Sylas, League of Legends’ newest champion, debuted in January with a truly ultimate ability: stealing an opposing champion’s ultimate to use for himself.
This ability could have very easily become extremely overpowered and nearly indefensible had the developers not been careful with their latest creation. With such a powerful ability, Sylas could’ve quickly become the strongest champion in the game.
That is not the case, however, and three developers—Szymba, Griftrix, and Squad5—explained the thought and debates that went on while creating Sylas and his abilities in the first episode of “Dev Doodles.”
The initial sentiment among the developers when Sylas’ ability-stealing powers were brought up was that there was no way they could pull it off without infuriating the playerbase. They also knew they would also have to tweak a lot of other champions—97 of 141, to be exact—to even make Sylas somewhat balanced.
Nonetheless, the devs pushed along with the idea, and set a goal before making Sylas: don’t make development and the overall workload tougher just because of Sylas.
Related: Cloud9 Licorice’s advice for those trying to learn Sylas: “Just play really crazy”
While debating about how Sylas should adopt powers from other champions, they ran into the extensive process of hijacking abilities from transforming champions, which actually transform into other creatures and change in some noticeable way when they use their ultimate.
This made them decide that instead of Sylas just taking their ultimate ability, he would actually take all of their abilities for a period of time to really give Sylas the feel and effectiveness of the other champion. But they had to make sure that he didn’t just keep their abilities after transforming back into himself because that obviously wouldn’t be too fun to play against.
The devs believed they’ve learned quite a bit about how to create and fix things. They also think the fact they were able to create something like Sylas essentially opens up the possibilities of what the design team can make.
Related: Sylas made his pro debut today in the LEC, and it worked… for a minute
And while there was certainly a lot of work put into Sylas’ development, the champion has proven to be quite weak in comparison to many other champs in League of Legends. This is unusual for new champions, who usually are overpowered when they debut and then are subsequently nerfed to normal levels.
Sylas still can be improved, and by the work the devs said they did to even get him into the game, one can expect he will be buffed in the coming months to make him an even more viable champion.
