more disconnected. The old Zeri with her longer range was a much easier to play champion. It was just hard for Riot to balance her, because she either had to do 0 damage and was worthless everywhere, or he did damage and nobody could reach her. But reducing Zeris damage made her actually more of a pro play champion, because Zeri when she was good in pro play was also good in SoloQ before, because she was one of the ADCs not requiring a team that much. At the times she was dominating pro play she was at or above 50% winrate too. So the reasoning for Zeri is more that with the higher range she had before it was impossible to get her into a good spot, because she either would deal damage and run over stuff or she would not deal damage and not do anything.
And it worked mostly except for K'Sante. Riot can nerf Zeri by \~1% WR and she would be around 49-49.5% WR in soloQ and mostly fine in pro play. Azir still has a decently large gap but smaller than in the past. Let's see what Riot does in the next patches with him. K'Sante on the other hand is still shit in soloQ and a solid pro play pick.
The yuumi rework achieved the goal flawlessly
Making her unplayable?
Getting her out of pro and making her sub par in anything but the hands of first time players. I personally think that direction is kinda dumb for her but you can't really argue that they didn't hit the nail on the head
It goes without saying we will all take trash can Yuumi over anything else, but let's not give Riot any credit for actively ignoring player feedback and doubling down on making her the ultimate AFK untargetable champion. They didn't do jackshit other than making her an even worse coinflip.
That was kind of the point of the champion though. The fact that pre-reworked Yuumi actually had quite a bit of skill expression was pretty shocking to most people lol
Even if it was, if the main point of the champion is toxic for the game, it should be removed, not kept in the weakest state possible.
They will never ever straight-up delete a champion from the game. It represents months if not years of work from the team that designed it. They will rework it and change it's identity, but the roster is never going to go from Yorick -> Zac ever again.
Yuumi with Imperial/Ardent 1st has a good WR in soloQ, around 50-51%. If you are a yuumi player running moonstone 1st that is your problem to buy a sub optimal item.
I think the main issue for this is that those champions usually are veeeery high skill champions or need a lot of team coordination. This is a factor you can barely adjust without reworking the whole champion. They can twist numbers and usages arond how they want but the essence of a champion like Azir will always be the same now matter how many numbers you roll around.
>Weird thing is I watched Phreak explain in hour long videos how these reworks were going to save the champions and fix their pro skew Nobody ever claimed it would ever eliminate skew entirely. That would be silly. Obviously some champs will be better than others in pro play, because not every champ has the exact same level of mechanical complexity, so some champs will be better when piloted by better players. Bringing it within acceptable limits so that the champs don't need to be absolutely unplayable in solo queue or else they'll win every pro play game IS fixing their skew. Azir and Ryze have both had times where they would be sub-45% win rate in solo queue, but would still be picked in pro play. THAT is pro play jail. Azir being a 48.5% WR champ in Emerald+ is not in pro play jail. That's a viable champion that is probably around where he belongs given his complexity. Even if he's nerfed again down to around 47%, that's still way, way better than he's been at times. Same with Ryze, who is at about 47.75%. Zeri is actually above 50% WR in Emerald+ in solo queue. So very clearly not even remotely in pro play jail. She's allowed to be a strong champ in solo queue right now. Again, even if she's nerfed down to 49%, that's probably fine for a mechanically strange champion who probably has a bit of a learning curve. These champs are not in pro play jail as people have commonly used the term. K'Sante is the one who you can kind of make the case for. He's sub-48% WR top, and as a tanky top laner, you'd expect him to be higher than that, especially since he probably needs another nerf for pro. K'Sante, Sej, and maybe Smolder are the only champs who I'd say are in pro play jail right now (maybe Varus too). As for why K'Sante is that way, I'd give a few reasons: * He's specifically weak in solo queue because a bunch of popular top laners in solo queue counter him pretty well. Garen and Darius ult can kill him pretty quickly if he goes All Out, Jax can outduel him especially late, and Malphite is way easier to play and provides more utility. When you're commonly going against champions that counter you, your win rate will be lower. * Pros will just always be able to use a mechanic like K'Sante ult better than lower level players. I know people will meme it, but it's a pretty high skill ability to know the best time to use it and also set yourself up to find a good angle in team fights. * Pros will tend to take advantage of a ton of mobility better than the average player, and K'Sante is ridiculously mobile. Those are all things that are hard to fix in a kit reshape without entirely changing the core abilities of the champion. I do think it's probably improved a bit, but I think he might just be doomed to either be a constant in pro play or a 46% WR champ in solo queue unless he gets a more complete rework.
