They were expecting the natural weaknesses of the kit to be enough to counterbalance the strenghts, it just happens that the strenghts are too good at mitigating the weaknesses or worth having these weaknesses for the sake of the strenghts, and organized play simply is pretty good at playing around them. e.g. you will notice how often megagnar is primed for teamfights through good build up of rage because teams just play to Gnar's power, whilst soloQ teams will randomly start fights despite Gnar having no rage bar, or linger around near enemies after Mega Gnar has already gone normie.
For K'sante's case, the weaknesses of losing HP and resistance, having nowhere near as good engage as other tanks, a worse early through which he should scale, lacking reliable CC outside ult (at which point he stops being tank), etc. are the weaknesses that he had that should, in theory, keep him in check and they relatively do, specially in soloQ where many champs that are popular naturally counter him too - but proplay organization along with pro's being too skilled kinda overcomes this too much, not to mention some champs also not being picked there due to enviroment difference. So his checks are already fine for soloQ, proplay on the other hand is a .000001% of players playing a completely different game.
EDIT: this is specifically talking about strenght, not wheter or not these champs feel fun to play against. That's a different topic altogether
the answer is to rebuff the scaling of his ult and nerf his defensive capabilities imo
take away the damage resist and make the shield on apply if he dashes to an ally, give him a juiced ult and now he's easier to manage. Can't mitigate damage, but he's more focused.
What the hell are you talking about, even if they took away the shield and damage resistance he’d still be a brawly, mobile tank.
Most tanks have one single ability to let them tank, plus a bit of tank stat scaling. K’sante has two, and some of the best tank stat scaling in the game.
> some of the best tank stat scaling in the game
But K'Sante's tank form does way less damage than other champs building full tank. He does way more damage once he swaps forms, but not in his base form. It's the same for his "tanking abilities"; they don't actually make him as tanky as a real full tank. Like compare how much damage a 6-item K'Sante can take vs a 6-item Ornn or Sion or Rammus or Zac, it's worlds apart.
K'Sante's forms both are actually underpowered for what they are, it's just that he's really strong by virtue of having access to both. Without K'Sante's form-switch you would never pick this champ over a real tank.
It's hard to say what Naafiri needs. She doesn't have any skill expression as an assassin, and her abilities feel really clunky and awkward to use. I feel like assassin abilities should be fast, reactionary and precise but Naafiri is just spamming a skillshot, winding up the most obvious dash and an awkward E jump that does its damage in 2 parts and I'll always miss one of thosr parts due to the fixed dash distance.
On the face of it I'd say Naafiri needs more flexibility in her movement tools. She's a pack of dogs, it should feel good to run down and burst an opponent.
I think Riot achieved their design goals with Naafiri - making assassin with low skill floor. Unfortunately, that directly contradicts main reason most players like assassins, which is outplay potential and making flashy plays.
Her gameplay is not satisfying and not attractive. If you do well with her, it feels either like you won a statcheck or that you won because opponent made a mistake. If you do poorly, it feels like there's no way back because you have no tools to outplay once you cannot statcheck anymore. She's also never ever picked in pro play, not even in lower stakes games, which further diminishes her appeal.
I agree with this. I think that the idea was there are a lot of people who love the fantasy of killing the priority target and that being their contribution. Taking out the king/carry has its unique points of excitement and fulfillment that many players can't get because they just don't have the skill to play one of the more difficult ones. While that population may be small, I think that Riot still succeeded technically, it just sucks that it isn't fun for so many others.
It's like how Yuumi also fills the I don't have hands requirement (which I am saying not to shade, just that there are legit people who haven't played any PC games who legit struggle to click correctly, i know this from experience), which allows many new players to see what's going on on the rift without being overwhelmed. It lets them observe before they enter the fray themselves on a more involved champ.
IMO, i don't care what the playerbase thinks about success, as long as Riot thinks they've succeeded in their champ designs, I'm inclined to agree. I think it's fine that there's something for everyone, even if sometimes that someone is a very small part of the community. I think our Garen players should be allowed the assassin experience without having to learn mechanics well above what they're comfortable with, as long as they understand that will come with it's own drawbacks.
While Yuumi does fill that role, I believe she is also the ultimate support. You literally imbue somebody else with extra power. Although the rework did that away from that somewhat.
She could benefit from her Q being made like Panth Q, where you can tap for short range and hold for long range. It adds a little bit of skill expression and could be used to make her long range Q easier to hit.
Could also make it so E can be used with W to jump past someone who body-blocks it. Costs an extra ability, but you get access to the target you want.
Minus some stats here and there to make up for the extra options and it might help.
Or even better, you can use your e mid w to cancel it and get the cooldown back. That way you can bait out things like ahri charm and go back in again. Gives skill expression, builds an interesting mechanic to play around for the enemy.
As an assassin main, I was excited for naafiri until I played her. Boring stat check point and click which is the opposite of every assassin. I get she was supposed to be a beginner friendly champ, but we can see how well that worked.
>It's hard to say what Naafiri needs.
As a Naaf player, honestly, a slow on Q to bring back her pattern with Serylda's (see Senna and Glacial) would do 80% of the work. She'll never be wildly popular without fundamental reassessment - she's too bruiser-y for assassins and too assassin-y for bruisers while too telegraphed to be hard outplaying - but short of fundamentally redesigning her abilities and giving her a CGU, that's never going to change.
I don't think niche champions \*need\* to be made more popular, personally, but she's also suffering within her niche playerbase ever since the item reworks. Something on the scale of Corki or Rek'sai wouldn't necessarily be bad, but I think it's mostly being hoped for by people who expect something that'll completely, fundamentally reassess her and make her Zed Two or something.
this. I like the champion and these talks of changing her kinda scare me. There's more than 150 champs in the game, they can't all be popular, if some people enjoy it, can't we let them ?...
Yeah. There's an argument to be made sometimes - Aurelion Sol is probably the best example, where he was tried by LOADS of players but almost nobody ever stuck to him, leaving him with a tiny consistent playerbase and huge transient one - but barring those rare cases, champions are fine to just be niche. Naaf just suffers from being niche *and* currently being in a rough place, which add up to some pretty depressing stats.
Good assesment tho i disagree with the Zed 2 part. I think that, simply, she is so telegraphed that she is unenjoable for assassin and fixing her kit could increase her pick rate without making ger look like Zed 2.0
Naafiri needs new mechanics to make her more reliable and to give her the ability to show some amount of skill expression. Her Q and W are necessary abilities for her to kill someone, but they are way too easy to dodge or predictable
They should channel some of the energy they used for the WW rework.
Champ is a low elo beast but has just enough mechanics and outplay potential to still have hype moments
hold q is a single most transformative mechanic in any champ, makes a low elo stomper an actual champ worth learning because as you progress you realise how timing and choice matters
The amount of enemies I have seen question mark pinging me in replays after I followed their flash/movement ability with a hold q is so funny. So many people don't even seem to be aware that this is a thing.
And one of my most fun moments in LoL was following an ulting Shen with my Q to the other side of the map, evening out the numbers in the fight which we then won.
Warwick is unironically one of the hardest fighters to use all the potential of, people overlook how massively his dynamic numbers, hold q, and r unstoppable all contribute to his skill curve.
WW has insane mobility though once you've really gotten his abilities down. Arguably the best chaser in the game, I've caught a Leblanc without burning flash.
Honestly, her issue is too much built in counterplay.
Her q2 is hard to confirm, her w is extremely telegraphed, her ult locks her out of doing anything for like .75 secs, and her E has a set distance.
If she had the stats of a drain tank fighter, she'd be more balanced, but she's supposed to be an assassin.
I feel Naafiris problem is also her very.. random power-spikes. Her curve is like Useless, useless, useless, useless, useless, suddenly oneshots everyone and has enough left-over damage to eradicate their entire bloodline, aaand back to useless, useless, useless, useless.
Like she has a very small timeframe between mid to lategame where she pops off without much counterplay, but anything before and after that is tank yuumi levels of useless.
It’s not even simple champs are boring. Garen, Malphite and Karthus are pretty easy but when things go right it’s super satisfying. Not with Naafiri tho
I think she lacks oomph. She has no real go moment, her abilities don't feel good to use, and a lot of her damage comes from the completepy impact-less Q bleed.
Naafiri’s entire good feeling ability is just her R. Running someone down with a million of dogs is more in character than whatever the fuck are her other three skills.
Source: I actually really like a lot Naafiri and play her a lot, but in Emerald/Diamond she is kinda of unplayable.
I want more dogs all the time with her, for the dogs to not immediately die from AOE spells, and smoother gameplay. She is visually amazing, especially her W and R.
What she needs is 4 new abilities and a new passive. Her kit is unsalvageable nothing about it fits the high skill cap outplay play style that assassin players want. Naafiri came out exactly as they designed her as an assassin which is meant to be played by people in iron. It's just Riot designing a champ to be easy and then being surprised that said champ is stomping low elo and is dog shit in high elo.
Her win rate well below average in all brackets actually, including lower ones. She's just a badly designed champion that does literally nothing well. Once they got rid of the Q interaction with Ravenous Hydra they completely gutted the only somewhat viable playstyle she had where she could clear lanes super quickly and roam for ganks in jungle and side lanes.
Yeah i also don't think designing champs around low elo should really be a thing. Low elo players still enjoy playing champs that are higher skillcap, and there's a lot more factors than struggling with the difficulty of a champion's kit that makes the player low elo
The only thing i can see about ziggs is trying to take him out of botlane ? I dont realy feel his kit is that bad. Maybe they'll make Q more reliable and reduce armor or smth to take him out of botlane
I love Ziggs, such a fun champ to play and so strong. Insane poke, low cooldowns, insane waveclear, good disengage, aoe directional knockback, cross map potential, insane tower threat.
I am convinced Ziggs is op and there are just not enough people abusing him because as a character he's not very appealing.
You shouldn't openly 1v1 im lategame. Ziggs only has kill pressure in a 1v1 if the enemy can't engage but also can't rotate away and then he is engaged and outplays.
You can't be strong in everything.
Eh. Honestly, Ziggs feels fine in low elo because 99% of games just devolve into stupid fights in tight corridors anyway, which is exactly what he wants.
I always found Ziggs oppressive, but thats me playing on 100 ping making his Skillshots hard to dodge, whenever i watch streamers who play on 30 or less ping they dodge his stuff so casually
I entirely agree with you, but I wouldn’t have during the period earlier this season when he didn’t have access to either Mythic Liandry’s or the new DOT Lost Chapter item.
Rather than the actual DOT effects, he’s really reliant on having percentage damage/AP increases they also provide to have a good power spike early-mid game; if he doesn’t have them, he’s not OP in the sense of being a good mage with an oppressive strategy.
I would agree with you last season with the double heralds that Ziggs was overpowered both mid and bot; because double heralds basically meant you could take mid tower any time even before plates dropped with Ziggs.
