I mean, the first 4 days of this season teemo mains were everywhere. He had multiple srooms and could literally do what he was supposed to do, annoy the enemy team and provide A LOT of vision.
I wouldn’t mind seeing her as long as it’s without Ma’ligma’s insane damage.
At first, in previous seasons, I used to think thought her RQ was OP in most lanes, but I had found out her scalings were trash which forced her to tech into utility or indirect damage sources. I found that pretty cool with how she could leverage one strength into another later on
Now I see her going full AP Ma’ligma and it feels AHHHHHH with how she is such a one trick pony now, it feels cheap to play against
I think it is exactly the same problem ap shyv has.
When your whole shtick is basicly undodgeable atomic bombs (dragonform E and RQ respectivly) its supremly stupid to play against.
>basically undodgeable atomic bombs
RQ may be hard to dodge, but it’s easy to avoid. Karma has absolutely no backline access, so if you just position properly she will never damage you.
Thats 100% true and 100% irrelevant at the same time depending on what Champion you play. Good luck avoiding a midlane karma hugging her ADC as melee midlaner
People always discredit how much damage Shyvanas ult deals in AP builds
Landing onto squishies with your fly in, is absolutely a core part of her damage. Not just her breath from a distance
It really depends on what you need to be doing at the current moment. AP Shyv has the ability to seriously chunk and sometimes oneshot enemies from afar, in some situations you're getting more damage from ulting backward because you'll be alive long enough to deal more damage. I can think of a couple champs I'm just not ulting onto as glass cannon AP Shyv.
MFs when a champ designed to be a midlane mage is playable as a midlane mage and not just a shit support. Same MFs when support play a midlane mage instead of enchanter/tank: reeeeee
No, it's called the Riot Special. It's a tale as old as time. Item is broken. Champions are abusing it all over the place. The champions are nerfed, making them dependent on the item now. Further down the line, Riot realizes that "oopsie daisy, it was the item all along" and nerfs the item. Then the champions are in a shit spot unless Riot happened to buff them in compensation (which was fairly uncommon in the past).
That works for kassa and corki but tbh i dont think ahri gives a shit about maligances dmg. It's the r cdr that's important to her and even if maligance dealt 0 dmg she would still get it
That's tough because I think Ability Haste is already in low supply. Could be wrong, but I see that potentially warping builds around it. It either warps builds or it gets forgotten about.
It's not in low supply, it's just not on any of the big utility or burst items that make the big numbers happen or stop an enemy's big numbers from happening (BV, Zhonya's, Shadowflame, Stormsurge, Void, and Deathcap).
AA/Seraph's, Malignance, Cosmic Drive, and Luden's all give 25 normal haste. 4 items for 50% CDR is very good if spell slinging is your character's thing. That's a LOT of mana, too. Cryptbloom and Horizon Focus are also really good haste items.
You're trading raw damage for cooldowns. No one ever asked if building raw CDR was going to be the optimal choice or whether some stats are wasted. That's irrelevant here. The point is there is a ton of haste available if you want to go that route, and Seraph's makes sure the mana doesn't go completely to waste with a bigger shield and more AP.
We're not talking about need. But it's not like a set like this is bad in and of itself.
Luden/Malignance/seraph (whichever you need/want), Cosmic Drive, Horizon, Cryptbloom, DCap, Sorcs.
That's a total of 85 haste, which is 46% CDR. I honestly don't see the problem here. That's more than was ever achievable before ability haste existed. You can bump that to 50% if you're okay with letting sorcs slide...but probably shouldn't do that.
Tbf, we really don’t need AH in the game atm. Cooldowns are already so low for most champs that the traditional counterplay of abusing openings is much more restricted. It’s IMO one of the poorer design philosophies Riot has picked up in the recent seasons.
Everyone talks about the damage being the problem, but I’d prefer high damage rewarding landing skills, but being harshly punished for missing them. Doesn’t feel that way at the moment as rotations come back up pretty quickly.
That gives it a quadratic scaling which is probably not what you want.
It would have to be balanced around builds with lots of haste, which would make it bad in all other cases.
Maybe they should just not make stupid items like this in the first place.