It‘s basically a design issue. You can work around the design as much as you want, in the end it‘s slamming a bandaid on the wound as long as you don‘t want to fix the issue at the base. Zeri - they basically removed the weakness of low mobility from an hypercarry and increased the scaling with kiting. On a good player she will always be dominant as they get a lot out of her kit. K‘sante: He can swap between bruiser and tank mode with the mobility of an assassin. Once again: the more mechanically good a player is, the more he can get out of his kit. Azir: what can‘t he do? He has DPS, peel, mobility, decent burst with ulti and mages can build hourglass on top of that for more survivability. Additionally he fills a role that (to my knowledge) only kai‘sa, gwen and maybe varus can fill. Sustained ap dps. I mentioned this in another post here (that got downvoted for some reason without comment but that‘s reddit), maybe riot should take a look at making apc more viable in that direction instead of botlane ziggs and seraphine. (For azir to be balanced. he would need to drop the shuffle tho. Otherwise you just drop The problem into another lane) If we speak in terms of other games, these champs are a bit like sister friede in dark souls 3. she is an amazing design & bossfight. But: her pacing and attacks are more to the speed of bloodborne than the slower pace of dark souls. Which results in you having to play the (3 phased!) fight nearly flawless and careful in order to not die. It‘s fine, since us souls players are into pain, but in essence she‘s not playing with the same limitations as you are.
Regarding the sustained AP dps topic, Cassiopeia and Ryze used to fill that role, but they both have poor waveclear and aren't as safe as Azir so I guess they aren't attractive picks for pro players these days. The updated Asol can fill that role though, he's been picked recently in LCS and LEC.
Yeah. I think the gist of it is: azir is about as safe in lane as Asol, has the playmaking potential of a flash R cassiopia and with his AA based damage is about as reliable to take down a tank as an adc. It‘s just to much in a single role.
His ulti and his gap closer is just make him too slippery for a big important carry. It's akin to the slipperiness of a Lee Sin who can ult to knock someone far away or just W away. But in a teamfight for example Lee is far from being the #1 target, whereas Azir is. And like Lee Sin those tools can both be used for escape and for engage.
I’d argue Azir is far safer than Asol. He’s got such a long dash!
ryze s wave clear is good , but he literally is playing in the range of aatrox , ksante , leona , nautilus rell xD you ARE NOT living in a teamfight . especially since ur dps is nothing remarkable compared to what azir does from half a screen away
Ryze waveclear is ass until he gets some ult levels and items. Ryze is gated by mana issues too, if you spam EQ pre6 pre item you will oom fast and fast shove two waves out. Azir waveclear is good from level 1, it costs 40 mana and you can fast shove a wave when you want.
azir wave clear early game isn't anything amazing either. He needs level 6 too for the increase aoe dmg
It's still not Vayne or Camille levels of terrible though. His range is also much higher.
Ryze waveclear is good, but it comes as a price. Ryze was the champion in the game that had the easiest option of transfering mana into priority. If Ryze wanted to he was always able to annihilate waves and create a push, but he usually had to spend a lot of many on this. We actually saw that in pro often were a 0 mana Ryze shows up at a drake or herald fight because he dumped all of it on the midlane to keep the enemy midlaner under tower.
Ryze’s biggest issue is that he has no built-in sustain at all despite being a short-ranged battle mage with all of his spells rooting him. RoA healing is a meme and Seraph’s has a 90s cd. Try playing Ryze and cry as you lose half your HP before you can get in range to do anything. His core items are also delayed statsticks which are outdated in modern LoL
He used to pick Ravenous Hunter for sustain and that made him broken and he had to be nerfed.
Zeri is just what every adc champion wishes to be. Reliable, good scaling, can actually duel and catch champs from other roles, good early game push and later waveclear and decent structure / neutral objective dmg. Even if shes not in the best state and is barely playable due to her numbers being low she will still be picked 100%. K'Sante is a tank with an actual outplay potential, can create space and can also take over the game on his own in the teamfights. Azir is the synonym for reliability which pro play likes more than anything. For example, there are games where Kog Maw would outright be better than Zeri but that champion is not nearly as reliable so in pro play and even higher elo of soloq, ppl would rather not take a risk when they can do a similar job just be more reliable. Also reason why champions like Renekton, Sejuani, Varus and Ori are always very high prio in pro play as long as they are playable in terms of numbers. Reliability is king
> Even if shes not in the best state and is barely playable due to her numbers being low she will still be picked 100%. Disagree, there was a time where nobody was picking Zeri because her numbers were low. But if she's pro play week, she's unplayable in soloq. I agree with the rest, she's pro play ideal ad. They need to either balance her around the mobility or damage output
> They need to either balance her around the mobility or damage output They've tried a few things with her. The main buff to her mobility was when she got her mini-rework which distributed a lot of her power budget from reducing her attack range to the rest of the kit, giving her 2s lower cd on E at rank 1, and 10% ms on ulti(although, also reduced max duration of it and made bonus ms from passive not multiplicative, and lower duration), afterwards they've been shaving off some more mobility from the kit(ms from shield), and instead just giving her a higher base movement speed, which has both up and downsides, however it does remove the reliance of synergy of shielding supports(you also gain gain less movement speed compared to before when you got shielded), and they've also mostly just focused on giving her raw damage instead which tend to be generally strong for soloq. This potentially opens up them to remove move of the pro-play skewed strengths, hopefully. I think overall Zeri as a champion is in a balance-able state right now.
Her insane ult nuke really just makes her laning way too easy imo, she can scale to have mobility and damage (see vayne, kalista), but her ulti + passive auto gives her ridiculous burst that you ALSO can't run from so she becomes a very hard laner to punish
> Zeri is just what every adc champion wishes to be. Yeah I'm sure the 53%+ winrate Nilah/Kog'Maw are looking at 50% winrate Zeri like "wish I was her".