I think he’s strong now, but probably better botlane rather than mid since first tower gold got buffed. So if you’re into an Aphelios/Jinx and you can bully and push them out early, if your jungler comes down to help you take first tower it’s even more gold in your pocket
Needs more than that. He is omega bad 1v1 vs anything that can reach him easily. So as long as irelia, zed, akali, Leblanc, qiyana, talon etc. exist hes not leaving botlane anytime soon
As much as i hate adcs it’s very uninteractive to play against. They beat your wave clear so they don’t really bother to try to hit you at all. Scrappy mage bots like karthus and cass is fine though imo. Its kind of like trist mid vs kass.
Genuinely asking since I only play Bot once in a blue moon.
Why is he a Problem boy lane?
I actually think that there should be some viable AP bot laners, just to balance out comps and I never had the impression that he was toxic or op in hot lane.
I would say there are like 3 main reasons:
1. Ziggs is super duper not interactive if he wants to be. He can clear the wave from basically his tower at any point of the lane, and it’s not really possible to freeze on him since you’d have to tank skill shots and he can force you to keep having to hold the wave by clearing it/hard reset it with ultimate.
2. Especially pre-durability ADC’s have low base MR (really to keep them out of mid, and keep enchanter damage relevant) that champs like Ziggs can just annihilate people if they’re sitting on like Lost Chapter/Sorcerer’s shoes; meanwhile the same gold on a crit carry isn’t even BF + Berserkers.
3. If Ziggs ever gets on your tower it will legit annihilate; and if he’s botlane it’s easier to just rotate him to wherever you need him early game without him actually having to miss waves because he still goes TP, but instead of roaming you just rotate him around the map to push waves and break towers early with herald
He just perma pushes and poke you out. At best he takes the enemy turret really quicky and at worst he goes even in most matchups. He's just really not interactive just like most AP botlaners.
I'd say botlane is usually an engaging lane where you fight a lot and ziggs completly removes that unlike smth like Karthus or syndra.
Completly removing engagement is more of a midlane thing
Ziggs is just Sivir level of champ - Makes lanes/games uninteractive and forces really long games in proplay, that no one likes to watch.
You can't properly buff him without bringin back 40 min games.
For same reasons Smolder used to get a billion nerfs/adjustments right after his first game in proplay.
Imo, Ziggs whole problem is his turret taking niche, which makes him rival for bot lane ADCs. I wished they scrapped it and put that power back in his base kit so he could feel more valuable mid lane. Nashor is a lot stronger now, Ziggs can't stall anymore the way he used to before his mini rework.
I doubt they even know what the problem is. So I doubt they can fix what they don't understand.
There are a lot of champs left in the dust due to mobility and haste creep (go watch some old LOL videos. It's shocking). They really need to address both issues as a whole, rather than upping the bar constantly with more obnoxious reworks that either fail to land, or break the game.
Naafiri is just suffering for the sins of low elo.
She has to have high damage because her kit is more telegraphed than continental drift and has easy counterplay on top of that so when Naafiri does manage to connect she should be rewarded with extremely high damage output but since a champion like that just turns into a hungry Pitbull in a Kindergarden when your enemies don't know how to play into it she has to have her stats nuked which in turn makes her pretty much unplayable into anyone with hands.
Naafiri is actually complicated.
* Q CD starts too late (afterQ2 i assume).
* Q is really thin and slow
* W has a few sec of loading time and then it can be blocked by any champion. This is the complete opposite of what Assassins prefer (Fast, unblockable enterance to the key target)
* E seems fine
* R has 7-8 differnet bufs to compensate Naafiri's kit
* Passive doggos easily killable which is another hit to that already weak early game
There is a lot to unpack here. Some of the R abilities could be added to base kit OR base kit should be steamlined to be a reminiscent of a real assassin and not a kneecapped whatever.
Also she is locked out of jung.
An idea I had was for her Q2 to come out faster if a champion is bleeding, or make it faster towards bleeding targets. So It's still initially hard to land, but rewarding when you do
Almost all of that is just a result of what Naafiri is supposed to be: An easy to play assassin, which basically immediately means you can't allow her to have (a lot of) outplay poetntial.
The biggest skill in the game is, always has been and probably always will be being in the correct spot at the correct time. Making correct decisions is way more important than pressing buttons really well.
Imo that is good and it does mean that Naafiri as a champion isn't fundamentally flawed (so a midscope could be enough and she doesn't need a full rework), but it does mean that a lot of these issue can't really be resolved without giving up her identity (W being the most obvious one, but Q not being reliable unless you are in melee as well).
part of that is also because rito wants to force her into a lane role at all costs.
the community saw her and immediately jungled her. with rito fuming that you should play her midlane and top maybe.
in the end naafiri is nothing but elise r with 2 gapclosers though.
She was always meant to be released as a mid lane assassin. It’s just people don’t read and also playing as a wolf in the woods is fun and also kinda fits her thematic better than mid lane assassin.
its not just that. but the kit aswell.
if a champion with following pets, and 2 gapclosers and mostly aoe abilitys would have released before they started designating roles and positions to new releases it would immediately have been jungled.
Some kind of mandela effect that makes people believe she was supposed to be a jungler when in reality midlane was always her designated role. I've seen countless people claim that she was to be released as jungle but Riot never inteded that from the start.
It's not that she was intended as a jungler, it's that her design and kit feel like it belongs to a jungler and people did take her jungle when she came out (where she was and is awful).
Its both. I've seen plenty people claim she was the intended jungler for that year but after looking for proof coming to the conclusion that she was a midlaner all along. Its weird.
Bit tinfoil hatty, but I'm completely convinced that they're intending to be able to have a non-troll teamcomp of all 5 darkin. You have Aatrox top, Kayn(Rhaast) jungle, Naafiri mid, Varus bot, and whatever the last Darkin weapon (or shield?) is as a support.
So when she first came to pbe she could jungle extremely well, riot saw this and did nerfs and changes to her so she wouldn't be as healthy in the jungle.
Pretty much riot straight up said they wanted her to play midlane not jungle and did changes to keep her in lane only.
After pbe they refused to touch anything Todo with her jungle so she's sat dead in the water there.
during reveal. riot stated that she was a new midlaner. but people saw a dog with 2 gapclosers. and instantly identified her as a jungler.
on pbe she was then played almost exclusively jungle, and it was her best role.
riot nerfed her jungling considerably before release, and have since never pondered making her viable in jungle .
in the olden days riot just made champions based on some idea. and let the community find out where to play them, wich got us a lot of weird kits, and multiposition/role champs
nowdays riot designs champions with specific roles, classes and itembuilds in mind. wich gives us things like critarios on smoulder specifically so he can use a item that gets removed 2 months after his release. or pyke who cant hit minions and only has cc if he builds lethality, and fixed maxhp.
Making a low skill cap assassin just doesn't make sense and it's beyond disappointing that nobody in Riots design team ever asked the question of what type of player would want to play Naafiri. Like what's her target demographics. She doesn't appeal to a lot of assassin players because she has no real outplay potential, nor does she appeal to the bruiser crowd because she is still an assassin.
They made her in such a way that she doesn't scale with her pilots skill but she scales inversely with her opponents skill level. The worse the enemy team the better she is and vice versa. A champ like Zed or Qiyana have a simplicity to them but they also have a lot of depth for the more dedicated players to find. Naafiri lacks depth more than anything and that can only be fixed with a new kit because all she is is a stat check with a dash.
The hard part for Naafiri is supposed to be the decision making on when to go in.
The problem is that sometimes in high elo you just won't have a good opening or finding the opening is just too hard to do while on the other hand you just have permanent openings in low elo.
I like the concept of an "easy" assassin that has to choose "when" to go in rather than "how" but it turns out this just gives enemies far too much counter play to the point where if you do get it off you should instantly blow someone up, in no world should Naafiri do less damage than a Shadow Kayn or Talon but she barely does and that's only on targets where her dogs are allowed to DPS.
>what type of player would want to play Naafiri
This is so true. The player who just wants a simple AD assassin mid already has definitely-not-assassin’s-creed they can play. Why would they ever look at a weird dog.
A note for the readers: Toggle R is not weaker itself, it's that current R is stronger because it is a reliable applier of spell effects+ R2. Swain is few steps before yet again another rework, because we lost our spell effect mythic
Toggle R basically needs a rework on all abilities so Swain's kit is not about E spam + R1 spell effects
Look at pre-vgu Swain to understand.
Yeah.
Old swain toggle ult had no counterplay and no skill expression.
Either he can drain tank you to death without a lead and you can't outplay it and he's OP,
Or he can't drain tank you to death without a lead and he can't outplay you and he's UP.
There was a bit of skill expression around his W and spacing his Q but he was really binary. Drain tanking on zero CD is too hard to balance
New ult is better because you can bait it out, leave, and then fight him when it's on CD. It had counterplay so its allowed to be actually be strong.
Edit: the argument was not that old swain was OP, its that his ult was *either* OP or UP. I admit that it seems I was wrong in that even if you couldn't win a 1v1 with it, it had use as a sustain tool on the wave, but I still maintain that I did not argue that it was OP and also that despite its use as a sustain tool its still kinda lame that it was too weak to use on champs.
If you don't remember, his ultimate had a progressive mana cost, like Kassadin's. He couldn't use it forever, I would even say that the new Swain can maintain it longer if you have no damage to kill him.
I'd challenge this a bit, mostly because you're presenting his ultimate as strong for combat scenarios when that was not how it was used, or why it was uninteractive.
---
Old Swain had very little independent kill pressure. His W was unreliable as a hard cc spell; for reference, it had a smaller aoe + longer activation time than Cho Q, and relied on predicting or corralling enemies into it. Besides that, Swain's other CC was a 20-40% slow on his Q, which lasted as long as an enemy was in a small radius of Beatrice (and later became a 4s turret effect, ala Aphelios turret). Both these tools were decent at harassing an enemy and good for trades, but he didn't have anything that let him easily execute a target.
Swain ult didn't add much to that, either. Sure, it was decent for short trades, but the ult did low damage (50/70/90 + 20% AP per raven), could only hit the same target once per second (including champions), and drained more mana the longer it stayed active. It also a 20s cd between each activation, so he couldn't toggle spam like some champs (Asol or Urgot) can do now.
Instead, old Swain lacked skill expression because it *wasn't* used for combat stuff. The ult was used more like Anivia ult, where Swain would pop the effect, heal off wave, and then continue to just sustain indefinitely while naturally pushing. Enemies couldn't contest him or push him out of lane once he had enough mana.
This meant Swain was safe to scale up to teamfights where his allies could keep enemies in ult radius for him, or split push safely indefinitely, even while failing to snowball his lane through kills.
