League of Legends Has A Damage Problem

Tourist…Cleavers were nothing compared to bloodrazor stacking.

I swear the average Vars viewer is silver 4.

tanks haven't been tanks in a long time…

it's 100% champs just being soo good that they could "splash" into other items, Remember when Senna and Akali could both run frostfire gauntlet and it wasn't troll cause there kits and scaling where so good anyway it basically made up for missing a damage item ?

Yes, there's too much damage, and there's a few specific reasons why. (Essay incoming below, no, there's not a tl;dr)
Firstly, if tank meta became an issue, it means that champions weren't giving up enough for the durability they sought, there wasn't a proper tradeoff, from what was explained here it seems that's the case, tanks having %hp damage is a complicit factor in why tank meta is a problem, and why it still hasn't actually gone away. The "tank meta" that's been mentioned was supposedly only a problem when champions like Ekko and Fizz were building tank items and still being effective damage champions. Meanwhile I have to ask… What exactly makes "actual tanks" more balanced having tons of free damage over other champion classes? Theoretically yes Fizz could be more problematic because he's super mobile, but honestly Sejuani is also super mobile, her dash cooldown is short enough to both escape and reengage and can usually get multiple rotations of spells on you and just kill you. (Or hell, even get you most of the way dead with a single rotation, and then just wait until her dash is back up to go in an finish the job) I personally don't see "tanks" having free damage as any more justifiable than any other "class" in the game. For one, we should probably not standardize on burst damage for the effectiveness of late game non-ranged dps champions in the first place, not saying that some champions just can't have it, but the fact that everyone has burst is a little obnoxious. For another, we should probably standardize free damage via mechanics which still require gold from the champion in order to be effective, so remove the overwhelming majority of %hp damage from the game, of all damage types, regardless of champion, and instead either just give them realistic flat damage for the actual difficulty of the spell to hit, or go with what Darius gets which is damage through free armor penetration which still requires him to actually have relevant damage to make use of. (And while you're at it, maybe change his passive from giving him a ton of free AD to instead have it multiply his bonus AD, which would then require him to actually build some damage to do damage)

Secondly, the damage creep is a partly a consequence of the sheer amount of snowballing in the game, which despite everything they've tried, still isn't really solved in anything but a frustrating way. Yes we have comeback mechanics with objective bounties and gigantic shutdowns on snowballers, but that doesn't solve the issue, as much as it simply punishes good play rather than actually solving the inherent issue. What's the inherent issue of snowballing? Every champion getting way too many things off of buying very few stats. Yeah, Sylas is an amazing snowballer, imagine my surprise when he gets tons of damage, and tons of sustain just from buying AP. Why exactly is Sylas rewarded for building bursty when he's supposed to be a scaler and his kit is built extremely well for sustained DPS? Why don't we say, bind his healing ratio to bonus HP? If he has to buy lots of HP to have decent sustain from his W, then he'll actually be trading something off by going high damage builds by losing his big healing, and he'll lose out on damage since we just won't give the damage portions of his abilities anything but AP ratios. Same goes for many champions, why is Annie's shield an AP ratio? Why is Orianna's shield an AP ratio? Why is Riven's shield an AD ratio? Why exactly aren't we making champions HAVE to build differently to get different benefits and drawbacks? I ask this because we have a LOT of stats in the game, probably a few more than we need in all honesty, and yet riot insists on never using a substantial chunk of them. Example: Heal & Shield Power, why exactly is it that enchanter type champions get both damage and supportive power from just AP? Why exactly is it that Karma just gets to have a 105% AP ratio on her ulted shield, thereby incentivizing against building Heal & Shield Power, in favor of more raw AP, in order to burst people better and only occasionally drop some fat shields? Sure you probably still do shield more in the late game but that's basically irrelevant, the majority of Karma players go AP over Shield Power because it's easier to play, usually wins more anyway because burst damage is the meta, and you do actually lose out on a significant amount of damage going the proper supportive build. On the flip side, why do mages get to have super high damage and get decent shielding and defensive aspects from building their damage items? Why shouldn't they actually be forced to build Shield Power to be supportive? Snowballing is out of hand because too many champions get too much benefit from only building one or two stats, and should probably be changed and forced to actually build for the aspects of their kit they're looking to improve, instead of letting them get away with building nothing but damage, damage, and more damage. Also champions like Bel'veth randomly getting a stupid amount of damage reduction on a basic ability is unbalanced, who woulda thought.