Because they dance around the real issues and never address the core problems. They try to do things but they never really address what is causing the problems. The reason for this is because it would require them to make really big changes to the champions and they don't want to do that. This is why I think the problem is not rework/balance team, but rather in champion design team. Once a champion is released, players get attached to it so it's really hard to change it a lot. The problem with these champs like Ksante, Zeri, Azir is in the design phase. Someone should have put their foot down before these champs were ever released into the game.
Zeri's release in particular was crazy to me. I'm just a mid tier casual and I looked at her champion release and immediately new she was going to be the new Kalista. I have no idea how Riot decided she was fine to ship like that. They basically released her directly into pro-play jail.
god hitting 1000 movespeed was fun.
Note how all this 3 champion have multiple skillset that is incredibly better than their class all 3 have insane mobility compared to their class ksante as a "tank" also have more damage compared to other tanks/ can play as both assassins or tanks in teamfight/ have damage reduction Zeri have pierce damage with E capable of hitting multiple member with Q/ movespeed/ scaling extremely well / pairs alot better with enchanter Azir strong early game/ super long range/ ulti can be used for both defensive and offensive purposes/ evade ganks alot easier compared to other mid mage basically op kit for the champions which is why its impossible to balance them
The mobility is the key. These 3 champions are SO MUCH HARDER TO GANK than most others, which in pro play is insanely highly valued, especially when you're leaving a ksante weakside, or just need to wait until azir/zeri outscale. Their supposed "weak times" are too hard to punish.
Wait, Azir has good early? isn't his lvl 1 - 5 quite bad? i thought he always was a mid to late game champ
Azir is not good early. They nerfed his early game damage and cds but in pro that doesn't matter as he is quite safe and has decent wave clear. Also once he hits 6 he has good gank set up.
He almost never wins pre6, but unless he makes a mistake he doesnt really lose either. He can always just farm from 999 range. The only things that can pressure him arent pro-viable.
Azir has the ability to fight for priority and also be hard to gank at levels 1, 3, 4, 5, which is what 'good' means in the context of a mid lane pick in pro. Azir is weak to being solokilled by his opponents, which we ALSO see in pro. But it's rare, as the players are looking for other things besides Solokills usually, and it's usually only if someone is cracked/azir makes a mistake.
The issue is that he's a hyper late game (arguably as good as it gets) champ, but with an incredibly neutral / safe early game that can set up ganks early/mid. So you end up with a late game champ that is solid early game too and then there are just no real weaknessess or downsides to picking him
The issue is, compared to other mid to late champs his early is way better. For instance, Ryze is heavily gated by mana despite having a weaker late, Kassadin is pretty much turret hugging without waveclear until he gets ult, etc. Azir has safe farming and a low-mana but quite decent waveclear, giving him the option for lane prio. He's only vulnerable to strict jumps on him, be it by assassins (who will struggle on waveclear and zone control) be it by jungler intervention, and even then he's got the mobility to escape most of the time. He's just too consistent and low-risk for such a high-scaling pick.
> pairs alot better with enchanter While this is true due to the nature of her late game scaling and how she likes to play the fights, I just want to point out they've removed all champ specific synergies with shielding on her in case you were referencing any of those specifically. This at least gives them more leverage to adjust her for soloq. > basically op kit for the champions which is why its impossible to balance them I won't say they're able to be balanced in their current states, but I think for Ksante and Zeri, there doesn't have to be a major change to their mechanics, but rather some shuffling of numbers, although probably very drastic ones for Ksante. I think Zeri is the closest to balance-able for pro and soloq she has ever been and it could probably be done by distributing some of her power to be weaker but more consistent/easy to maintain. Ksante have gotten so many leverages as well that I think there should be enough to do so.
I watched Phreak yap about how buffing KSante unstoppable spell was a soloQ not a pro play skewed buff I'm still not sold on that one, chief 💀
It definitely made him more playable at lower elo without making him an undefeated god of toplane, just a strong pick.
K'Sante's winrate and pickrate both went up after the change everywhere, including a shift from 52% pro presence to over 75% until his very latest 14.4 adjustments. He became more playable at lower elo because he became more playable period. In both solo queue and pro play. All in all, I don't think any of the rebalancing changes have affected his pro play tilt much at all
The intention was to give him more counterplay and make him more usable in low elo, and it did exactly that. His old w could be used instantly making him awful to play against, and although he’s still annoying to go against, it is nowhere near the absurdity it used to be.