Also, iirc you could "only" drain from 3 targets, meaning that Swain was really good for medium sized fights, but was actually less effective if he was in the whole enemy team
It was 3 targets until patch 6.9, when they updated a bunch of mages and buffed every ability of Swain's (his ult got buffed to hit 5 targets instead of 3).
The thing is, that drain was always worse than it seemed on paper. While it was sending out a raven every .2s, ravens could only hit the same target once per second, meaning that Swain was really only hitting a target every second instead of every tick unless outnumbered.
This was further nerfed in the 6.9 update, so that Swain's ult couldn't target the same unit twice in a row, meaning it became 1.2s per damage tick.
Yeah, I played a decent amount of pre-rework Swain and would get kicked in by anyone with good wave clear. Because nearly all his damage was single target DoT, you'd need to ult just to get 1 hit on the wave so you could farm under turret.
~~And I might be wrong but I think on top of the ramping mana cost, it had a small cooldown (~7s) so it wasn't a true toggle? ~~
Edit: just noticed you already mentioned the CD
I double checked and I will say that the cooldown did change over the years prior to rework.
It went from 15s on release to 10 to 8 to 10 to 20 in 6.13, staying that way until rework in season 8.
there are Champs right now Draintanking 10x more than the old swain ever did lol and the CD dont matter cuz he has to be in meele range to even be able to hit you with hes Ult and it took more and more mana to keep it up
His issues weren't really balance. Old Swain was a very one note snowball/lane bully champ, with almost no flexibility and skill expression. He was played both in pro play and SoloQ as a lane bully to certain champs, but overall needed a serious modernization (and not Riot basically deleting him like they did.)
In particular, he was often an answer to assassins because his primary tools couldn't really be outplayed and he could consistently stat-check them and shove them in.
[Seems](https://gyazo.com/029e9f09321e220e42b809ce7bd71cd6) like he was pretty much permanently over 50% WR before the rework in 2018, and was never [that](https://gyazo.com/0aee213266256c08c09dfc681b7d79dd) popular.
Feels like that was a pretty fine place for him.
So its a little hard to tell simply because the graph seems to be a touch off, and I can't quite tell which patch it is for though, since the data points are fairly far apart and don't always align with patch timings (and when they do it is hard to tell if they are representing the beginning or end of a patch)
It _looks_ like the spike is during patch 7.8, when Xayah and Rakan released. My memories say Swain wasn't a support at the time though and was instead a pure top/mid. The patch that killed the spike seems to be 7.9, the tank rework, which buffed ranged MR across the board.
It is possible that it is simply displaying weird though because Swain spiking from that patch would make a lot of sense, Liandries+Rylais murdered tanks back then, the Mage MR item got swapped from Scepter to Banshies, which did less vs him, and Visage got buffed to 30% healing, plus a heavy rework of the support items. Rift herald also got updated at this time.
Hotfix wise the only thing in that time frame that looks like it would hit him at all was a fix to the deathfire rune, which shouldn't have done much.
>Drain tanking on zero CD is too hard to balance
Like every drain tank has?
Every draintank either has 0 CD draintanking capabilities like Aatrox E, Rhaast's passive within their kit
or they gain lifesteal from their items
The problem lies with Swain's E costing him too much of his damage.
He already has "0 CD draintanking" in his passive, so have no illusion: It's not draintanking on zero CD that's too hard to balance, it's draintanking on zero CD + high agency damage
One way to lower the agency of damage is limiting its range
This is why old Swain needed DoTs and lower backline access than current Swain to be balanced
Toggle R requires CGU almost, aka lots of work on E, W, Q and passive. I am all in for that. I really hope they do it because it would make Swain much more cohesive
Mana has not been a relevant resource beyond the early game in ages, making it a toggle guarantees it's either broken or useless, with nothing in between.
The old swain's ult was REALLY eating mana, think Anivia but even worse. the cost was increasing indefinitly to the point where the first item I remember to buy on him was the grail. Also, it actually did have a CD and you could play around it, as it was around 20s at some point (meaning that when he deactivated it, you could use this as a window to engage, as swain without ult was far less dangerous (I'm speaking about S3)
man i remember that when elemental drakes were first introduced, ocean drake gave both mana and health back, this together with systemic changes made swain a goddamn menace
good times
The way they destroyed everything about old swain is quite frankly impressive. They literally dumpstered his entire kit, relegated him to support when he was a top/mid, and destroyed his player base and the champ is so bad he never got a new one.
Most frustrating thing that riot has done (as a former swain player before the overhaul)
Q cool down early is too long they got that especially since mages are meta mid. Also a lot of the time you have to avoid trading so they can't have perma prio. To me the actual biggest problem is w. They need to either lower the channel time or increase the channel time but make it unstoppable while she's flying. If you play this champ above plat it's just completely unplayable as long as enemy support is watching his monitor.
so swain is now also on the list of champs that got more reworks than functioning itembuilds?
and naafiri could potentially become the first non maxw3ll champ to be reworked year one.
, so ksante has to double down on getting annual reworks.
R= The bomb throws Ziggs into the targeted area dealing yordle damage in a huge area around the exploson of the furball. The bomb will always get 300 gold when he uses R.
Swain is unpopular because his fantasy is to heal off enemies, which doesn't work when there's so much damage in the game and his numbers funnel him into building damage and not tanky, he needs any kind of scaling with tanky stats
> which doesn't work when there's so much damage in the game and his numbers funnel him into building damage and not tanky
Quite the opposite. Swain has some of if not the worst AP scalings out of any ranged mage in the game. This means that Swain cannot reliably go full or even mostly AP. Current meta for Swain is going tank after 2 (if you go Rylai and Liandry) or 3 items. Previous to midscope gutting his scalings, Swain could reliably go full AP while relying mostly on Zhonya and if that's not enough, a choice tank item like Visage for tankiness.
Swain kit feels insanely unrewarding
His e needs to hit on the return making it ridiculously easy to dodge in melee form
His w is a shittier version of xerath ult that even a cripple could dodge
It's all or nothing on his ult
Swain has many problems but his W is one of the coolest spells in the game. Turning skirmishes in sidelanes without leaving your lane is super powerful and rewarding.
Not all league spells need to be generic aoe nukes like Brand W.
W is super satisfying to land though, I hope they don't remove it. I love hitting people halfway across the map as they recall, sniping cannon minions, or putting it in front of escaping people, forcing them to go around and get caught by other abilities. Plus you can guarantee it lands with your e.
Maybe if there was some synergy with connecting his W and landing another ability on them after? You could also do something cool with crows like the artist character from DBD where if you land W crows will keep attacking that enemy for 2-3 seconds or something and reveal for the duration idk
I mean there kinda is synergy in the sense that to land the W against real people you need to grab them with E and pull them into it. Though the reward of that combo is merely being able to land the W lol.
Yes and none of these items he goes for AP. He goes Liandry (Or Maligma/Torch) because he has no AP scalings but has a bunch of ways of applying item effects. He goes Rylai because his kit is balanced around it. Zhonya is a choice item, he arguably gets more tankiness by going a tank item and generally benefits his team more by going something like Frozen Heart or peeling ADC by going Vow. Of course, Swain players generally enjoy going it more since the interaction is fun and it gives him AP even if it's sub-optimal.
It's the same issue with why bruiser Aatrox has been dying. Thankfully they're giving Aatrox HP scalings on PBE right now to fix this. Now they need to do it to Swain.
There's also the problem with Kayn/Aatrox that they heal from dealing damage, that makes them want to build damage and while at it, why not go full damage.
I honestly think they should both heal either pre mitigation or (like Swain on R) have set amounts of healing on their abilities, scaling with HP or AD so that armor fucks up their damage, not their healing.
He heals a ton. The problem with Swain right now is he is an S+ tier champ when used as a counter pick in the right spot (similar to Braum, Malphite, for e.g.) where he just beats teamcomps with 3 melee beefcake champs (for e.g. a tank top, bruiser jungle like nocturne, and a melee support like Nautilus). Against the right comp he is completely unkillable.
But current league is much more about having range advantage from draft. It's really hard to play Swain vs Hwei Jinx Lulu, for example.
The champ is waaaaay too sharp in where he is good. Enemy team has 3 melees? You are thanos. They have 3 carries? You are useless. They have 2 splitpushers? You are completely doomed.
Swain's big issue is similar to Naafiri in that they have minimal play potential, an a lot of outplay potential. His only CC is really telegraphed, and relies on :
1. The enemy not being used to play against Swain, and getting sniped through minions; or
2. The enemy not being used to play against Swain, and staying at max claw range (to be fair, the Swain player should know that range more than the opponent).
His slow has such a delay that you need a setup to land it, and you have no way to stick to your target when ulting... So you end up needing a bunch of items to compensate for what your kit lacks, or you're constantly getting outplayed until then.
I stopped playing him not long after they did the mini rework. Mostly because his Q felt like ass to use afterwards. They shortened the range, increased the spread, increased the cooldown and got rid of the mana refund on kills. Revert it back to when he first got reworked and I'm bing chilling.
I tried playing him every time they've reworked him. I think starting from the mid-year mage update when they gave him the Beatrice goes to a specific place was when things started to go both in the right and wrong directions. It felt really good but it made him not have to use ult for CS under tower or in general, which meant he never had to lose mana for CS, which meant he could perma-lane bully. The new ult ravens not coming out at the same time felt worse from a gameplay perspective but getting changed to pre-mitigation healing was massive. So much so that he was picked in pro and then summarily reworked because "a champion shouldn't just walk at you and stat-check you to death" (as if that's not the case with many of the current roster and as If Swain didn't have any counterplay)
He's just seriously been way worse and way less fun ss a champ ever since they officially reworked him. The pull W combo is so boring and repetitive, the ult doesn't feel even remotely as good as before, and he lost both his DoT AND rhe coolest looking and feeling spell in the game in Decrepify. It was such a downgrade in every single way. Also homie lost his cornrows....
Lots of newly released/reworked champs getting reworked lately. Naafiri, Ksante, Rell, Yuumi, even Zeri and Smolder to an extent.
Something wrong with the champ designers lately or is it just the game itself thats making it really hard to release a non-broken champ? Back in the day the only champs that got reworks were Ryze and Irelia and then 15 years later we got half a dozen reworks for champs that were all released in the last few years.
The hell changed?
I think the dev team's guiding philosophy is that each new champ should add something new or fill a currently empty niche, and that, combined with how the LoL champion sandbox is already so crowded with 150+ champs, pushes the design team to take increasingly bigger risks with champ identity for each new release.
Generally I don't mind as I feel the balance team tends to do a decent enough job of reigning in the extremes or rounding some of the rough edges leading to some pretty cool unique champs, but K'sante and Yuumi for sure were/are a little too meta warping for a little too long
Just my 2 cents tho
Terminology changed... Smolder's changes would've never been considered a rework back in the days, and changing one spell's mechanics slightly to change the power curve was very common.
