League Of Legends balancing issues by an ex Worlds Player.

These changes are not something that I want Riot to do during the season. It’s massive changes that can only be done in the off season.

Core League Of Legends concepts

Minions

Minions have over time gotten weaker and became less important. That’s a massive problem as it removes differences between champions, and it removes skill from the game.

Now a big reason why Minions have gotten weaker is because Riot wants the game to be faster phased than it was in the past. To achieve that Riot have increased gold per minute, kill gold (Bounties for high farm and kills) and tower plating gold. Now the problem becomes that minions are at a point where the importance of farming is at an all time low. That in combination with minions being at their weakest in terms of how easy they are to kill due to champion power creep that creates a situation where most games end up with the same play style on all champions. The playstyle is simply push and roam. That’s also why you see a lot of support players leaving their AD Carry alone to roam around the map at extremely early points in the game.

The solution to this issue is quite simple. Make farm more valuable in terms of gold and lower the gold per minute. That way the average game should have the same amount of gold, but it would reward the better player.

Now to tackle the secondary issues of how easy minions are to kill. The problem is generally AOE abilities tend to one shot waves later on which makes pushing extremely easy. My suggestion is to give minions a anti Area Of Effect damage buff that increases over time. That makes it harder to CS thus increasing the skill in the game, and it slows the power of perma roaming. Another benefit of making minions harder to kill would be to force laners to be in dangerous spots more often. Now that should help junglers have more impact in the game as they would have more opportunities to make plays.

Towers

Riot have done a fantastic job by adding tower platings, and by forcing bot laners to lane bot lane instead of lane swaps.

There’s nothing that I would want to change about towers, but I wanted to add it to also congratulate Riot on changes that were well done.

Herald

Herald is overall a good addition to League Of Legends, but the positioning of Herald doesn’t make much sense considering the current power balances in the game. Herald should be the objective that you want if your goal is to get gold on a specific role. Right now AD Carries are the biggest snowballers, and best late game champions. Therefore it would make a lot more sense to have Herald around bot lane. Now if you want Herald around top lane I would suggest that you make top laners weaker Early - Mid game, but you make them the strongest late game. That could also make sense with top laners being on an island and being far away from the majority of the game.

However, if you don’t want to make top lane into a late game power house. I would suggest changing Herald and Dragon positioning as that should overall make the state of the game healthier.

Dragon

Dragon is the objective that you want to put a limit on the game. You generally win the game if you manage to get 4 dragons which means it’s an extremely important early game objective. The objective doesn’t give you that much immediate power, but it allows you the opportunity to close out games faster. The positioning of dragon should be around the early game focused lanes, and not the lane that’s supposed to carry late game. It just doesn’t make any sense to me.

Freezing

Freezing is a way of manipulating your waves. Essentially you make the wave stay at a certain point to gain resources and force the opponent to respond in some way.

Throughout the last few years I have had discussions on freezing with many. My belief is that freezing currently sucks mid - late game, and I believe that I have been proven right due to the fact that pro players still don’t freeze very much in mid - late game.

I said prior to worlds that we won’t see very much freezing at Worlds due to how bad it currently is. I was proven right on that as well.

It used to be an amazing strategy in the past many seasons ago. What changed? The fact that minions are worth less in comparison to everything else in the game. Therefore freezing is objectively worth less per minute spent freezing compared to the past.

I believe that freezing should be a good addition to the game, and it increases potential ways of playing the game. Therefore i’m hopeful that Riot will consider some of my changes regarding minions as that would boost the power of freezing.

Split pushing

Split pushing of the past is pretty much dead. You will rarely see players try to split push with the goal of taking towers. The reasoning for that is due to how easy minions are to kill in combination with how fast people can now move around the map. A massive problem with the map movement is the plant behind dragon / baron. That plant allows players to easily get behind someone split pushing thus making the strategy too dangerous in comparison to the benefits.

Now that’s only the movement part. The other problem is that most champions in the game kills minion waves in no time. Therefore you have almost no benefit from stacking up a wave and utilizing that to pressure the enemy in a 1 v 1 situation since they’re going to murder that wave in no time.

Nowadays you mainly see players pushing in the wave and roaming to get vision or flanking the enemy team forcing a team fight. The reason for that is due to the fact that killing the tower is of low benefit to winning the game. The risk of dying near the tower is extremely high, and defending the tower is relatively easy in most cases.

I would like to see a situation where it’s possible to apply more strategies to winning league of legends. It would create more diversity in how games are played out based on which champions are picked. Even popular split push champions are often simply splitting to power farm gold so that they can scale and teamfight.

Poke Compositions

Poke compositions aren’t really used in their true sense anymore. There’s far too much healing in the game to focus on poking enemies down and using that. This has created a situation where a lot of poke champions have far too much damage due to it being necessary for them to be viable.

We need to nerf healing and poke damage at the same time. That’s the only way to fix the issue because if you nerf one without the other it will completely ruin the balance of the game.

I want poke compositions to be viable again as it creates a much more diverse meta, and it creates different ways to play the game which I consider a net positive.

Also poke compositions require a lot of skill from both parts because dodging every small bit of damage makes a massive difference.

Healing and Shielding

It’s obvious to many that Healing at its current state is a problem. Healing and Shielding are two mechanics in games that easily gets too strong which ruins a lot of other aspects of the game. Nowadays damage needs to be high enough to kill people two times over due to healing being at the level it currently is.

Healing is in my opinion the lesser of the two evil. If Shielding ever gets too strong it becomes incredibly oppressive as you can’t kill people in the first place. Healing works in a way that you can still 100 to 0 people before they get healed. A perfect example of Shielding being oppressive is to look at Overwatch during their shield meta.

Riot is slowly nerfing healing as Season 11 progresses, but they should never have allowed it to get to this point in the first place. A big argument from Riot seems to be that anti healing should counter healing. I agree with that, but it should be in niche situations where people pick a team composition around healing, or champions that are heavily focused on healing. It shouldn’t be the norm, and often seeing 3+ champions buying anti healing shows that it’s a massive issue.

Another massive problem around healing is that it heavily reduces skill in the game. Those small outplays that people make don’t matter anymore because the enemy will simply go hit a jungle camp or the next minion wave and be back to full health. That makes poking compositions useless, and it requires poking champions to be close in strength to bursting champions in a straight up fight.

I would like healing to be reduced to a point where small outplays matter again, and it’s not all about the massive catch that one shots somebody.

Also, this problem extends to the laning phase due to how much native healing most champions have combined with runes and Doran’s Shield.

Look back at the old meme of “Better nerf Irelia” One of the big points about nerfing Irelia was due to her healing being too strong. Nowadays most champions have healing equal to that of old Irelia which removes the strength of small outplays as champions will heal it up in a short time frame.

Gold Income The money that champions have is at an all time high. It’s like we’re living in a crazy bubble, and often players don’t have to do anything to get the money.

Riot have added Turret plating gold, Increased gold per 5, Increase gold for killing people, increased gold for supports meanwhile minions were left giving only scraps. Minions is such a vital part of the game, but it feels like their worth is currently too low. I would suggest decreasing gold from other sources, and increasing the gold for minion kills.

Plants Overall a decent addition to the game, but I feel that Riot missed the mark with some of them. The Healing plant is amazing as it mostly promotes aggressive playstyle to get it which means people have to proactively aim for it.

Scrying orb makes removing visio