A few days after Riot Games’ Phroxzon became lead gameplay designer on League of Legends, he shared details on the team’s thought process behind balancing assassins.
In a Reddit thread from Oct. 2, the developer said they wanted to “give some more transparency” to players on why they made some changes to assassin champions, rather than “defend any specific points.”
He wrote that the team had to make tradeoffs and couldn’t make everyone happy. He explained which criteria were considered when balancing assassins, and tackled criticism of Haste’s strength in the meta.
He mentioned three main criteria the balance team took notice of to balance assassins. The first one is assassin’s combos: “These are patterns that cannot be done unless champ is extremely ahead or opponent is in lower MMR brackets,” he explained, giving Leblanc’s QRW combo as an example.
The second one is the strength of standard combos, which they “try to have as much moment-to-moment gameplay in these combos” but they tried to make snowballing scale with counterplay so that a team isn’t entirely powerless against assassins.
In that spirit, the team tries to set the assassin’s power curve to the midgame rather than too early, so that snowballing can be more easily countered.
On Sept. 29, a player demonstrated how strong Haste could be on assassins when fully built up, giving an example of Zed’s almost nonexistent W cooldown. It sparked controversy in the community as players asked for a nerf of the stat on those champions.
He explained that Haste helped assassins get more burst damage and gave them the potential to carry games, but that they kept in mind they had to be able to be countered, still.
“Non-damage stats on assassin items or a champion’s AR/HP/MR per level allow us to bolster their win rates, without sending their burst damage overboard,” he wrote, explaining why Haste was more balanced, rather than adding pure damage or Lethality to their items.
Lastly, Phroxzon explained base damage needed to be low on assassins’ items so that their early-game power remains limited while being able to kill squishy champions by themselves when behind.
Under the thread, players unanimously praised the transparency given by the designer. “Phroxzon has been doing a great job with addressing all the complaints recently, even with the obvious backlash he’s inevitably gotten,” wrote one of the top-voted comments.
Meanwhile, more balance changes will be hitting live servers alongside Patch 13.20, including buffs for Jinx, on Oct. 12.
Published: Oct 2, 2023 10:11 am