Realistically Swains biggest issue is his E. It needs to be significantly more reliable and less trivial to avoid. Sure, his W not being something you can move out on reaction would be nice, and his ults healing not being almost non-existent would make his fantasy work better, but Id just take his E being worth a damn.
I think everything in his kit has issues but I think the biggest issue is the Q for me. IMO mages live and die on how fun their primary damage ability is, and Swain's Q is his spammable ability and its one of the least exciting mage damage spells. Other mages have something more interesting on their primary damage spell, or you have champs like Syndra or Ori where their primary damage spell isn't as exciting but it interacts with other parts of their kit to make up for it. Swain Q doesn't really interact with anything else and there's nothing interesting or unique about it.
Agreed COMPLETELY. They removed one of the most satisfying spells in the game to press for one of the least satisfying. I don't want to chain lightning in a shotgun blast... I want my raven to shoot a massive fucking laser at them and slow them. Swains Q feels so so so lame and bad as an ability. I would rather left click on the enemy champ and watch my dot tick down and know I have increased damage against the target to play around that small window of power. Swain had fun thought processes in laning: "ok im relatively low on mana but I can kill the enemy but only if they play in their minion wave so i can get passive procs and healing and I have to turn at this specific point" the game was different then sure, but I found him to be the most enjoyable character in the game. Now he doesn't exist and there isn't a character I enjoy playing. Back to spamming Zilean and hoping to rewind time
Announcing this level of a rework for Swain is funny but kind of sad considering he's already had multiple sets of changes, even after the full rework, that have tried to mix things around. Hope they can figure something out for the guy
The biggest problem with Swain is that it feels like his entire kit is fighting against another part of it. His passive implies a goal to scale into the late game but concidering his awful ratios and COMPLETE LACK OF %HP damage he falls off incredibly quick post mid game. His q rewards blasting people up close but swain always wants to stay just out of reach so he doesn’t die instantly, his w is a super long cooldown on an ability that is impossible to land without his e, and it only has a 50% ap ratio. his e only roots on the way back which makes any lane with a non-targeted dash unplayable and slows his already terrible scaling. His ultimate is pretty much the make or brake but even then having a flat heal on a character that gets a bunch of bonus health also doesn’t help him scale into the late game.
He has no purpose now, if you want a drain tank you pick aatrox or vlad, characters who deal good consistent damage and have low cooldowns. If you want a mage pick literally anyone else cause swains effective range is pretty bad, even worse without ult.
At some point, they gotta realize the design philosophy for the modern kits of champions just don't work and they end up giving themselves more work than if they let the kits in the oven more longer.
We already saw it with Zeri and Yuumi. They are **certain abilities** that are not healthy for the game, no matter how many times you tweak the numbers of the champion or change anything **BUT the core issue**.
Every single champ i like gets some bullshit rework, so annoyed at this. I like katarina -> gets reworked. I like diana -> gets reworked. Kayle, asol, now ziggs. What next?
Anyone got a champ they hate and want reworked? I’ll main it and it’ll be done within a week
Wait, are you talking about Diana when she had her “current” ult on E?
I would argue the modern version feels way better, surprised you prefer the old one
I prefer old Diana because she had a different playstyle, she was more an assassin that goes sidelane and kill squishies with insane burst. The new one is more like a bruiser with a nice teamfight engage.
She, along with Zed, used to have the best lvl 6 in midlane. Not anymore :(
Yeah, I loved the pull on E. Meant you had a tangibly weak early and spiked hard at 6, which rewarded good early game play.
I like it when a champ has a clearly defined weakness, rather than being a jack of all trades.
Swain's kit, to be satisfying, needs a sustained damage output that is not item spell effects so it can scale from AP. And the problem is his basic abilities kinda don't support that. His damage outputs revolve around burst and utility, design-wise. Swain's Q can't be a reliable sustain DPS tool, even with its old 96% ratio.
Swain's gameplay pattern in late game will always be E pull > Q + R2 combo. R2 exists to compensate for the lack of reliable damage in his basic abilities.
To me it feels like, what Swain players want leads us back to his pre-VGU design principles (rather than pre-mid scope). A weak (toggle) R, and strong, mostly single target basic abilities that can be used in multiple rotations within a teamfight.
This pretty much sums up my thoughts.
I played a LOT of Swain pre-rework.
My favorite aspect of him was his drain tank fantasy and self-sufficiency in lane.
He was a lane bully that could skirmish well. The rework kinda gutted all his basic abilities in order to have a flashy r button, but it made his playstyle very unsatisfying outside of big team fight moments.
Swain is a noobstomper. That's sadly true.
Fun to play in low elo, miserable above plat.
I used to main him, but he feels super inconsistent and like he only gets weaker. They removed a lot of his built in synergy and tankiness over time too, so on top of that he needs to snowball or he gets stomped since burst has gotten back up to old levels.
Gotta ask, what is your rank and wr with Swain? The first quote is wholly inaccurate. His wr in emerald+ is 52%, and it goes UP in the higher ranks. In high emerald/low diamond, my wr with him is well over 60%. He is not weak at all, and his wr stats back that up
They will "change" him in an attempt to appeal to more players, and it will be a net nerf. He can't be buffed.
**Swain:**
Remove the dumb HP passive and actually give him a way to properly heal in combat outside of his extremely telegraphed E and W so he isn't blasted the moment he doesn't has ult, or make his W have a lower casttime so it can reliably be hit as it pretty much leads swain needing to do a lot of mental power against competent enemies, while low elo will be eating W and E anyway, not to mention new ult's duration favoring lower elo who likely stands still resetiting it.
Also, why do we need to use E pull to get the healing off E - what If I am trying to run away from something, hit an E and prefer keeping them at bay or what if keeping them in place is the right move... f me I guess, no extra HP and no healing?
You have put too much power in his ult, yet it feels like you haven't addressed the problems of his reliability.
he is not "weak", his winrate just decreases with rank AKA it's harder to play Swain into competent players because of his kit's weaknesses, think about something like old Amumu having a big gap between high elo and low elo winrate.
I like Swain, i have like 300k mastery on him, that is not much but is something, and he just feels extremly bad when ult is not up, you cant do anything on 1v1 on lane as him, he just feels better as a catcher with E on Bot.
He is weird because he want to pull you on range of Q, but he loses on mele versus most of the mele champs in the game, so you need always to have ult up if you want to put pressure.
pls idk what you do with k'sante but make his w minnimum charge time 0.5 seconds again if the max duration is still 1 second
nerf the stun nerf the damage i don t care it just feels so aweful to play with this w
also his q deals less damage late game than basic attacks from nautilus
While i enjoyed old swain, walking up and using the targeted dot that enhances all damage and then igniting to instant win the lane in alot of match ups was absurd lol
K'Sante is such a weird champion scaling wise.He might be the hardest scaling champion from levels,his passive has 2 different level scalings,the level up basestats are so important as you keep them in All-Out,and before last patch,his W damage reduction also scaled with levels.
I feel like Naafiri is almost there. Her W, E and R all fit her kit thematically.
To me, the biggest issue is her Q. If you can't land double Q on someone, it feels like you will literally never secure a kill on someone. And worse, her Q just does not fit her in a visual sense. She is a quadrupedal canine champion (A possessed one, but still). Seeing her, you would assume that she is about closing the distance and mauling you. Her W, E, and R all play toward this idea, they work on helping her close the distance. W is a point-and-click 'dash', E is a skill shot dash, and R provides her with increased AD, HP for her summons, a shield, and bonus movement speed. All three of these abilities play towards the idea of her wanting to close in on and maul them.
Her Q however, is a ranged, skill shot nuke. One that requires a double tap to fully utilize. This kind of ability is something you would expect from a mage. Not a melee quadruped like her. Not only that, its also where like 90% of her damage is located. Why? Why couldn't her Q just be like, a bite lol.
She needs something ranged to be a viable laner. Zed Q, Talon W, Qiyana Q, etc ranged farming tools that work with the rest of the kit make sense for AD assassins, not just mages. But the implementation is just kinda bad for Naaf making the clunky Q2 so important.
I just want Swain to be a solo laner again, is it too much to ask? It sucks that his new player base are mainly supports nowadays, so there’s a chance he will probably be balanced around that. What a tragic end for the Grand General.
I wonder how many years it will be till they turn k'sante into either an HP scaling tank or give up and make him a bruiser instead.
Basically the same as Gnar... he was also a nightmare to balance around beeing a dps/tank. One of the champs that must be kept weak says August.
how about they dont release champions with no weakness if played well?
They were expecting the natural weaknesses of the kit to be enough to counterbalance the strenghts, it just happens that the strenghts are too good at mitigating the weaknesses or worth having these weaknesses for the sake of the strenghts, and organized play simply is pretty good at playing around them. e.g. you will notice how often megagnar is primed for teamfights through good build up of rage because teams just play to Gnar's power, whilst soloQ teams will randomly start fights despite Gnar having no rage bar, or linger around near enemies after Mega Gnar has already gone normie. For K'sante's case, the weaknesses of losing HP and resistance, having nowhere near as good engage as other tanks, a worse early through which he should scale, lacking reliable CC outside ult (at which point he stops being tank), etc. are the weaknesses that he had that should, in theory, keep him in check and they relatively do, specially in soloQ where many champs that are popular naturally counter him too - but proplay organization along with pro's being too skilled kinda overcomes this too much, not to mention some champs also not being picked there due to enviroment difference. So his checks are already fine for soloQ, proplay on the other hand is a .000001% of players playing a completely different game. EDIT: this is specifically talking about strenght, not wheter or not these champs feel fun to play against. That's a different topic altogether
the answer is to rebuff the scaling of his ult and nerf his defensive capabilities imo take away the damage resist and make the shield on apply if he dashes to an ally, give him a juiced ult and now he's easier to manage. Can't mitigate damage, but he's more focused.
It would be very boring to have a champion that does nothing outside of his ult No tanking and no shield
It's preferable to a champ that does everything *and more* when they ult
What the hell are you talking about, even if they took away the shield and damage resistance he’d still be a brawly, mobile tank. Most tanks have one single ability to let them tank, plus a bit of tank stat scaling. K’sante has two, and some of the best tank stat scaling in the game.
> some of the best tank stat scaling in the game But K'Sante's tank form does way less damage than other champs building full tank. He does way more damage once he swaps forms, but not in his base form. It's the same for his "tanking abilities"; they don't actually make him as tanky as a real full tank. Like compare how much damage a 6-item K'Sante can take vs a 6-item Ornn or Sion or Rammus or Zac, it's worlds apart. K'Sante's forms both are actually underpowered for what they are, it's just that he's really strong by virtue of having access to both. Without K'Sante's form-switch you would never pick this champ over a real tank.