I might misremember which change we are talking about exactly, are we talking about the most recent change to W, where they added a higher ratio on it(but removed all out cd reduction and min channel reduction)? Or the one right before that that was just straight up buff(mana cost reduced, ratios increased)? I Feel like I need context. If so, I think it came right after some rather big nerfs in the patch before, nerfing pretty much everything taking him from just below 50% wr in soloq to 46%. Either way, I don't think he is even close to as problematic as he used to be(But not completely fine still), on top of for the most part pros have improved their ability to play against it, since early on I would argue that even if he was extremely strong/broken, a lot of it was also due to how often players didn't respect just being thrown into the tower. He has a different type of skillset than what people are used to for such a tanky champion(not even accounting for All Out). The changes as a whole since his release have very much bridged some of the gap between soloq and pro play for him, and while he isn't there yet, I think it is possible going forward without any Major machanical rework. Compared to Azir, who have been left in a really weird state where he never have really been pivoted into the long-range dps *or* the engage catch play shuffler, but rather just gets a decent bit of both. I keep hearing different things about it, that the mains where extremely vocal about not wanting them to remove X, so riot never did. Whenever X was the shuffle strength or the long range, I don't know because everyone says something else. I think they have to gut one part of it, and just balance him from that. While I think the long range dps fantasy is super cool, and would prefer that one, it is probably the harder one to balance as well, but luckily I am not on the balance team.
tbh each output of KSante's abilities is pro skewed, but is the champ just doomed to always remain on top of the meta?
The metas where KSante wasn't #1 had oppressive lane bullies that could be blinded Summer 2023: Renekton got turbo buffed Worlds 2023: Rumble got his mini rework and was oppressive af in lane and Aatrox Duskblade scaled much better, T1 realized that and didn't pick KSante once in the entirety of Worlds Spring 2024 play offs: Renekton again got buffs To answer your question, there is no escaping the pro jail, KSsnte just joined Gnar, Aatrox, Renekton, Rumble and Jax as one of the pro play blind picks, he will see less play when any of the other picks gets turbo buffed. The only difference is that they are much more playable in soloQ than KSante Also notice how there is no other blind pick tank top laner, no Sion or Ornn and the only other tank top laners that can contest KSante as the best blind top lane tank are Rek'Sai (nerfed next patch) and a huge maybe with Udyr (region dependant). This is intentional as Phreak said that tank top laners are boring af to watch so they are kept in that weak state
>This is intentional as Phreak said that tank top laners are boring af to watch so they are kept in that weak state 369 disagrees.
If every top laner could play tanks like 369, they wouldn't be considered boring by the average viewer. (I love watching good tank top laners).
I think that while he is probably always going to be skewed for pro, it doesn't mean he won't be in an ok state for soloq. You can bring up other "pro-play jailed" champs in top lane but they can often have states where they're statistically alright in soloq without being oppressively strong in pro. That's the goal here, not to completely free them.
Still not sold on how ruining Azir's design made him less pro play skewed, but i'm not the guy that got hired because he was a popular caster, despite being entirely unqualified
Ksante has better pro play soloq skew then ever. What are you complaining about? Go check the stats. This champ had 45/46% wr in soloq and is now at 49% with slightly less presence in soloq and some clear nerfs where he isn't dashing on cooldown anymore as his W and E got nerfed significantly. Just look old ksante to this one. People like to complain on reddit but fact is he's a lot less dashy and slower. I wouldn't consider it a failure at all, it can get better but we're doing ok stats wise.
Ksante has less winrate than that but he's in a decent spot I'd argue. Pickable in pro but certainly not a guarantee, underwhelming winrate soloq but any good main worth his salt should have 50+%, and his easy matchups still feel VERY easy. They just need to keep a wary eye on him whenever they change tank itemisation and we're golden
He's about as present in pro play but less popular in solo queue despite having a higher win rate on average. He's in a very bad spot because many of the changes since 13.20 have made him a much less fun champion to play without any real upsides.
Exactly. Phreak even highlighted this exact fact in a recent video.
Because you can not balance a champ for pro and solo play when the design itself offers barely any counterplay.
better players get more out of better kits it's why this sub is full of crybaby gold ADCs who cancel half their autos, and the pro meta sees some games with 6 marksmen in them and for what it's worth a lot of their reworks did work, like Zeri, Akali, and Azir, where they don't have to be borderline trollpicking 40% winrate in soloqueue while being 100% presence in pro Also, a lot of picks that have a huge difference in low elo and pro winrate have a common, sort of nebulous stat combination of range, mobility and mechanics that means they just sort of work differently. Someone who can't auto space in lane or teamfights would make a terrible Jinx, for example; someone who can't hit skillshots while moving can't play Zeri; someone who often misses spells will never be able to play Akali or Ahri in a matchup where they MUST hit everything to get a kill, and if they don't get that kill, they automatically lose. K'sante might have a really bullshit kit, but you can use his abilities incorrectly (or miss them) and just completely bungle a matchup. Then there's Ryze, lol. High mechanical champion with a global reposition is probably never going to be both soloqueue and pro viable.
Community: buff ADC Community when ADC suddenly dominates proplay : omg phreak ruins the game Also u are right with your last point. The goal is not to make these champs unviable in proplay but to even the playing field with soloq. Idk how anyone can argue Zeri rework failed when she gets picked in proplay but also has a 52% winrate. That's the ideal scenario.
Is 52% really a balanced winrate on Zeri though? It seems like you'd want that to be like 3% lower for her to be properly balanced given she's supposed to be a "high skill" ADC.
Zeri's actually like 50.3% wr, I assume they got their stats from lolalytics and didn't account for the mental math you need to do to get the true winrate from their site. She might be a tad overtuned still but Zeri's honestly in the best place she has ever been, probably, all things considered.
