Some champions are not designed for teamfighting, and some are genuinely awful at it. They will contribute little even if they join for the teamfight, and they are fundamentally designed to be more useful by solo pushing. But in the current meta, the only way they can stay relevant is for them to be able to match the pressure of a teamfight for an objective.
However, objectives in this meta are insanely incentivized and making your teammates fight for one 4v5 is trolling, unless they’re giga ahead of the enemy team.
Splitpushing is just not good. Why? Because they can push a wave just to have one person easily oneshot it and end the entire splitpush attempt until the next wave, which may take a long time depending on how far the wave has to go. Because even with champions strong at 1v1, there are single champions you can send that can contest them or stall them for long enough it’s a complete waste of time, or even those that can just kill/force off the splitpusher. A 5v4 teamfight will also most likely be a quick win and quickly killed objective at which point they recall and can stop the splitpush as a team.
So what does keeping champions designed to solo lane relevant require?
- Forces multiple champions to deal with the splitpusher
- Forces much more effort to counter-clear their pushing minion wave.
- Faster turret-taking speed to equalize the results to the objective lost if the enemy team chooses to 5v4 teamfight and take the objective before trying to stop the push.
That is why Hullbreaker exists, and why Hullbreaker is and must be so overtuned. It grants huge defensive stat boosts to the point most single champions will not win 1v1, makes their wave much tankier, and makes them take turrets faster so the enemy team must pick between sending multiple people to stop them or lose something as meaningful as they gain.
Nerfing Hullbreaker is nerfing the symptom and result of the meta. Even with how strong Hullbreaker is, splitpushing is still the worse tactic, just because of how strong winning a team fight or objective can be. If people hate Hullbreaker, they should advocate for teamfighting and objectives to be less rewarding.
Hullbreaker is a makeshift bandaid measure to brute force splitpushing and teamfighting/objectives to be on equal footing via overtuned buffs. But the root cause of its existence and level of strength is the strength and value of teamfighting and objectives, which Hullbreaker cannot fix.
Obviously Hullbreaker is a tangled up situation where you can’t just delete Hullbreaker until a lot of other things in the game are adjusted alongside it. I think a great deal of frustration comes from the vision of “teamwork” looking like 5 champions in close proximity of one another showing up to teamfight at an objective pit, and any notion of “divide and conquer” is just absent to those players.
Hullbreaker isa lazy bandaid fix, and yet a necessary slap in the face to perma group and 5v5 death ball. I don’t really like Hullbreaker, I wish that tanks and mages weren’t the superior teamfight classes, but if they’re supposed to be supreme in 5v5 structured fights, then expect things to be added to the game that counterbalance it.
Honestly I think league would be more fun if Hullbreaker wasn’t “needed” in the first place.