So, Riot had an issue with Yuumi wherein this champion they intended to be accessible and simple ended up being very exploitable in pro play, and having an actually high mastery curve so she wasn’t even usable by the intended audience.
They did what they did for a lot of pro tier problem champions in that they reworked her, removing much of her skill expression to bring low tier and high tier Yuumis closer together, and make her less dominant in elite tier without having her winrate being nearly 40% (which it was at her lowest point; after being nerfed right before her rework dropped).
They made it so she no longer has to detach and she’s no longer able to switch allies, effectively speaking, by tying her abilities effectiveness into a very clunky best friend mechanic. This removed much of the counterplay of the champion, as she now has zero reason to put herself at risk, while also anchoring her to one person and enforcing her identity as an afk duoQ champ.
In the process of removing all the fun from Yuumi to make her easier, Riot’s goal was just to get her out of professional play and into the hands of low elo players who don’t wanna move around much and just want to be a cute cat supporting their friends. Did it work?
Absolutely not! Her winrate is still bottom tier because she went right back into pro play and had to be nerfed all over again. And by removing skill expression from the champion, did they make her any easier? I guess, but her mastery curve is still the 21st in the entire game, the closest enchanter to her in difficulty in this sense is Renata Glasc, who is in 44th place. In the lowest elos possible, her winrate has somehow gotten even worse than before and she now sits at almost 40% WR in Iron. She is genuinely unplayable for low elo players, both difficult to learn and useless to master because you get no returns from putting in the work.
You basically have to break your back learning to optimize every drop of power from the worst kit in League of Legends in exchange for a mediocre WR with Yuumi, when you could instead just play any other enchanter and do far better.
Trying to balance her around a low skill floor is a terrible idea to begin with, this entire plan was doomed from the start. Yuumi is a role-altering champion who does not teach you the fundamentals of League. Beginner friendly champs always have been, and always will be, fundamentals-only champs, with almost no mechanics unique to them on top of that. Garen, Soraka, these are beginner champions.
Yuumi is more akin to Ivern or Singed in that she’s a champion who’s mastery is unique to herself and will not help you improve at anything besides playing Yuumi. Champions like these always reward basically one tricking them and end up with low play rates because of it, even if they’re mechanically simple and powerful (see Ivern). So balancing Yuumi around being an all-inclusive enchanter for beginners is a horrible idea, and the data backs it up, beginners cannot play Yuumi. Low elo players cannot play Yuumi. But she’s so nerfed that Yuumi mains and pros also cannot play Yuumi, so what’s left? Who is this champion for?
The rework simultaneously removed her counterplay and removed her power, so she’s less satisfying for both sides, and less healthy for the game as a whole. What is she even supposed to do anymore? Her healing and shielding is bad. She offers little to no crowd control. Her damage is bad. Her unique remaining niche is basically just being able to support dive carries like Zeri or Twitch, who can get into weird positions with a Yuumi where other supports would struggle to follow and help them, but is that really all an entire champion should offer? She can’t even do that with non-adcs anymore because of the dumb best friend mechanic, and the changes to her kit to where she now empowers specifically auto attacks instead of giving stats, and that empowerment scales with your ally’s crit, trying so hard to make sure you cannot get creative with who she’s paired with. Because of that, even slightly non traditional adcs like Lethality Varus can’t benefit from these buffs.
They need to revert this rework and balance Yuumi with the intention of her being a low playrate niche champion with a high skill floor, it’s the only way she can remain functional. It’s not what they wanted her to be, but clearly she’s failed at what they wanted her to be, so what else can they do?
You must log in or register to comment.
Can’t we just remove this garbage from the game
It sucks because Yuumi could honestly be a really high-skill unique enchanter if they’d just drop the fucking untargetability.
She’s so unique and has so much potential to be something different for the enchanter class.
Yuumi saw zero pro play at world’s and also isn’t a 40% win rate shit pick even if she isn’t great.
That is a success, riot and the playerbase don’t want yuumi to be good and this was the compromise on not just deleting her
A 49 wr in emerald+ isn’t even that bad , no way is she getting straight buffs
yuumi is a failure of a champ period
yuumi should be bad
it should be a bad thing to pick yuumi
sitting attached to someone and putting in half the actions and effort as other players should never be rewarded or good
the rework was a complete success
The rework is a success because I no longer see her, Riot got it right.
The rework was doomed to fail when Truexy and his team committed to retaining Yuumi’s untargetability. Enchanters are supposed to be weak to getting bursted and isolated from their teammates, neither of which applies to Yuumi. She needed a much larger scale set of changes than what a midscope could provide.
I mean, ur gonna call it a failure regardless until they change her W, champs dogshit unplayable rn because shes so awful and u still think shes broken
Just make her targetable and that’ll fix everything.
Just remove Yuumi from the game already
I’m satisfied - I don’t see Yuumi in my games much anymore. I’m sure as soon as she gets buffed and is popular in solo queue people will hate her all over again. Need to change the attachment part. Give it a limited duration, or make her take partial damage the, or something.
IDK what you are talking about lmao. I no longer see her in my games and whe nI do she looses hard. So it’s great.
best friend passive sucks ass. your adc is a shitter? welp that sucks good luck since your other teammates are gonna whine they need to hit 16 while wondering why you didn’t switch sooner to get passive on them. i have seen this repeatedly. if there was a stack limit it wouldn’t be so bad but nah 150 farm into the game needing to switch is miserable lmao
the heal on passive is alright. the heal itself kinda sucks. having to hit an enemy can be annoying. healing both of you is nice though.
q aiming is an improvement over previous q. now you’re not having your aim tethered to your ally nearly as much.
w the bonus healing sounds nice but really doesn’t do much. the on hit is cool and all but that plays back into issues of your adc falling behind it’s useless plus if your adc is a spell slinger rather than an AA based one (ez ecluded because q is an AA) they’re not procing heals from it anyways.
e i personally like the shield. it’s a decent size. not the worst cooldown. gives mana like raka’s old e. a little cost intensive but eh.
ult i only really like with moonstone otherwise the heal on ult sucks to me.
either they need a slightly lower passive cd for the heal or some way to reduce the cooldown yourself. possibly need to buff a ratio some where.
I wonder if a lot of the irritation with facing yuumi could be mitigated if some CC effects (for example, knock up) forcefully detached her from whoever she’s riding.
With a nerf like this, it would free up power budget to put in buffs in more expressive and rewarding places.
In on the same side as with many others, I rarely see yuumi so my ban has feed up for others. I consider that a success. The only ones not happy with the parasites game state are its mains but who cares. They wanna play an it, then deal with it