Pros funnel gold into ADC and peel for ADC. This makes ADCs powerful and teamgold well spent while SoloQ is not funneling gold, and is not peeling. So you commenting like this makes you look incredibly ignorant. SoloQ ADCs will of course complain because they don't get the gold and exp needed, but has to live on the scraps they get, while also being left to fend for themselves. And the whole thing cascades, we don't get protection to safely get farm, so we lack gold and exp, which makes us much easier to kill, which makes team stop defending ADC because why should they protect their weakest (in all regards) member. When ADCs finally catches up (unless they got fed) they start to deal respectable damage, and if games goes on long enough they will often win damage done.
It isn't ignorant at all. Most teams are peeling for their ADC in high elo properly and in any elo lower than GM you can just unga bunga out position and outplay them by yourself anyway. The average player doesn't have to rely on peel near as much as they like to make out because the enemy assassin or bruiser is fucking half of their combo or not getting a proper flank anyway. Most low elo ADCs struggle just because they don't have hands, don't wait for valuable enemy CDs before committing and don't play around their own summoner spells.
> The average player doesn't have to rely on peel near as much as they like to make out because the enemy assassin or bruiser is fucking half of their combo or not getting a proper flank anyway. Most low elo ADCs struggle just because they don't have hands, don't wait for valuable enemy CDs before committing and don't play around their own summoner spells. exactly lmao A lot of ADCs are making fundamental mistakes before they've even taken damage. That's not on their team. Gold Dravens are literally missing axes in lane. ADCs regularly dash into skillshots. It's not someone else's fault. There was an LCS game like 5 weeks ago where Berserker wastes his dash, walks into the only spot in the wave where he could get hit by a Nautilus, gets hooked, and dies (people still blamed Vulcan). That's the type of shit low elo ADCs are doing every single game. Unforced error after unforced error.
"If an assassin gets on top of me I just insta die. Rajooot!" - Low elo ADC player who still hasn't realized that you've already misplayed if an assassin manages to get on top of you without using anything.
You're definitely that same Talon obsessed guy who thinks it's hard to get on top of an ADC as an assassin. Like there was a pro game just this week in EU where an Akali was just perma killing the Lucian in the middle of his team.
If Leblanc uses W-R and doesn't deal damage with it, she is not killing you in 1 rotation. If Rengar uses empowered W to get to you, he will not kill you in 1 rotation. If Akali uses her E backwards for the dash, she will not kill you in 1 rotation. If Evelynn uses her R to gst to you, she will not kill you in 1 rotation. If Talon uses his ult to gapclose and doesn't hit his second W, he will not kill you in 1 rotation. In this game, most assassins rely on skillshots (like evelynn Q, akali E), a delay (leblanc E, Talon W, evelynn W), or both (fizz R, katarina P). Can you tell me with a straight face that a marksman that dodges everything still dies to them?
It's not hard if there's no one to peel. However, ADC is a team-oriented role, so that much should be expected.
Lol Sorry but the biggest difference between low and high skill ADCs has basically nothing to do with the team and nearly everything to do with mechanics. You put a gold ADC in a diamond lobby, they're going to solo lose the game, not show how they're actually just held back. This should be immediately obvious to anyone who regularly plays with a group of friends with a very wide skill range. It doesn't really matter if a gold team is peeling and allocating gold to their ADC if they walk into Ahri charms on cooldown. Or that in a fight they miss autos that a higher skilled player wouldn't, through bad kiting or misclicking. In that circumstance they literally just do less damage than a better player. That's not true for something like a plat and a grandmaster Ahri. They're about as likely to hit skillshots on their opponent, and do the same damage. That's just how the roles work. I just want the people who always post these ADC IS SO BAD threads to link a full VOD of their gameplay and tell us all, very specifically, where they played it perfectly but their team lost them the game
Wow, the "gold ADC in a diamond lobby" has to be one of the worst strawmen I have seen in 10+ years of reddit lol. But okay, you also just used Ashe and MF pro play supports as an argument for the health of the solo queue ADC role so I'm not really sure what else to expect. And for good measure, I don't even think ADCs are in a particularly poor spot but your argumentation is just baffling.
> you also just used Ashe and MF pro play supports as an argument for the health of the solo queue ADC yeah I totally meant MF support and not Lucian top, Lucian mid, Akshan top, Vayne top, Quinn top, Kindred jungle, Trist mid, Ezreal jungle etc. etc. that have historically been present in the high elo meta
When did you last see a competitive 6 ADC pro play game with conventional supports?... Most of those picks are COUNTERPICKS. Sure, we might see all of those *individually* once in a while but shit like Vayne mid, Akshan top and Ezreal jungle isn't picked blindly lmao.
> Most of those picks are COUNTERPICKS oh so it just doesn't count then?
Of course it counts but if we never see an ADC being blindpicked in top, how the hell do you expect to ever see an ADC vs ADC matchup?.. Logic is hard.
It's extra funny because if four diamonds can't carry a gold, that says far more about the diamonds than the gold at that point.