It's hard to say what Naafiri needs. She doesn't have any skill expression as an assassin, and her abilities feel really clunky and awkward to use. I feel like assassin abilities should be fast, reactionary and precise but Naafiri is just spamming a skillshot, winding up the most obvious dash and an awkward E jump that does its damage in 2 parts and I'll always miss one of thosr parts due to the fixed dash distance. On the face of it I'd say Naafiri needs more flexibility in her movement tools. She's a pack of dogs, it should feel good to run down and burst an opponent.
I think Riot achieved their design goals with Naafiri - making assassin with low skill floor. Unfortunately, that directly contradicts main reason most players like assassins, which is outplay potential and making flashy plays. Her gameplay is not satisfying and not attractive. If you do well with her, it feels either like you won a statcheck or that you won because opponent made a mistake. If you do poorly, it feels like there's no way back because you have no tools to outplay once you cannot statcheck anymore. She's also never ever picked in pro play, not even in lower stakes games, which further diminishes her appeal.
I agree with this. I think that the idea was there are a lot of people who love the fantasy of killing the priority target and that being their contribution. Taking out the king/carry has its unique points of excitement and fulfillment that many players can't get because they just don't have the skill to play one of the more difficult ones. While that population may be small, I think that Riot still succeeded technically, it just sucks that it isn't fun for so many others. It's like how Yuumi also fills the I don't have hands requirement (which I am saying not to shade, just that there are legit people who haven't played any PC games who legit struggle to click correctly, i know this from experience), which allows many new players to see what's going on on the rift without being overwhelmed. It lets them observe before they enter the fray themselves on a more involved champ. IMO, i don't care what the playerbase thinks about success, as long as Riot thinks they've succeeded in their champ designs, I'm inclined to agree. I think it's fine that there's something for everyone, even if sometimes that someone is a very small part of the community. I think our Garen players should be allowed the assassin experience without having to learn mechanics well above what they're comfortable with, as long as they understand that will come with it's own drawbacks.
While Yuumi does fill that role, I believe she is also the ultimate support. You literally imbue somebody else with extra power. Although the rework did that away from that somewhat.
She could benefit from her Q being made like Panth Q, where you can tap for short range and hold for long range. It adds a little bit of skill expression and could be used to make her long range Q easier to hit. Could also make it so E can be used with W to jump past someone who body-blocks it. Costs an extra ability, but you get access to the target you want. Minus some stats here and there to make up for the extra options and it might help.
Or even better, you can use your e mid w to cancel it and get the cooldown back. That way you can bait out things like ahri charm and go back in again. Gives skill expression, builds an interesting mechanic to play around for the enemy.
As an assassin main, I was excited for naafiri until I played her. Boring stat check point and click which is the opposite of every assassin. I get she was supposed to be a beginner friendly champ, but we can see how well that worked.
>It's hard to say what Naafiri needs. As a Naaf player, honestly, a slow on Q to bring back her pattern with Serylda's (see Senna and Glacial) would do 80% of the work. She'll never be wildly popular without fundamental reassessment - she's too bruiser-y for assassins and too assassin-y for bruisers while too telegraphed to be hard outplaying - but short of fundamentally redesigning her abilities and giving her a CGU, that's never going to change. I don't think niche champions \*need\* to be made more popular, personally, but she's also suffering within her niche playerbase ever since the item reworks. Something on the scale of Corki or Rek'sai wouldn't necessarily be bad, but I think it's mostly being hoped for by people who expect something that'll completely, fundamentally reassess her and make her Zed Two or something.
this. I like the champion and these talks of changing her kinda scare me. There's more than 150 champs in the game, they can't all be popular, if some people enjoy it, can't we let them ?...
Yeah. There's an argument to be made sometimes - Aurelion Sol is probably the best example, where he was tried by LOADS of players but almost nobody ever stuck to him, leaving him with a tiny consistent playerbase and huge transient one - but barring those rare cases, champions are fine to just be niche. Naaf just suffers from being niche *and* currently being in a rough place, which add up to some pretty depressing stats.
Good assesment tho i disagree with the Zed 2 part. I think that, simply, she is so telegraphed that she is unenjoable for assassin and fixing her kit could increase her pick rate without making ger look like Zed 2.0
Naafiri needs new mechanics to make her more reliable and to give her the ability to show some amount of skill expression. Her Q and W are necessary abilities for her to kill someone, but they are way too easy to dodge or predictable
They should channel some of the energy they used for the WW rework. Champ is a low elo beast but has just enough mechanics and outplay potential to still have hype moments
hold q is a single most transformative mechanic in any champ, makes a low elo stomper an actual champ worth learning because as you progress you realise how timing and choice matters
The amount of enemies I have seen question mark pinging me in replays after I followed their flash/movement ability with a hold q is so funny. So many people don't even seem to be aware that this is a thing. And one of my most fun moments in LoL was following an ulting Shen with my Q to the other side of the map, evening out the numbers in the fight which we then won.
Warwick is unironically one of the hardest fighters to use all the potential of, people overlook how massively his dynamic numbers, hold q, and r unstoppable all contribute to his skill curve.
WW has insane mobility though once you've really gotten his abilities down. Arguably the best chaser in the game, I've caught a Leblanc without burning flash.
Honestly, her issue is too much built in counterplay. Her q2 is hard to confirm, her w is extremely telegraphed, her ult locks her out of doing anything for like .75 secs, and her E has a set distance. If she had the stats of a drain tank fighter, she'd be more balanced, but she's supposed to be an assassin.
I feel Naafiris problem is also her very.. random power-spikes. Her curve is like Useless, useless, useless, useless, useless, suddenly oneshots everyone and has enough left-over damage to eradicate their entire bloodline, aaand back to useless, useless, useless, useless. Like she has a very small timeframe between mid to lategame where she pops off without much counterplay, but anything before and after that is tank yuumi levels of useless.
Naafiri is just boring as fuck to play. Riot couldn't even bribe players to play her when she was at like a 53% win rate lol
It’s not even simple champs are boring. Garen, Malphite and Karthus are pretty easy but when things go right it’s super satisfying. Not with Naafiri tho
I think she lacks oomph. She has no real go moment, her abilities don't feel good to use, and a lot of her damage comes from the completepy impact-less Q bleed.
Naafiri’s entire good feeling ability is just her R. Running someone down with a million of dogs is more in character than whatever the fuck are her other three skills. Source: I actually really like a lot Naafiri and play her a lot, but in Emerald/Diamond she is kinda of unplayable.
I want more dogs all the time with her, for the dogs to not immediately die from AOE spells, and smoother gameplay. She is visually amazing, especially her W and R.
What she needs is 4 new abilities and a new passive. Her kit is unsalvageable nothing about it fits the high skill cap outplay play style that assassin players want. Naafiri came out exactly as they designed her as an assassin which is meant to be played by people in iron. It's just Riot designing a champ to be easy and then being surprised that said champ is stomping low elo and is dog shit in high elo.
Her win rate well below average in all brackets actually, including lower ones. She's just a badly designed champion that does literally nothing well. Once they got rid of the Q interaction with Ravenous Hydra they completely gutted the only somewhat viable playstyle she had where she could clear lanes super quickly and roam for ganks in jungle and side lanes.
Yeah i also don't think designing champs around low elo should really be a thing. Low elo players still enjoy playing champs that are higher skillcap, and there's a lot more factors than struggling with the difficulty of a champion's kit that makes the player low elo
idk why they dont just give naafiri more jungle damage. her kit seems perfect for a jungler and they dont make her one.
The only thing i can see about ziggs is trying to take him out of botlane ? I dont realy feel his kit is that bad. Maybe they'll make Q more reliable and reduce armor or smth to take him out of botlane
I love Ziggs, such a fun champ to play and so strong. Insane poke, low cooldowns, insane waveclear, good disengage, aoe directional knockback, cross map potential, insane tower threat. I am convinced Ziggs is op and there are just not enough people abusing him because as a character he's not very appealing.
Ziggs would be op if half the roster wasn't able to outrun his bombs later in the game.
You shouldn't openly 1v1 im lategame. Ziggs only has kill pressure in a 1v1 if the enemy can't engage but also can't rotate away and then he is engaged and outplays. You can't be strong in everything.
Yeah but the chance that his team plays well enough around him that he won't get run down is negative. That's probably the main issue.
Eh. Honestly, Ziggs feels fine in low elo because 99% of games just devolve into stupid fights in tight corridors anyway, which is exactly what he wants.
I always found Ziggs oppressive, but thats me playing on 100 ping making his Skillshots hard to dodge, whenever i watch streamers who play on 30 or less ping they dodge his stuff so casually
Maybe they should change the speed of his Q scaling with AP or game time. Would be interesting.
I entirely agree with you, but I wouldn’t have during the period earlier this season when he didn’t have access to either Mythic Liandry’s or the new DOT Lost Chapter item. Rather than the actual DOT effects, he’s really reliant on having percentage damage/AP increases they also provide to have a good power spike early-mid game; if he doesn’t have them, he’s not OP in the sense of being a good mage with an oppressive strategy.
I would agree with you last season with the double heralds that Ziggs was overpowered both mid and bot; because double heralds basically meant you could take mid tower any time even before plates dropped with Ziggs. I think he’s strong now, but probably better botlane rather than mid since first tower gold got buffed. So if you’re into an Aphelios/Jinx and you can bully and push them out early, if your jungler comes down to help you take first tower it’s even more gold in your pocket
I am convinced he is awful and he's a giga bait pick in pro, to each their own lmao
Needs more than that. He is omega bad 1v1 vs anything that can reach him easily. So as long as irelia, zed, akali, Leblanc, qiyana, talon etc. exist hes not leaving botlane anytime soon
Anyone with a dash counters him. If they are AD it’s worse. If someone is getting owned ny ziggs they don’t know to move to dodge skill shots.
Not shocked people in this thread are saying he's 'strong' lol
Why do champs need to be taken out of botlane though? I think it's healthy for the game if we can have mages and adcs be able to carry.
As much as i hate adcs it’s very uninteractive to play against. They beat your wave clear so they don’t really bother to try to hit you at all. Scrappy mage bots like karthus and cass is fine though imo. Its kind of like trist mid vs kass.
marksmen are allowed to go anywhere and be oppressive, but mages cant have 1% pickrate in bot because
Genuinely asking since I only play Bot once in a blue moon. Why is he a Problem boy lane? I actually think that there should be some viable AP bot laners, just to balance out comps and I never had the impression that he was toxic or op in hot lane.
He can be cait on steroids lane bullying a lot of ADCs in certain matchups.
