The Great LoL Balancing Act

With the recent arrival of Rengar, and soon after that, Syndra, League of Legends will have a total of 104 playable champions and it doesn’t seem as if they’re slowing down anytime soon on the champion releases.

As is natural with most games of this size, not everything is going to be necessarily ‘viable’ in the standard ‘meta-game’ and Riot is no exception to this rule and the regular updates that happen to the game look to solve these issues by either ‘buffing’ those considered weak or ‘nerfing’ those considered too strong.

For the most part, Riot does a good job in trying to make a lot of champions viable for play and different types of play too but they aren’t perfect. For every Ezreal or Graves, there’s an Urgot or Varus who just aren’t played as much because they can’t do as much as others.

I'm not your typical AD Carry

There is a variety of reasons as to why this happens, it can come down to their abilities, how much damage they can dish out, how much utility they have or don’t have, etc. A notable problem that has been occurring recently is the power of recent champions upon their release.

Zyra’s safe distance, high damage burst and area-of-effect (AOE) utility made her almost impossible to beat if she was played right. With her win statistics averaging over 50% against every other common mid lane opponent – she was deemed bad enough to be ‘hot-fixed’ which meant she was nerfed in-between patches, she was that much of a nuisance.

Not even close...

Diana is also proving more and more of a problem if played competently because of her ability to chase as well as burst down hard thanks a to combo of Q-R-R (thanks to a refreshing cooldown on her ult) with passive bonus hitting for a whopping 990 base magic damage at level 18, not taking into her account her shield which also deals damage and an AOE pull-in with a slow to help with her chasing.

Darius had a problem with the ‘grace period’ on his ultimate that let it refresh the cooldown even without getting the last hit on an enemy champion. While he was, and still is, easily shut down by any form of crowd control (CC), he still got a nerf because he was stomping on games in lower ELO too hard and this is one of the reasons balancing League of Legends is so hard.

There are several dynamics to the game itself, first off is the range of people playing the game. There are those who do it for a living, flying around the world to participate in tournaments for fame, glory and money and then there are those playing for fun and just for something to do with friends. Within this there are other groups and overall, various range of skill levels and to favour one, would be to neglect others – that’s why you see Darius getting nerfs when he’s playable against because there’s a majority who can’t play against him.

I'm not OP, I promise!... PENTAKILL

There’s also the factor of trying to release champions so that they can be viable in the current meta-game, it’s something Riot champion designer Xypherous pointed out on the League of Legends forums recently:

"It’s funny how the majority of OP champions can be found in top lane. They were created for each other."

While he’s talking mostly about top lane itself, this can be indicative of the other lanes as when you release a champion, you don’t want them to be unviable because they’re weak against what’s popular and strong right now. You need to make something that can go up against that champion, which is also an attempt to balance out those champions considered strong.

It’s a difficult business working out what to buff, what to nerf and with some of the LoL community having potty mouths and aggressive attitudes, I can imagine it being particularly tough when something goes ‘wrong’ such a champion becomes unviable or a rework is looked down upon as a nerf (see Evelynn) or a champion ends up being too strong. For as long as League of Legends stays active in producing new champions, maps and other content, no doubt the Great Balancing Act will continue and while they may never perfect it, it’s nice to know they’re trying.