This issue is multi-faceted, having enough free defense to go full damage is problematic, having enough free damage to go full defense is also problematic, and on top of that we also have tanks who literally get damage from building tank items in some cases.

Thirdly, just to make this clear because I know someone will say it in a response to this, "But if you take away the damage tanks do then why would they even build tank?" Now let me ask this. Are tank champion supposed to, y'know, do damage? Or are they, as their name implies, supposed to be beefy enough to survive? If the answer is both, then you're a victim of the current meta. The current meta dictates that "durable" champions need to be GIGABEEFY because there's too much %hp damage all over the place, and too many easy ways to obtain %hp damage if you happen to not have it innately, maybe BorK IS actually too strong, maybe it wouldn't have to be so strong, if tanks didn't have so much free damage that they get to cheat and buy more durability than is actually reasonable? I'm fully willing to admit that realistically speaking, everyone is supposed to do damage, everyone should actually be able to do that. What I will say though is, maybe they should just actually have to build damage items in order to do damage, I know, crazy thought. Perhaps in order to do damage, you should have to build damage, perhaps in order to survive longer in fights, you should have to build durability, I know it's hard to comprehend for a lot of players, but maybe you shouldn't be able to get away with five AP items, sorcerer's shoes, and still be hard to kill. Saying this as an ADC main who also played a ton of midlane and a LOT of Akali. Maybe, juuuuust maybe, champions shouldn't be given free durability and they should have to itemize properly in order to obtain that durability. Imagine that. This comes with the knock-on effect that if tanks have to abide by similar rules to the rest of the cast and actually buy damage items to do damage, then if a tank player decides to just go full durability, they're gonna be hard to kill, but it won't be so problematic as they will actually lose a good chunk of their kill threat, so BorK doesn't need to suddenly let you deal with a full durability champion.

Wouldn't a tank who goes full durability just be useless then? Idk Leona seems to do it just fine with mostly being a CC bot, Braum also does it just fine being a CC bot meant to protect his team. It's almost like we could have a more interesting game for the role tanks fill in their team comp, just as being another damage dealer, or by actually being selfless and giving up being the carry and instead helping through frontlining and CC. Why not add in items for increasing CC duration while also lowering the overall duration of CC in the game? This way we could make Tanks all about CC and maybe finally take away some of the insane power that ranged champions can have with their CC on top of their damage? (Syndra stun is a point and click spell, you can't tell me otherwise, this shit is brainless to hit)

Edit: To add onto this, I'm not saying early game champions can't exist, they just need to actually give something up for that early game power. As far as I'm concerned, these sorts of champions just shouldn't have very good scalings or any scalings at all and just rely purely on their high base damage and accept the fact that they should just fall off a cliff and be actually useless in the late game. Oh that sounds not fun? Well I'm not gonna sugarcoat it, given that most of these early game champions can outright win the game by 15 minutes I don't think it's unreasonable to say they should actually lose if they don't win it fast. If scalers need to have a poor early game or a mid game then they deserve a strong late game. As it stands, yes, I understand that a good amount of "scalers" do have good early and mid game, such is life with riot games I guess. I'm suggesting that scalers also receive some treatment to properly make them bad at early levels in exchange for their late game prowess, we shouldn't have everything with champion design or balance, we should have champions be focused on particular gameplay instead of what we have now which is a lot of very broad designs that focus on few things in particular for the sake of "viability and balance" rather than, y'know, fun, or non-toxic gameplay. Imagine a champion actually having obvious weaknesses and needing to actually give something up for an advantage somewhere, this should be applied to all champions in the game, without exception.

respect for the master duel music 4:29 🙂

ye last whisper got the upgrade…void staff did not… ofc, cuz zed cant be not meta.

I’d rather them try to nerf items more than champion damage. specifically ap items where almost every ap mage will buy ludens first and void staff later. There’s almost no variety
I do think yi and irelia are two of the biggest offenders of one item full builds where yi spikes the strongest off of botrk while irelia while still spiking off a full botrk spikes insanely hard off of just vamp scepter

I don’t want longer games people just start to tilt and quit the second they fall behind

Honestly not only tank items defines rhe "items issue" i died the other day to an ahri, half her damage was item damage… Its ridiculous

And then you have champs that deal 0 damage. Yeah riot buff all champs to compensate then forget about a few of them making them unplayable.