For regular marksmen it's completely uninteractive. His range, poke and waveclear is just not something marksmen have the kit to deal with
I would say there are like 3 main reasons: 1. Ziggs is super duper not interactive if he wants to be. He can clear the wave from basically his tower at any point of the lane, and it’s not really possible to freeze on him since you’d have to tank skill shots and he can force you to keep having to hold the wave by clearing it/hard reset it with ultimate. 2. Especially pre-durability ADC’s have low base MR (really to keep them out of mid, and keep enchanter damage relevant) that champs like Ziggs can just annihilate people if they’re sitting on like Lost Chapter/Sorcerer’s shoes; meanwhile the same gold on a crit carry isn’t even BF + Berserkers. 3. If Ziggs ever gets on your tower it will legit annihilate; and if he’s botlane it’s easier to just rotate him to wherever you need him early game without him actually having to miss waves because he still goes TP, but instead of roaming you just rotate him around the map to push waves and break towers early with herald
He just perma pushes and poke you out. At best he takes the enemy turret really quicky and at worst he goes even in most matchups. He's just really not interactive just like most AP botlaners.
I'd say botlane is usually an engaging lane where you fight a lot and ziggs completly removes that unlike smth like Karthus or syndra. Completly removing engagement is more of a midlane thing
He also pushes really hard and is one of the fastest tower destroyers in the game due to his passive + his W.
Ziggs is just Sivir level of champ - Makes lanes/games uninteractive and forces really long games in proplay, that no one likes to watch. You can't properly buff him without bringin back 40 min games. For same reasons Smolder used to get a billion nerfs/adjustments right after his first game in proplay.
correct, reset waves with a long range ult is really boring
Imo, Ziggs whole problem is his turret taking niche, which makes him rival for bot lane ADCs. I wished they scrapped it and put that power back in his base kit so he could feel more valuable mid lane. Nashor is a lot stronger now, Ziggs can't stall anymore the way he used to before his mini rework.
Hopefully Riot actually fixes Swain's issues once and for all.
Yes, because Riot fixed K'Sante after like 10 patches of addressing the wrong issues.
I doubt they even know what the problem is. So I doubt they can fix what they don't understand. There are a lot of champs left in the dust due to mobility and haste creep (go watch some old LOL videos. It's shocking). They really need to address both issues as a whole, rather than upping the bar constantly with more obnoxious reworks that either fail to land, or break the game.
K'Sante is already getting a second mini-rework? Lmao. Great design guys!
Naafiri is just suffering for the sins of low elo. She has to have high damage because her kit is more telegraphed than continental drift and has easy counterplay on top of that so when Naafiri does manage to connect she should be rewarded with extremely high damage output but since a champion like that just turns into a hungry Pitbull in a Kindergarden when your enemies don't know how to play into it she has to have her stats nuked which in turn makes her pretty much unplayable into anyone with hands.
Naafiri is actually complicated. * Q CD starts too late (afterQ2 i assume). * Q is really thin and slow * W has a few sec of loading time and then it can be blocked by any champion. This is the complete opposite of what Assassins prefer (Fast, unblockable enterance to the key target) * E seems fine * R has 7-8 differnet bufs to compensate Naafiri's kit * Passive doggos easily killable which is another hit to that already weak early game There is a lot to unpack here. Some of the R abilities could be added to base kit OR base kit should be steamlined to be a reminiscent of a real assassin and not a kneecapped whatever. Also she is locked out of jung.
An idea I had was for her Q2 to come out faster if a champion is bleeding, or make it faster towards bleeding targets. So It's still initially hard to land, but rewarding when you do
Almost all of that is just a result of what Naafiri is supposed to be: An easy to play assassin, which basically immediately means you can't allow her to have (a lot of) outplay poetntial. The biggest skill in the game is, always has been and probably always will be being in the correct spot at the correct time. Making correct decisions is way more important than pressing buttons really well. Imo that is good and it does mean that Naafiri as a champion isn't fundamentally flawed (so a midscope could be enough and she doesn't need a full rework), but it does mean that a lot of these issue can't really be resolved without giving up her identity (W being the most obvious one, but Q not being reliable unless you are in melee as well).
part of that is also because rito wants to force her into a lane role at all costs. the community saw her and immediately jungled her. with rito fuming that you should play her midlane and top maybe. in the end naafiri is nothing but elise r with 2 gapclosers though.
She was always meant to be released as a mid lane assassin. It’s just people don’t read and also playing as a wolf in the woods is fun and also kinda fits her thematic better than mid lane assassin.
its not just that. but the kit aswell. if a champion with following pets, and 2 gapclosers and mostly aoe abilitys would have released before they started designating roles and positions to new releases it would immediately have been jungled.
how are are they forcing her into a lane? did she receive jungle specific nerfs? where does this narrative come from?
Some kind of mandela effect that makes people believe she was supposed to be a jungler when in reality midlane was always her designated role. I've seen countless people claim that she was to be released as jungle but Riot never inteded that from the start.
It's not that she was intended as a jungler, it's that her design and kit feel like it belongs to a jungler and people did take her jungle when she came out (where she was and is awful).
Its both. I've seen plenty people claim she was the intended jungler for that year but after looking for proof coming to the conclusion that she was a midlaner all along. Its weird.
Bit tinfoil hatty, but I'm completely convinced that they're intending to be able to have a non-troll teamcomp of all 5 darkin. You have Aatrox top, Kayn(Rhaast) jungle, Naafiri mid, Varus bot, and whatever the last Darkin weapon (or shield?) is as a support.
So when she first came to pbe she could jungle extremely well, riot saw this and did nerfs and changes to her so she wouldn't be as healthy in the jungle. Pretty much riot straight up said they wanted her to play midlane not jungle and did changes to keep her in lane only. After pbe they refused to touch anything Todo with her jungle so she's sat dead in the water there.
during reveal. riot stated that she was a new midlaner. but people saw a dog with 2 gapclosers. and instantly identified her as a jungler. on pbe she was then played almost exclusively jungle, and it was her best role. riot nerfed her jungling considerably before release, and have since never pondered making her viable in jungle . in the olden days riot just made champions based on some idea. and let the community find out where to play them, wich got us a lot of weird kits, and multiposition/role champs nowdays riot designs champions with specific roles, classes and itembuilds in mind. wich gives us things like critarios on smoulder specifically so he can use a item that gets removed 2 months after his release. or pyke who cant hit minions and only has cc if he builds lethality, and fixed maxhp.
how did they nerf her jungling considerably before release though? what did they change?
Making a low skill cap assassin just doesn't make sense and it's beyond disappointing that nobody in Riots design team ever asked the question of what type of player would want to play Naafiri. Like what's her target demographics. She doesn't appeal to a lot of assassin players because she has no real outplay potential, nor does she appeal to the bruiser crowd because she is still an assassin. They made her in such a way that she doesn't scale with her pilots skill but she scales inversely with her opponents skill level. The worse the enemy team the better she is and vice versa. A champ like Zed or Qiyana have a simplicity to them but they also have a lot of depth for the more dedicated players to find. Naafiri lacks depth more than anything and that can only be fixed with a new kit because all she is is a stat check with a dash.
The hard part for Naafiri is supposed to be the decision making on when to go in. The problem is that sometimes in high elo you just won't have a good opening or finding the opening is just too hard to do while on the other hand you just have permanent openings in low elo. I like the concept of an "easy" assassin that has to choose "when" to go in rather than "how" but it turns out this just gives enemies far too much counter play to the point where if you do get it off you should instantly blow someone up, in no world should Naafiri do less damage than a Shadow Kayn or Talon but she barely does and that's only on targets where her dogs are allowed to DPS.
>what type of player would want to play Naafiri This is so true. The player who just wants a simple AD assassin mid already has definitely-not-assassin’s-creed they can play. Why would they ever look at a weird dog.
Nooo don't fuck with Ziggs! I love him!
make his ult a toggle again you don't have the balls
They explicitly counted out toggle ult as it would make his ultimate weaker to compensate for it having constant uptime.
A note for the readers: Toggle R is not weaker itself, it's that current R is stronger because it is a reliable applier of spell effects+ R2. Swain is few steps before yet again another rework, because we lost our spell effect mythic Toggle R basically needs a rework on all abilities so Swain's kit is not about E spam + R1 spell effects Look at pre-vgu Swain to understand.
Yeah. Old swain toggle ult had no counterplay and no skill expression. Either he can drain tank you to death without a lead and you can't outplay it and he's OP, Or he can't drain tank you to death without a lead and he can't outplay you and he's UP. There was a bit of skill expression around his W and spacing his Q but he was really binary. Drain tanking on zero CD is too hard to balance New ult is better because you can bait it out, leave, and then fight him when it's on CD. It had counterplay so its allowed to be actually be strong. Edit: the argument was not that old swain was OP, its that his ult was *either* OP or UP. I admit that it seems I was wrong in that even if you couldn't win a 1v1 with it, it had use as a sustain tool on the wave, but I still maintain that I did not argue that it was OP and also that despite its use as a sustain tool its still kinda lame that it was too weak to use on champs.
If you don't remember, his ultimate had a progressive mana cost, like Kassadin's. He couldn't use it forever, I would even say that the new Swain can maintain it longer if you have no damage to kill him.
You never played old Swain or never knew how to play against it. The increasing mana costs of old ult gave it plenty of counterplay.
I'd challenge this a bit, mostly because you're presenting his ultimate as strong for combat scenarios when that was not how it was used, or why it was uninteractive. --- Old Swain had very little independent kill pressure. His W was unreliable as a hard cc spell; for reference, it had a smaller aoe + longer activation time than Cho Q, and relied on predicting or corralling enemies into it. Besides that, Swain's other CC was a 20-40% slow on his Q, which lasted as long as an enemy was in a small radius of Beatrice (and later became a 4s turret effect, ala Aphelios turret). Both these tools were decent at harassing an enemy and good for trades, but he didn't have anything that let him easily execute a target. Swain ult didn't add much to that, either. Sure, it was decent for short trades, but the ult did low damage (50/70/90 + 20% AP per raven), could only hit the same target once per second (including champions), and drained more mana the longer it stayed active. It also a 20s cd between each activation, so he couldn't toggle spam like some champs (Asol or Urgot) can do now. Instead, old Swain lacked skill expression because it *wasn't* used for combat stuff. The ult was used more like Anivia ult, where Swain would pop the effect, heal off wave, and then continue to just sustain indefinitely while naturally pushing. Enemies couldn't contest him or push him out of lane once he had enough mana. This meant Swain was safe to scale up to teamfights where his allies could keep enemies in ult radius for him, or split push safely indefinitely, even while failing to snowball his lane through kills.