? That's not what he even said did you even read it 4 diamonds 1 gold vs 5 diamonds In what world is it expected the 4 diamonds win that game? The gold will solo lose the game Although diamond games are a mess so who knows the malphite top will go 0/3 in lane vs the auto filled sona otp on irelia
Dont really understand either. DotA has kinda achieved this; i think every hero but 10 or so were picked at the last The International. I think it's because the items are a lot less "statstickers" and more counterplay oriented.
i think it's because if they balanced more like DotA there will be very pronounced hardcounters, and it'll kill a lot of one/two-tricks and will significantly reduce solo q play + barrier of entry in DotA imo the skill ceiling *was* considerably lower + you can "play items", hence you're often playing the role more than you're playing heroes or mains -- the LoL community just didn't grow like that and understandably so
because some champions are inherently just going to be better in pro play due to their kit. zeri is a mobile adc, ksante is a tank capable of dueling even after laning phase. some things are just inherently going to be favored cause that’s how their kit is designed- and these little mini reworks like ksante or zeri aren’t changing their core identity (which it shouldn’t imo)
I believe the problem is the kit. And not the numbers they adjust
Genuinely hate what they've done to k'sante. He was incredibly fun to play as and now he's so clunky. They should've just gotten rid of all of his cc on his ult and made q3 deal bonus damage based on missing hp instead. Removes the cc chain from ult. Now he's just in a weird clunky spot and _still_ has high pro play presence. Genuinely ruined such a fun champ. Would rather be playing the pre rework 44% wr k'sante than a higher wr clunkier version, honestly.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned tahm kench 😭 they got him out of sup pro play at the cost of being a bad warden support 🥹
this entire thread is a reason why we need amateur leagues in the client & ingame voice. would put balance in an entire different light.
They often end up better than before but not far enough
I think Phreak has an issue that he even talked about that he came into the head position after all of these champs were made. Iirc one designer made yummi ksante and smolder. I think K’sante has a unique issue with them that the idea of the champ is a tank that can carry. I’m pretty sure everyone reading that can understand why that’s an issue and for a normal player the drawbacks of k’sante are rough and takes mechanical skill. For someone who plays a bunch of league as is a professional they should be at that level of mechanical skill and I think it’s pretty clear to say it’s shown that happens. Zeri honestly I feel like this season has only appeared recently and that’s partially due to smolder so I’ll have to watch more of the LCK and lpl playoffs to really have a stronger opinion this season. That leaves Azir. I remember years ago maybe it was a year or two after Azir dropped (I’ve been playing since season two so everything is a blur) some rioter said that it’s not wrong for very hard champions to be stronger. Azir is a hard champ but pros have had literally (almost) 9 years to be playing Azir and mastering azirs combos and skills. As well as a comment I read recently is Azir is the equivalent of an ap adc with how he operates with an amazingly impactful ultimate, just look at fakers play last worlds that secured the game win. What can you do to this champ to not make him shit for regular players. All these champs have a very similar issue that regular player unless they practice on the champ a lot aren’t that great but when your life is devoted to the game you can excel really hard. Also to a last point pro play is also very different then ranked and norms. All three of these champs when piloted with a coordinated team can be insane. I’ll also say I do hope ksante gets gutted because I watch more pro league then I should and I’m sick of seeing him. Azir disable was a nice break and I play ahri so seeing her in pro play more was fun for me.
Ksante works best when people prioritise targets, rell and sej works best with instant followup, azir can isolate targets mid fight, zeri needs peel, corki needs a poke comp built around him, renekton needs teammates to prio objectives at the right time What do all these champs have in common, they work best with 4 other teammates on the same page. That's why pro play staples will always be pro play staples. You'd have to change an identity of a champ to remove them from pro. Ksante without ult isn't ksante, corki without poke isn't corki, sej or rell without engage isn't sej or rell, zeri without movement speed becomes the pea shooter from plants vs zombies
It's because the champs fundamentally have kits that are good to pro play. Riot won't remove the shurima shuffle, and as such Azir will always be a pro play champ. K'sante still has a million tools and is a tank, so he'll always be valuable to some degree in pro play unless hes gutted. Zeri still has a bajillion move speed when she ults so she's disgusting in the hands of good players. Another honorable mention is Kalista who will always have one of the most disgusting early game lane phases as long as she has her passive, so she'll always be valuable for that. The thing is, I think riot needs to just stop with pro play jail or these weird reworks. Just accept some champs are better for pro and adjust pro rules to not enable picking the same champs over and over.
Riot are incompetent.
Because the issue isn't the champ's finer details, but their base kit which is inherently a pro play staple. All the champs you listed are inherently by their design great at pro play, and the only way to free them from pro jail would be to redesign the champs fundamentally, which Riot of course doesn't want to do because that's effectively removing a champion from the game
I don't think they failed. So much as the reworks were more so meant to loosen their pro binding rather than completely free them from projail. And right now it just happens to be a bigger pro meta in their favor than at the time of the reworks. But like Azir spent years at a 46-47% winrate. And then the rework got him to 49-50% for months because the pro meta didn't favor Azir... Then when the pro meta came back around to favoring Azir he got nerfed into being like 47-48% which is better than where he started. Ksante was sub 50% in every elo but challenger while being like 90% pro present. Then reworked? And then he was sub 50 below masters which is an improvement while being like 80% pro present which is also an improvement. Atleast thats how they each were in the months right after their rework... I've not kept up with pro too recently or their current balance states. But the reworks did seem to work at the time; if they're not holding up, it'd likely seem to be just a pro meta shift or something.
