Recently, a Riot August clip has become popular wherein he says that Zed is the most frustrating champion in league to play against, therefore he will be kept weak for the rest of eternity. He cites that Zed’s ult inherently has good counterplay (his ult announces itself, it takes about 0.6–1.0 second for Zed to reappear after casting, and Zed always pops up behind the target), yet in low elos, this translates to an unfun experience of watching your death without being able to do anything against it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KIcRAynokw

To get some things out of the way first: yes, I like playing Zed, no, I am not trying to argue he should get buffed, no, I am not crying about nerfs, and yes, this post is about balance overall for League of Legends.

To be objective, I agree it is important to ensure champions are enjoyable for the entire player-base, yet there are champions which are worse offenders than Zed that have not been hit with the nerfed “for all of eternity” statement. Personally, I’ve never enjoyed playing against Gwen, K’sante, Rengar, Yorick, Yummi, Graves, Ziggs, or Janna. Are all of these champions completely broken and unbalanced? Not really. Are their kits and game design extremely unfun to play against? Honestly, I’d rather just dodge the game then play against them.

We all know Riot has their favorite champions (skin sellers and pro-play meta definers), and to be honest, you gotta make money somehow so I can let it slide. Also you gotta keep pro play engaging and competitive (do they do this… you’d have to ask a pro player about balance). So if there’s any bias towards certain champions, at the end of the day, I get it.

But somehow, despite the majority of the community saying they hate K’sante, the champion is getting buffs next patch. The Riot balance team have expressed their belief that winrate is an overrated stat so how about we all ignore the sub 50% winrate (just like Zed btw), and accept that K’sante should not be buffed (just like Zed). In fact, keep it nerfed “for rest of eternity” (just like Zed).

The fact that K’sante quite literally has almost every ability in the game is disturbing (shield, dash, unstoppable, auto refresh, a main ability that costs sub 28–20 mana, slow, max health damage on passive, stun, knock up, abilities that can be cast during dash, can go over terrain with dash, root, displacement immunity, ability reset after ult, and his optimal build is to go as much armor and mr as possible because when he ults, its converted into attack damage and he gains attack speed and healing on damage).

This champion has escaped Riot’s notice of being frustrating and unfun and it’s not the only one. I quit playing league after season 6 and returned around season 11 because I missed playing the game. It was a mistake. This game is always plagued by champions or items that are too strong, and for some reason, Riot refuses to hotfix anything. Just like when Udyr and Hecarim were meta and oppresive for months, Orianna has been shitting on high elo for the better part of a month, and K’sante is by far the most overloaded champion in the game.

I don’t want to bash any Rioters because balancing this many characters in any game is no easy feat, but the game isn’t fun, and it’s culminated because of multiple reasons.

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1. If you want to have many strong meta picks, increase the number of bans or make it so that you can’t repeat bans with the enemy team.
2. The League community is toxic and opinions are suspect at the best of times, but generally when they say something is unfun/frustrating, then it probably is unfun/frustrating.
3. The client is shit.
4. Champion kits are filled with too many options, and the numbers that go with the kits aren’t low enough to balance it out.
5. Hotfixing champions or items doesn’t happen often enough.
6. Certain champions happen to escape nerfs every patch even though they are stomping high elo (probably because low elo is doing fine).
   1. You don’t see the opposite happening because the majority of players are not at the highest elos (this is conjecture because I hope this is the reason and not the fact that Riot just doesn’t care, ignores it, or wants those champions to continue being strong).
7. Why is it that a lot of the community and Rioters can agree that frustrating champions should be nerfed/kept weak for the rest of the game’s lifespan (Zed), but Riot’s balance team cannot agree with the community on which champions are frustrating to play against?

Tyler’s rants have been explosive for his entire career, but god, I feel like there are so many now about game balance. And they’re not just from him. There are other streamers, pro-players, and content creators that are just unhappy with how the game is. I know pre-season is right around the corner with an item overhaul, map changes, etc, but I don’t see how that fixes the problems that are inherently present with certain champions.

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Any thoughts and comments are welcome, but I don’t wanna aim any hate towards the balance team.