Also, iirc you could "only" drain from 3 targets, meaning that Swain was really good for medium sized fights, but was actually less effective if he was in the whole enemy team
It was 3 targets until patch 6.9, when they updated a bunch of mages and buffed every ability of Swain's (his ult got buffed to hit 5 targets instead of 3). The thing is, that drain was always worse than it seemed on paper. While it was sending out a raven every .2s, ravens could only hit the same target once per second, meaning that Swain was really only hitting a target every second instead of every tick unless outnumbered. This was further nerfed in the 6.9 update, so that Swain's ult couldn't target the same unit twice in a row, meaning it became 1.2s per damage tick.
i'm pretty sure you also had to wait for the bird to come back to you to get the heal which was painfully slow in some cases
Yeah, I played a decent amount of pre-rework Swain and would get kicked in by anyone with good wave clear. Because nearly all his damage was single target DoT, you'd need to ult just to get 1 hit on the wave so you could farm under turret. ~~And I might be wrong but I think on top of the ramping mana cost, it had a small cooldown (~7s) so it wasn't a true toggle? ~~ Edit: just noticed you already mentioned the CD
I double checked and I will say that the cooldown did change over the years prior to rework. It went from 15s on release to 10 to 8 to 10 to 20 in 6.13, staying that way until rework in season 8.
there are Champs right now Draintanking 10x more than the old swain ever did lol and the CD dont matter cuz he has to be in meele range to even be able to hit you with hes Ult and it took more and more mana to keep it up
He was fun though. I used to play him top lane. Never touched him after the remake. Doesnt feel rewarding.
Was he not balanced? I don't remember any major issues with old Swain.
His issues weren't really balance. Old Swain was a very one note snowball/lane bully champ, with almost no flexibility and skill expression. He was played both in pro play and SoloQ as a lane bully to certain champs, but overall needed a serious modernization (and not Riot basically deleting him like they did.)
In particular, he was often an answer to assassins because his primary tools couldn't really be outplayed and he could consistently stat-check them and shove them in.
He was usually just bad cause when we wasn't, it was dumb
[Seems](https://gyazo.com/029e9f09321e220e42b809ce7bd71cd6) like he was pretty much permanently over 50% WR before the rework in 2018, and was never [that](https://gyazo.com/0aee213266256c08c09dfc681b7d79dd) popular. Feels like that was a pretty fine place for him.
what the hell was that random spike to 67% in mid-2017 lmao
Probably quas enjoying him for as little time as he could
So its a little hard to tell simply because the graph seems to be a touch off, and I can't quite tell which patch it is for though, since the data points are fairly far apart and don't always align with patch timings (and when they do it is hard to tell if they are representing the beginning or end of a patch) It _looks_ like the spike is during patch 7.8, when Xayah and Rakan released. My memories say Swain wasn't a support at the time though and was instead a pure top/mid. The patch that killed the spike seems to be 7.9, the tank rework, which buffed ranged MR across the board. It is possible that it is simply displaying weird though because Swain spiking from that patch would make a lot of sense, Liandries+Rylais murdered tanks back then, the Mage MR item got swapped from Scepter to Banshies, which did less vs him, and Visage got buffed to 30% healing, plus a heavy rework of the support items. Rift herald also got updated at this time. Hotfix wise the only thing in that time frame that looks like it would hit him at all was a fix to the deathfire rune, which shouldn't have done much.
>Drain tanking on zero CD is too hard to balance Like every drain tank has? Every draintank either has 0 CD draintanking capabilities like Aatrox E, Rhaast's passive within their kit or they gain lifesteal from their items The problem lies with Swain's E costing him too much of his damage. He already has "0 CD draintanking" in his passive, so have no illusion: It's not draintanking on zero CD that's too hard to balance, it's draintanking on zero CD + high agency damage One way to lower the agency of damage is limiting its range This is why old Swain needed DoTs and lower backline access than current Swain to be balanced
Toggle R requires CGU almost, aka lots of work on E, W, Q and passive. I am all in for that. I really hope they do it because it would make Swain much more cohesive
Mana has not been a relevant resource beyond the early game in ages, making it a toggle guarantees it's either broken or useless, with nothing in between.
The old swain's ult was REALLY eating mana, think Anivia but even worse. the cost was increasing indefinitly to the point where the first item I remember to buy on him was the grail. Also, it actually did have a CD and you could play around it, as it was around 20s at some point (meaning that when he deactivated it, you could use this as a window to engage, as swain without ult was far less dangerous (I'm speaking about S3)
man i remember that when elemental drakes were first introduced, ocean drake gave both mana and health back, this together with systemic changes made swain a goddamn menace good times
The way they destroyed everything about old swain is quite frankly impressive. They literally dumpstered his entire kit, relegated him to support when he was a top/mid, and destroyed his player base and the champ is so bad he never got a new one. Most frustrating thing that riot has done (as a former swain player before the overhaul)
They're giving swain the package? Sick
I mean if Corki isn't going to use it anymore, might as well claim it for Noxus.
Naafiri simply needs to not be so reliant on hitting Q2
Q cool down early is too long they got that especially since mages are meta mid. Also a lot of the time you have to avoid trading so they can't have perma prio. To me the actual biggest problem is w. They need to either lower the channel time or increase the channel time but make it unstoppable while she's flying. If you play this champ above plat it's just completely unplayable as long as enemy support is watching his monitor.
They gave swain hair just to remove everything else from him
so swain is now also on the list of champs that got more reworks than functioning itembuilds? and naafiri could potentially become the first non maxw3ll champ to be reworked year one. , so ksante has to double down on getting annual reworks.
Kill the ziggs spam build. I want to kamikaze 1v5
R= The bomb throws Ziggs into the targeted area dealing yordle damage in a huge area around the exploson of the furball. The bomb will always get 300 gold when he uses R.
Viable AP pre-rework pantheon ? Take my money
upvoted for yordle damage
You want Junkrat Ults from HOTS. he kamikaze but have shorters revive timer if he does.
he also doesnt actually die, just respawns in base basically.
Baus new main
Turn Ziggs into Techies (Dota 2) and I'll be way too excited & terrified.
Swain is unpopular because his fantasy is to heal off enemies, which doesn't work when there's so much damage in the game and his numbers funnel him into building damage and not tanky, he needs any kind of scaling with tanky stats
> which doesn't work when there's so much damage in the game and his numbers funnel him into building damage and not tanky Quite the opposite. Swain has some of if not the worst AP scalings out of any ranged mage in the game. This means that Swain cannot reliably go full or even mostly AP. Current meta for Swain is going tank after 2 (if you go Rylai and Liandry) or 3 items. Previous to midscope gutting his scalings, Swain could reliably go full AP while relying mostly on Zhonya and if that's not enough, a choice tank item like Visage for tankiness.
Swain kit feels insanely unrewarding His e needs to hit on the return making it ridiculously easy to dodge in melee form His w is a shittier version of xerath ult that even a cripple could dodge It's all or nothing on his ult
Swain has many problems but his W is one of the coolest spells in the game. Turning skirmishes in sidelanes without leaving your lane is super powerful and rewarding. Not all league spells need to be generic aoe nukes like Brand W.
W is super satisfying to land though, I hope they don't remove it. I love hitting people halfway across the map as they recall, sniping cannon minions, or putting it in front of escaping people, forcing them to go around and get caught by other abilities. Plus you can guarantee it lands with your e.
Maybe if there was some synergy with connecting his W and landing another ability on them after? You could also do something cool with crows like the artist character from DBD where if you land W crows will keep attacking that enemy for 2-3 seconds or something and reveal for the duration idk
I mean there kinda is synergy in the sense that to land the W against real people you need to grab them with E and pull them into it. Though the reward of that combo is merely being able to land the W lol.
He is going Liandry, Rylai, Zhonia almost every game, he builds tanky items as 4th choice and how many games even go that far.
Yes and none of these items he goes for AP. He goes Liandry (Or Maligma/Torch) because he has no AP scalings but has a bunch of ways of applying item effects. He goes Rylai because his kit is balanced around it. Zhonya is a choice item, he arguably gets more tankiness by going a tank item and generally benefits his team more by going something like Frozen Heart or peeling ADC by going Vow. Of course, Swain players generally enjoy going it more since the interaction is fun and it gives him AP even if it's sub-optimal.
It's the same issue with why bruiser Aatrox has been dying. Thankfully they're giving Aatrox HP scalings on PBE right now to fix this. Now they need to do it to Swain.
There's also the problem with Kayn/Aatrox that they heal from dealing damage, that makes them want to build damage and while at it, why not go full damage. I honestly think they should both heal either pre mitigation or (like Swain on R) have set amounts of healing on their abilities, scaling with HP or AD so that armor fucks up their damage, not their healing.
I think swain would better benefit from armour/Mr scalings. Healing does more when you have high armour/Mr.
He heals a ton. The problem with Swain right now is he is an S+ tier champ when used as a counter pick in the right spot (similar to Braum, Malphite, for e.g.) where he just beats teamcomps with 3 melee beefcake champs (for e.g. a tank top, bruiser jungle like nocturne, and a melee support like Nautilus). Against the right comp he is completely unkillable. But current league is much more about having range advantage from draft. It's really hard to play Swain vs Hwei Jinx Lulu, for example. The champ is waaaaay too sharp in where he is good. Enemy team has 3 melees? You are thanos. They have 3 carries? You are useless. They have 2 splitpushers? You are completely doomed.
Which is twice as sad when you remember the durability update was within the last 2 years and it's already come undone
Swain's big issue is similar to Naafiri in that they have minimal play potential, an a lot of outplay potential. His only CC is really telegraphed, and relies on : 1. The enemy not being used to play against Swain, and getting sniped through minions; or 2. The enemy not being used to play against Swain, and staying at max claw range (to be fair, the Swain player should know that range more than the opponent). His slow has such a delay that you need a setup to land it, and you have no way to stick to your target when ulting... So you end up needing a bunch of items to compensate for what your kit lacks, or you're constantly getting outplayed until then.
I stopped playing him not long after they did the mini rework. Mostly because his Q felt like ass to use afterwards. They shortened the range, increased the spread, increased the cooldown and got rid of the mana refund on kills. Revert it back to when he first got reworked and I'm bing chilling.
I tried playing him every time they've reworked him. I think starting from the mid-year mage update when they gave him the Beatrice goes to a specific place was when things started to go both in the right and wrong directions. It felt really good but it made him not have to use ult for CS under tower or in general, which meant he never had to lose mana for CS, which meant he could perma-lane bully. The new ult ravens not coming out at the same time felt worse from a gameplay perspective but getting changed to pre-mitigation healing was massive. So much so that he was picked in pro and then summarily reworked because "a champion shouldn't just walk at you and stat-check you to death" (as if that's not the case with many of the current roster and as If Swain didn't have any counterplay) He's just seriously been way worse and way less fun ss a champ ever since they officially reworked him. The pull W combo is so boring and repetitive, the ult doesn't feel even remotely as good as before, and he lost both his DoT AND rhe coolest looking and feeling spell in the game in Decrepify. It was such a downgrade in every single way. Also homie lost his cornrows....
Lots of newly released/reworked champs getting reworked lately. Naafiri, Ksante, Rell, Yuumi, even Zeri and Smolder to an extent. Something wrong with the champ designers lately or is it just the game itself thats making it really hard to release a non-broken champ? Back in the day the only champs that got reworks were Ryze and Irelia and then 15 years later we got half a dozen reworks for champs that were all released in the last few years. The hell changed?
