Being a main of a champion means that your are intrinsically biased towards said champion. Even if you’re not asking for buffs, the way you experience the game is primarily through the lens of that champion. In honesty I feel this actually makes you worse at giving balance advice as your feedback comes from a limited perspective. Every champ in the game warps how every role plays out.
Mostly I’m writing this after continually hearing about how Velkoz mains gave advice on how to balance the champ and were “ignored”. After reading the actual post I just laughed. The idea of “reduce damage and add skill expression” to an artillery mage is funny because their ranged damage IS their skill expression. You can’t have skill expression from the back line because the safety provides no counterplay. I think back to when Ezreal is poke dominant and how busted that is.
But even in terms of community balance suggestions it’s still a weird conversation because
- Reddit is not a good sample of the community nor is Twitter. The only people who see the full picture are the devs
- High elo players are good at playing the game, not necessarily balancing the game
- There are millions of players each with their own ideas of balance, and over 150 champ main subs. Devs cannot be constantly checking every Avenue for advice
- Devs have no obligation to give feedback on your idea, and you have no idea what internally was tried before they decided on what to ship to prod. If anything I’d never give feedback because I’d just be accused of not getting it if I disagreed
Those four points are in general, not specific to the velkoz post, just about feedback in general
Something as well is that there’s a reason there are so many people at all times balancing, even if there are one or two that are the face of the balance team. There are 160+ characters and you being mad that youre 3 million mastery points into Vel’Koz and still can’t land an E to save your life is not on the devs. Is that champ in particular incredibly weak? Of course, but now think about every other main of every other champ whining about the exact same thing for x,y, and z reasons.
Again, a callback to the challenger K’sante one trick that reached the top of this sub with his long ass video about how this recent patch doomed K’sante, how the champ was going to be useless and doomed to no identity and unplayable, and yet that’s the patch that catapulted him from 8 months of sub 48% winrate to almost 52% above plat in every rank.
People literally just don’t know, and they assume spamming 15 thousand games over 10 years of one champ makes them the guiding light to what needs to change. It might make you a very experienced champ user, but by no means a balance maker. You don’t take into account what the changes will do for the entirety of the rest of the game, only what you think will feel good for you specifically to play.