yep thats how i felt during the whole 'blue ez is best' meta. look this idiot bought a tear on his first back, lets roll him. tear items kinda suck, for the ~25% more mana u get compared to non tear items (850 vs 600) buying an eventual 150 more mana, for 5 min or more of no vertical growth feels bad. in mid lane the mage who buys tear first still cant clear the casters vs the zed/talon/ahri/ecko/etc who buys ad/ap and can now 1 shot the casters.
and yeah probably like 90% of the time you buy something for the unique thing it does not the stats. those choices could be more compelling if they were the same primary stats and cost(or even divorced of the primary stat, ie buying an item gives X gold cost of primary +secondary stat, you can pick if that is health armor/health MR or AD armor/AP armor) and maybe a third of the time, i want to buy some unique thing on an item but the primary/secondary stats don't make sense for my character or the matchup. ie chemtank into an all ad comp, zhonya's on a jinx… like i get GA is now suppose to be the equivalent cheat death item on ad chars but the usage between the zhon ang GA are really significant.
One reason I disagree with your point about "equal stats, different passives" is that sometimes the passive is only compelling if it's stronger then the item stats itself. Let's say every item has a certain power budget. If every statline remains the same, some passives become much less viable choices because the power budget for the passive is much lower. For example, if shieldbow had the same AD CRT as Kraken slayer, the shield would have to be much less because it would provide too much. But at a certain point, a shield becomes useless if it doesn't fulfill its purpose – to survive. So by balancing stats and passives differently, you provide a lot more design options for player choices. It's consequentially harder to balance, but it does make choices more interesting.
"Just a dude" who has a lot of history, passion, experience, and focus on exactly these sorts of design questions for this particular game. Humility is good, but there's a reason we're listening when you're talking.
Resource management (mana, energy, etc) is a complete joke in League of Legends. Most of the meta champions have ZERO resource management. This issue arises in several different ways. For starters plenty of them straight don't use a resource system. The energy system has proven that with even the most basic understanding of rotations, you will never run out of energy. The mana system will generally have such insanely low costs that mana is irrelevant on most champions, and the few champions that it is relevant on, its either a hard gate or forces those few champions into a single specific item or alternative fix. Item Design in S11 is at its all time worst, most items have merged into becoming almost a blur into each other. There are roughly 9? (2 sets of about 4~5) items that all provide almost the exact same stats and all provide some insignificant amount of damage burst in some fairly uncreative and similar way.
everything does vastly to much damage atm a 2 item champ will kill another 1 item champ in a single rotation, fights regularly are over in under 2 seconds this is genuinly a problem which could have been seen by anyone with a modicum of sense when talk about addind dozens of items which add huge flat damage and its clear that the riot balance team WANTS it to be a game of "1 shot or be 1 shot" the item design is awfull
Seraph's is boring, but I say it has a pretty well defined role. It allows you to not worry about mana and scale off of it. If anything, I'd say to just remove the bonus ap from it and put a lifeline shield that heavily drains your mana.
another great vid thx phreak <3
yep thats how i felt during the whole 'blue ez is best' meta. look this idiot bought a tear on his first back, lets roll him. tear items kinda suck, for the ~25% more mana u get compared to non tear items (850 vs 600) buying an eventual 150 more mana, for 5 min or more of no vertical growth feels bad. in mid lane the mage who buys tear first still cant clear the casters vs the zed/talon/ahri/ecko/etc who buys ad/ap and can now 1 shot the casters.
and yeah probably like 90% of the time you buy something for the unique thing it does not the stats. those choices could be more compelling if they were the same primary stats and cost(or even divorced of the primary stat, ie buying an item gives X gold cost of primary +secondary stat, you can pick if that is health armor/health MR or AD armor/AP armor) and maybe a third of the time, i want to buy some unique thing on an item but the primary/secondary stats don't make sense for my character or the matchup. ie chemtank into an all ad comp, zhonya's on a jinx… like i get GA is now suppose to be the equivalent cheat death item on ad chars but the usage between the zhon ang GA are really significant.
I like this content, please do more
"In another life as a game designer" New isekai coming out soon PauseChamp ?!
One reason I disagree with your point about "equal stats, different passives" is that sometimes the passive is only compelling if it's stronger then the item stats itself. Let's say every item has a certain power budget. If every statline remains the same, some passives become much less viable choices because the power budget for the passive is much lower. For example, if shieldbow had the same AD CRT as Kraken slayer, the shield would have to be much less because it would provide too much. But at a certain point, a shield becomes useless if it doesn't fulfill its purpose – to survive. So by balancing stats and passives differently, you provide a lot more design options for player choices. It's consequentially harder to balance, but it does make choices more interesting.
"Just a dude" who has a lot of history, passion, experience, and focus on exactly these sorts of design questions for this particular game. Humility is good, but there's a reason we're listening when you're talking.
TED talk with your guest host Phreak
Resource management (mana, energy, etc) is a complete joke in League of Legends. Most of the meta champions have ZERO resource management. This issue arises in several different ways. For starters plenty of them straight don't use a resource system. The energy system has proven that with even the most basic understanding of rotations, you will never run out of energy. The mana system will generally have such insanely low costs that mana is irrelevant on most champions, and the few champions that it is relevant on, its either a hard gate or forces those few champions into a single specific item or alternative fix.
Item Design in S11 is at its all time worst, most items have merged into becoming almost a blur into each other. There are roughly 9? (2 sets of about 4~5) items that all provide almost the exact same stats and all provide some insignificant amount of damage burst in some fairly uncreative and similar way.
This is a good 101 discussion on item design. Follow up discussions on some of the things you mentioned would be a great next step
everything does vastly to much damage atm
a 2 item champ will kill another 1 item champ in a single rotation, fights regularly are over in under 2 seconds
this is genuinly a problem which could have been seen by anyone with a modicum of sense when talk about addind dozens of items which add huge flat damage and its clear that the riot balance team WANTS it to be a game of "1 shot or be 1 shot"
the item design is awfull
Great video. Your videos are a diamond in an ocean of disposable garbage content.
hey looser
like and comment for mana rework, part 2
I would totally love to see more of this in-depth content, could maybe start some discussions as well
great video!
Real cool phreak
Seraph's is boring, but I say it has a pretty well defined role. It allows you to not worry about mana and scale off of it. If anything, I'd say to just remove the bonus ap from it and put a lifeline shield that heavily drains your mana.
What's up fellow Phreak, gamers here.
phreak i think you should follow your dream and become a game dev
Love theses videos, informative enough to matter engaging enough to not get stale. I’m at work and this is the perfect content (for me) to listen to.
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