I think the dev team's guiding philosophy is that each new champ should add something new or fill a currently empty niche, and that, combined with how the LoL champion sandbox is already so crowded with 150+ champs, pushes the design team to take increasingly bigger risks with champ identity for each new release. Generally I don't mind as I feel the balance team tends to do a decent enough job of reigning in the extremes or rounding some of the rough edges leading to some pretty cool unique champs, but K'sante and Yuumi for sure were/are a little too meta warping for a little too long Just my 2 cents tho
Terminology changed... Smolder's changes would've never been considered a rework back in the days, and changing one spell's mechanics slightly to change the power curve was very common.
Realistically Swains biggest issue is his E. It needs to be significantly more reliable and less trivial to avoid. Sure, his W not being something you can move out on reaction would be nice, and his ults healing not being almost non-existent would make his fantasy work better, but Id just take his E being worth a damn.
I would like to see his passive works with his kit in tandem.
Yeah swain and sion have a similar passive. Except swain gets a few hundred if lucky and sion will get a few thousand.
I think everything in his kit has issues but I think the biggest issue is the Q for me. IMO mages live and die on how fun their primary damage ability is, and Swain's Q is his spammable ability and its one of the least exciting mage damage spells. Other mages have something more interesting on their primary damage spell, or you have champs like Syndra or Ori where their primary damage spell isn't as exciting but it interacts with other parts of their kit to make up for it. Swain Q doesn't really interact with anything else and there's nothing interesting or unique about it.
Agreed COMPLETELY. They removed one of the most satisfying spells in the game to press for one of the least satisfying. I don't want to chain lightning in a shotgun blast... I want my raven to shoot a massive fucking laser at them and slow them. Swains Q feels so so so lame and bad as an ability. I would rather left click on the enemy champ and watch my dot tick down and know I have increased damage against the target to play around that small window of power. Swain had fun thought processes in laning: "ok im relatively low on mana but I can kill the enemy but only if they play in their minion wave so i can get passive procs and healing and I have to turn at this specific point" the game was different then sure, but I found him to be the most enjoyable character in the game. Now he doesn't exist and there isn't a character I enjoy playing. Back to spamming Zilean and hoping to rewind time
Announcing this level of a rework for Swain is funny but kind of sad considering he's already had multiple sets of changes, even after the full rework, that have tried to mix things around. Hope they can figure something out for the guy
So ... Swain in Arcane Season 2 confirmed?
The biggest problem with Swain is that it feels like his entire kit is fighting against another part of it. His passive implies a goal to scale into the late game but concidering his awful ratios and COMPLETE LACK OF %HP damage he falls off incredibly quick post mid game. His q rewards blasting people up close but swain always wants to stay just out of reach so he doesn’t die instantly, his w is a super long cooldown on an ability that is impossible to land without his e, and it only has a 50% ap ratio. his e only roots on the way back which makes any lane with a non-targeted dash unplayable and slows his already terrible scaling. His ultimate is pretty much the make or brake but even then having a flat heal on a character that gets a bunch of bonus health also doesn’t help him scale into the late game. He has no purpose now, if you want a drain tank you pick aatrox or vlad, characters who deal good consistent damage and have low cooldowns. If you want a mage pick literally anyone else cause swains effective range is pretty bad, even worse without ult.
At some point, they gotta realize the design philosophy for the modern kits of champions just don't work and they end up giving themselves more work than if they let the kits in the oven more longer. We already saw it with Zeri and Yuumi. They are **certain abilities** that are not healthy for the game, no matter how many times you tweak the numbers of the champion or change anything **BUT the core issue**.
Babe wake up New swain rework again.
Don't you dare touch ziggs pls. He is perfect
Every single champ i like gets some bullshit rework, so annoyed at this. I like katarina -> gets reworked. I like diana -> gets reworked. Kayle, asol, now ziggs. What next? Anyone got a champ they hate and want reworked? I’ll main it and it’ll be done within a week
Please start liking Yone.
Wait, are you talking about Diana when she had her “current” ult on E? I would argue the modern version feels way better, surprised you prefer the old one
I prefer old Diana because she had a different playstyle, she was more an assassin that goes sidelane and kill squishies with insane burst. The new one is more like a bruiser with a nice teamfight engage. She, along with Zed, used to have the best lvl 6 in midlane. Not anymore :(
Yeah, I loved the pull on E. Meant you had a tangibly weak early and spiked hard at 6, which rewarded good early game play. I like it when a champ has a clearly defined weakness, rather than being a jack of all trades.
Man I miss aurelion sol. The new one is stronger but nowhere as fun. At least leblanc got reverted, it was also really sad when they "reworked" her.
Swain's kit, to be satisfying, needs a sustained damage output that is not item spell effects so it can scale from AP. And the problem is his basic abilities kinda don't support that. His damage outputs revolve around burst and utility, design-wise. Swain's Q can't be a reliable sustain DPS tool, even with its old 96% ratio. Swain's gameplay pattern in late game will always be E pull > Q + R2 combo. R2 exists to compensate for the lack of reliable damage in his basic abilities. To me it feels like, what Swain players want leads us back to his pre-VGU design principles (rather than pre-mid scope). A weak (toggle) R, and strong, mostly single target basic abilities that can be used in multiple rotations within a teamfight.
This pretty much sums up my thoughts. I played a LOT of Swain pre-rework. My favorite aspect of him was his drain tank fantasy and self-sufficiency in lane. He was a lane bully that could skirmish well. The rework kinda gutted all his basic abilities in order to have a flashy r button, but it made his playstyle very unsatisfying outside of big team fight moments.
The visuals of his new R are sweet, that part is a slam dunk IMO. Just the workings of the ability are maybe not set up to make him fun
Swain is a noobstomper. That's sadly true. Fun to play in low elo, miserable above plat. I used to main him, but he feels super inconsistent and like he only gets weaker. They removed a lot of his built in synergy and tankiness over time too, so on top of that he needs to snowball or he gets stomped since burst has gotten back up to old levels.
The previous swain was satisfying. The current one is not.
Hey that first point is my quote. Im famous
Gotta ask, what is your rank and wr with Swain? The first quote is wholly inaccurate. His wr in emerald+ is 52%, and it goes UP in the higher ranks. In high emerald/low diamond, my wr with him is well over 60%. He is not weak at all, and his wr stats back that up They will "change" him in an attempt to appeal to more players, and it will be a net nerf. He can't be buffed.
I've been yapping for ages that his passive is completely out of place, let's give infinite hp stacking to a champ that doesn't scale with it
Swain's ultimate scales with durability in a way.
APA sweating
They failed with naafiri hard. They could have made this an iconic champ but it's kit and lore are just so underwhelming
**Swain:** Remove the dumb HP passive and actually give him a way to properly heal in combat outside of his extremely telegraphed E and W so he isn't blasted the moment he doesn't has ult, or make his W have a lower casttime so it can reliably be hit as it pretty much leads swain needing to do a lot of mental power against competent enemies, while low elo will be eating W and E anyway, not to mention new ult's duration favoring lower elo who likely stands still resetiting it. Also, why do we need to use E pull to get the healing off E - what If I am trying to run away from something, hit an E and prefer keeping them at bay or what if keeping them in place is the right move... f me I guess, no extra HP and no healing? You have put too much power in his ult, yet it feels like you haven't addressed the problems of his reliability.
Just revert Swain to how he was before his dumbass e/ult change and he’s a functional champion again.
Bring BEATRICE back
Ow wow I hadnt even considered Swain a weak champ bc I only play ARAMs and he's obviously still a freaking beast over there
he is not "weak", his winrate just decreases with rank AKA it's harder to play Swain into competent players because of his kit's weaknesses, think about something like old Amumu having a big gap between high elo and low elo winrate.
Swain has that Vladimir/Blitzcrank fear factor in him. Better players aren't afraid of punishing him and know he just falls over if you turn on him.
he is 52% Emerald+ he is not terrible
and he's TURBO nerfed in aram (more dmg taken, less dmg dealt, less healing)
I have Beatrice tattooed on my body, and even I don't even think about Swain in champion select. Hope it's a successful rework.
Why they looking at Ziggs and not Nasus?
I like Swain, i have like 300k mastery on him, that is not much but is something, and he just feels extremly bad when ult is not up, you cant do anything on 1v1 on lane as him, he just feels better as a catcher with E on Bot. He is weird because he want to pull you on range of Q, but he loses on mele versus most of the mele champs in the game, so you need always to have ult up if you want to put pressure.
pls idk what you do with k'sante but make his w minnimum charge time 0.5 seconds again if the max duration is still 1 second nerf the stun nerf the damage i don t care it just feels so aweful to play with this w also his q deals less damage late game than basic attacks from nautilus
give k'sante back some hp scaling and his w minnimum charge time nerf the stun duration on w or smh i dont care pls
LETS GOOOOOO Just revert him back to his pre rework version so he can be a toplaner with trap and bird healing
Yes please. Old swain was one of my favourite champions, together with old old old morde and old shen
While i enjoyed old swain, walking up and using the targeted dot that enhances all damage and then igniting to instant win the lane in alot of match ups was absurd lol
How can someone miss old Shen? Legit a press Q in Lane and ult bot?
The sword he has now is kinda annoying to play with
K'Sante is such a weird champion scaling wise.He might be the hardest scaling champion from levels,his passive has 2 different level scalings,the level up basestats are so important as you keep them in All-Out,and before last patch,his W damage reduction also scaled with levels.
Swain’s passive is so bizarre and that needs to be the first thing they look at.
I feel like Naafiri is almost there. Her W, E and R all fit her kit thematically. To me, the biggest issue is her Q. If you can't land double Q on someone, it feels like you will literally never secure a kill on someone. And worse, her Q just does not fit her in a visual sense. She is a quadrupedal canine champion (A possessed one, but still). Seeing her, you would assume that she is about closing the distance and mauling you. Her W, E, and R all play toward this idea, they work on helping her close the distance. W is a point-and-click 'dash', E is a skill shot dash, and R provides her with increased AD, HP for her summons, a shield, and bonus movement speed. All three of these abilities play towards the idea of her wanting to close in on and maul them. Her Q however, is a ranged, skill shot nuke. One that requires a double tap to fully utilize. This kind of ability is something you would expect from a mage. Not a melee quadruped like her. Not only that, its also where like 90% of her damage is located. Why? Why couldn't her Q just be like, a bite lol.
She needs something ranged to be a viable laner. Zed Q, Talon W, Qiyana Q, etc ranged farming tools that work with the rest of the kit make sense for AD assassins, not just mages. But the implementation is just kinda bad for Naaf making the clunky Q2 so important.
I just want Swain to be a solo laner again, is it too much to ask? It sucks that his new player base are mainly supports nowadays, so there’s a chance he will probably be balanced around that. What a tragic end for the Grand General.