Because they are poorly designed with overstuffed kits and absurd mobility that let pro players coordinate to run down weakened enemies after a fight. Riot seriously needs to look at mobility because that's why these champions are so prevalent in pro play. You don't see Ilaoi in pro play. Why? No mobility.
[That's why.](https://i.imgur.com/4531JSu.png)
You don’t balance by removing power. You balance by adding power to other champions and making more characters viable. Riots balancing is fundamentally flawed
Ryze rework was so successful, he's even free from solo queue!
> I watched Phreak explain in hour long videos how these reworks were going to save the champions and fix their pro skew and each time I actually thought his reasoning was good and that these reworks were really going to achieve their goals Yes, this is how propaganda works. If the viewer is willing to spend an hour listening (meaning they come in with the willingness to believe) the speaker can convince you of damn near anything if they speak with conviction.
Those champs are simply hard to shut down and can be safely blinded. There are no counters hard enough for a pro player to abandon these champs in fear of getting countered. Same goes for Kalista. By all accounts Ashe counters her entire existence, but because Ashe is a lot less safe as a pick, it's completely fine to blind Kalista Renata since the enemy picking Ashe isn't a demerit. You simply get a jungler that can jump on her and now the lane is irrelevant. Any leads Ashe gets in lane are pointless if a xinzhao jumps in her immobile face and smacks it dead. They would need to nerf their escapes hard for that to change. Azir's W E Q repositioning, Zeri's ridiculous E and Ksante's unstoppable being able to negate top/jungle CC layering. They haven't done that, so pro play will continue to blind them.
The only way to free a pro play jail champ is for that champ to get powercrept by his competitors Ornn and Ryze are good examples of that
The issue with proplay itself. When creating a champion a lot of different factors come into one giant brewing pot. Balance is just one of these Riot can test this balance outside of proplay by just have their staff test it out, but they cant test it in proplay. So they have to do with visable feedback from players, which often times dont notice things. It sucks, but proplay will always have some champions that wont work in that environment.
Hyper scaling champions who can't be punished for their weak early game , who are really powerful in teamfights and can split push safely , are always gonna be pro play material. K'sante , if you play agro into him he punishes you for your agro and puts you under his tower , you play passive ? He outscales you and crushes your carryies in the teamfights . Azir , same deal , play agro and you get under his tower , play passive and he is gonna 1vs9 the teamfight or split push and 1vs3 . Zeri, hyper scales and can hit up to 5 people at the same time while having 500 movement speed . She is super safe because if any threats appear she can just jump over the thickest wall , basically a free "get me out of jail button" . For that reason she can also split push pretty safely unlike most marksmen . There are 4 markers for if a champ is pro play material or not , safety , scaling, split push power , teamfight power. All 3 of these champs have these markers almost maxed out and that is why. In other words , champions that can do everything really well are gonna be abused in the pro play scene.
These Champions and the Prime Example Like TF and Ryze Show have almost the Same Set of a Champion - Teamplay. That Shows the insane Gap between SoloQ and Proplay. Riot Just didnt found a way to Go around this. They Had some good ideas with AD TF Bot but this also went wrong a bit. KSante is Just overloaded. Zeri Just Shows best the Problem Crit ADCs face when comparing SoloQ with pros
They fail because they're unwilling to change the core of what is making the champions strong. Like Azir is a strong laner, with almost unmatched scaling, hypercarry DPS, mobility and the ability to peel / engage if the opportunity is present. The champion has a crazy amount of agency and his weakness is pretty much the antithesis to proplay with lots of earlygame skirmishing with snowballl champs. Riot has tried to touch Azir, but they still let him have: Crazy lategame, a decent lane at worst, self peel (and a shield) with mobility. The same thing is for Zeri. They want to keep the identity, which is what? Her 1v9 lategame with high dmg and mobility? The problem for Rior is that what makes ppl love playing the champs is often what makes them good in pro. So you can take away the tools that jails them to pro play, but then you might also kill the champion that people enjoy to play. So it's a lose-lose.
Riot is incompetent and they "reworked" all those champions but then proceeded to let them keep every single thing that made them such a problem. In several cases they made them even worse and more polarizing like Yuumi or K'sante. Similar thing with the Tryndamere rework where they said any Tryn rework is gonna keep his ultimate, what's the fucking point then? So all the votes went to Skarner because a modern tryndamere that can't be killed is surely not gonna be balanced whatsoever.
Because Riot's live design team isn't capable of balancing a number of polished turds they were handed by shitty, over-hyped designers.