This is a whole bunch of yapping

it would be okey to cut damage down by 20% for EVERY champion. Tanks should lose 30-35% damage because their job is tanking and disrupting the enemy, not 1v1 the enemy adc and winning because % max hp true damage over time with infinite sustain is fun.

If your champion doesn’t have a ton of durability and a form of percent max health damage, your champion was made before 2016.

LOL. You think league has a problem now? It's been a problem since S10. but everyone is so insane they didn't stop to recognize it 4 years go. It's been bad since then.

I'd take a "tank Meta" any day rather than every Teamfights looking like a piñata party.
And they really overshot with anti tank designs, leading to fun champs like Camille, Fiora and Gwen, who don't give a shit, what you do or build.

Maybe it's the unpopular opinion, but I find the current meta refreshing and has me actually having fun in the majority of games win or lose. That said, I only play league casually and don't care for ranked. Feels a lot more arcadey and the faster more casual games where anyone can become strong are really nice. I hate when fights and matches drag on, any average over 25 minutes for a match feels very excessive imo.

It's SUPER important to note that "meta" does not and has never stood for "most effective tactic available"

The "meta" short for the metagame (defined: game within the game) is a prevalent strategy within the community, in some sports "metas" will be enforced by rules, such as how league eventually asserted 1 top, 1 jung, 1 mid, and 2 bot. Nothing is "more effective" about having 2 bot vs say 2 top or 2 mid. There's a point to be made that being near dragon was "important" for the duo lane, but 2 mid achieves this fine. The ultimate problem was that without having a clear "meta" of who goes where, the start of the game was a shit show of figuring out where the duo lane was, this could give certain teams advantages but it was overall bad for game health. So a meta formed, 2 bot. It was optimal in some ways, but sub-optimal in others, it wasn't "the most effective tactic" it was just the easiest to agree on.

As for things like "tank" meta, the problem with calling them "most effective" is that, often times they weren't. Tank meta made tank items super strong, but heaven forbid you play Tankmo, or Tankzreal, those weren't "accepted" in this meta despite being just as effective as many other tank build DPSs, the metagame was just the popular ideas people had. This is one of the core issues with the community, remember when people were literally getting reported into suspensions from league for playing Veigar mid? Then a professional played him without any buffs or changes, and it became a meta? They had to nerf the character people got suspended for playing? All because people have this idea that the "meta" is the "most effective tactics available"

Anybody with a brain knows that the metagame is driven by popular OPINION and not decisive fact. It's not the most effective tactic available because there could potentially be something somebody forgot about. You can't play chess by brainlessly making the same moves over and over again, you MIGHT be able to beat a lot of newer players by following the move order from a pro, but to actually get good at chess you have to learn how the moves work and make moves dependent on the actions of your opponent. There's no "one tactic to rule them all" and that's a game that's got very little variation, no patches to break metas up, it doesn't have 100s of characters that can interact with hundreds of different items to keep you on your toes… the fact that people think League works this way is pretty sad.

So please, do me a favor, remember that a meta is not "the most effective tactic available" because there's plenty of effective tactics that go unused, especially in a climate like the ranked queue of League of Legends, where deviation from this meta is criticized without merit. Also keep in mind that some tactics will work better in different skill levels, kind of like how Zed might be super strong, but in the hands of a novice he's useless and up against good players it's no more effective than any other assassin. All of these factors are forgotten when the discussion of meta comes up in league, we forget that a godlike Teemo player is probably best off playing Teemo, even if Teemo is "off meta"

downplaying old last whisper and black cleaver is crazy and super misleading. you could acquire it for a much cheaper price than ldr now and this was in addition to ie + pd being an insane power spike on their own two items, it made coming online as an adc very quick compared to current meta, people got blown up by auto attacks much more in the previous years. undervaluing % pen on its own and especially item cost for something like giant slayer—a good passive but is not better than coming online faster—is very strange. even as "just a stat stick" it was always worth having in your inventory

This is why I quit the game a long while back. This game feels more like a mobile game than Wild Rift.

Game shit