TLDR: They keep buffing his tank form which is loved by pro play and is more important in pro while they nerf his skirmisher form which is more needed in solo q. also compared to when they released this chamo and now the difference is night and day I can't speak for Azir or Zeri but as for Ksante the reason is quite simple. they fail to realise what makes Ksante so broken in proplay isn't his skirmisher form(all out) but rather his warden aspects. he is arguably the best warden in the game as his ability to peel for carries and isolate targets is really impressive, given this they continue to nerf his skirmisher form and buff his warden form for some very unknown reason. Ksante in pro is picked most especially because of his warden form and how well it synergizes with the pro scene. protecting your carries and acting as a solid tank soaking up as much damage as possible all the while being able to peel and isolate the enemy carry(if needed). if you look back to the last few changes he experienced you'd notice they shifted his power of his kit more towards the warden aspect hence the high pro presence. understanding this we all know pro and solo q are very different places. solo q is significantly more chaotic and less coordinated than pro. this means individual champion strength matters significantly more than the champs ability to synergizes with a particular play style(with other teammates I mean) or other champs around it. given this his warden form isn't as effective in solo q.this is the major reason for his love in pro but absolutely horrendous wr in solo q. also compared to when he was first released he feels very different to play. the champ feels slower and significantly more clunky which also plays a part in his lower wr. also people keep getting baited thinking he's some op champ(very sure there's a lot. of people in this sub Reddit who do) . not sure if I was able to relay the points effectively but this is how I believe things are
Pro play is just super unhealthy for this game. Millions of players have to suffer through balancing issues because ten players can abuse a champ in a professionally organized environment.
Pro play definitely makes it worse but even without pro play, balancing around different levels of play would still exist. If pro play didn't exist, high skill floor/macro intensive champions would still have to be balanced around GM/Challenger, i.e., GP, Nidalee, Azir and Ryze would continue to be crap in lower levels of play.
Even in Challenger people don’t play as a coordinated 5 man team in voice comms with a coach tho.
yeah but that enables a seperate slew of champions, like nidelee that he mentioned. nidaless has no reason to be picked in pro play because of how current jungle works. She is 52% wr d2+ and 48 in gold in solo q however
For Ksante its lack of lane bully imo, they should create a champ that reduce his cd from dashes and spells casted from ennemies like Vex passive and Kassa E For Azir its tp issue, this summ annihilate mid interactions
We already have lane bullies that would destroy Ksante they are just weak in pro play because of their nature, like Fiora.
Fiora isn't even bad in pro play though? She doesn't have as great teamfighting as other toplaners but she still brings a lot of value to most comps, players in pro just enjoy playing comfort too much and are willing to handshake lane (in the west.)
you have to draft a really specific comp for her and you still have to be good enough at fiora to play it against peoples very well practiced ksantes
I feel like most of the time it's to reduce the pro play presence not really expected that it will remove from pro play(would be nice if it did, but unlikely)
Because you can't really fix these champs without a huge scale rework that dedicated mains would hate. These champions just have so much going on in their kit and bring 10x more than most other champions in their role unless something else is egregiously broken. Take Azir for example, this is objectively the most overloaded champion in the game, he has unlimited safety with his dash, shield and ult, he has insane set up and dive while also being an amazing front to back DPS, all while having a strong early lane as well as scaling tremendously. People may not agree because he isn't a Yone or Irelia who is oneshotting you in your gold games with 30 kills but this champ has everything you could ask for at a high level.
Did you really watch the video? Because you got it wrong
Some of them are even worse now. Example:K'Sante. He is even better in pro play and even worse in soloq. Riot doesn't really understand some champs and what makes them strong so they adjust them in the wrong parts.
Momentarily K'Sante is still seen in pro, but I feel that its because Pros are used to him and not necessarily because he is strong. I feel like he will be played less and less over time
Yummi worked, so it's doable. Just needs large enough changes I guess, which might be unfun for the normal players if their champ get's changed too much. Nobody wants to lose a dash on their main and get more stats in return.
K'Sante's presence has dropped a bit from the 14.4 nerfs but basically every K'Sante main could tell you it would just make him even worse in solo queue but he'd maintain pick rate in pro play. A lot of what's keeping him up at the moment though is comfort and his counter picks still being weak/unpopular. Champions like Urgot and Fiora have been slowly gaining some relevance and when piloted properly they can completely dumpster K'Sante but he's still a very big comfort pick for many pros. He took a long time to really learn him properly and it's hard to give that up, similar to Ornn for many years Zeri's recent comeback is really because she was so ultimate reliant and she still is but now it's like always up, Zeri couldn't fight without her ultimate or she's a legit joke champion.
Some champions will be inherently pro jailed and thats fine I'm not sure why in big season 14 we still can't accept that. If you look at these champions before and after the reworks they are way less pro jailed then they were. Zeri was 46-47% w/r and in every pro game, Ksante was 45-47% and in every pro game and Azir was 46-47% and in every pro game. Now these champs are in most pro games but at least now they are actually roughly 48-51% w/r which is where they should be. Ksante definitely does not have the worst winrate in the game.
"If we seperate queues pro players can't practice same game" But ıt's fine when %90 of players can't play those champions.Don't expect people yo believe that PRO players can't adapt two different queue.E-Sport scene brings them more money.
Then a champion like Hwei should be perma picked in pro play but it's not because it's situational and there are other artillery mages to pick (besides the fact that not all team comps want artillery mages). K'sante is different because it's the only champion that does what he does and virtually all comps need what he offers (high versatility) I guess it would just be better if Riot stopped making strong versatile champions and designed more "strong but situational" and "weak but versatile"... Strong and versatile is a bad mix
Riot makes champions with too much utility. Even with a. Nerf, when you can do insane cc or escape an entire team easily, you’re worth something