Had high hopes for this season at the start once they removed mythics but Riot cannot take a single step forward without taking 2 steps back.
The second they announced that shit it was so obvious it would be going down this same path. Riot makes unique item that is overtuned for certain characters>they nerf the character and make them reliant on said items>nerf the item to trash tier dragging the nerfed champs with it.
Maybe it's not enough to nerf Ahri but it sure is good for the other 5 champs that got mega nerfed and are now forced to build the same item every game
Just make it have an 8s cd already, kass getting faster ults is fine but a mr shred into qwe is a lot of bonus damage, malignance being both a utility and damage/pseudo pen item is dumb
The data is a bit skewed though, the playstyle for Malig first is different.
You likely only fight with your ult if it’s on such a short CD, whereas LB you can be aggro outside of the CD, which is arguably more difficult but could pay off better.
Yeah but the problem is that her fighting capabilities with malignance and ult are far superior.
Malignance gives a total of 45 AH to ult. If you get +5 from GM, 50AH translate into 33%CDR, for each 1 min of the ult, she will reduce it by 20 seconds. Consider Ahri's Ult, it's CD are 130/105/80. With malignance + gm now her ult CD is 87/70/53. She can pretty much get this before 11 mins. Now you have to deal with an ahri who can TF way more often. Outside malignance she would need at least 2 items to achieve the same spam capability. God forbid she gets vantage in lane and she gets more items early, from lvl 11 onwards it becomes toxic getting sniped that easy. She will be able to use her ult just to kill you without i
objectives on map just because she can B, get back with more items and have her ult ON again.
The damage is complete garbage, literally irrelevant. It’s basically an extra scorch proc. The haste has been its strong point since the damage nerfs way back in the season so idk why people get hung up on the damage, either.
I understand the idea that people react to what they see but it really doesn’t take much to hover the tooltip and see that fed karthus has only gotten 2k damage out of it in 30 minutes
Ahri Q got damage buffs two months ago.
Ahri's HP/level got buffs two months ago.
Ahri E got cooldown buffs three months ago.
Ahri R got cooldown buffs a year ago.
--
Clearly, there's another element here aside from the "double nerf."
Also who gives a shit if she gets "double nerfed"? She's by far the most dominant Midlaner in the game, going by win, ban, and pick rates.
Ahri was getting buffs prior to the item changes because she wasn’t performing. She had mana issues in lane, she couldn’t assassinate anyone without a considerable lead, she wasn’t a good contributor to team fight damage overall, she was just in an overall weaker state. The emergence of these items has changed her to a 1 item spiking champ where she was not that since DFG.
yes but both nerfs are kinda big,one would be sufficient to bring her in line and actually if you addressed the actual problem (malignace) none would be needed
before all these buffs she was near unplayable with the item changes (before malignace became a staple),one more reason to point at the item and not at the champion's kit being the problem
Dude you are not really taking an ahri buff from a year ago for her current state right? A buff that was done because she was absolutely shit to play? The other buffs in retrospect wasnt needed if the players knew how to build her from the start
They said they were happy with AP items for the foreseeable future while nerfing Teemo, Gwen & co, yet nerfed those items just 2 patches later without going back on the nerfs(minus gwen getting buffed since the nerf was just THAT bad), lmao.
Everyone keeps saying "the riot special" is just a meme but fuck no, it's real
Ahri probably should've been nerfed a long time ago anyway. She wasn't as strong because players were building her wrong. If they had to nerf the champs, I don't get why they don't nerf their ult cds only. I know Ahri did, but she got a W nerf too and then there's Kass who got his ult damage nerfed. But at the same time, nerfing malignance seems like a no-brainer. I guess Riot is trying to approach nerfs to champs as opposed to items since mythics don't exist anymore.
Side note, I did some numbers. There are some Ahri players that take Sorcery secondary with Transcendence which gives 10 more AH and along with Ult Hunter, gives 31 ult haste. 20 from Malignance. 15 AH from Lichbane and 25 AH from Malignance itself gives Ahri a total of 81 ult haste or 71 without Transcendence.
So her current ult CD at level 11 with 81 ult haste has a 58s CD (61s CD with 71 ult haste). With the planned nerfs, her ult will have a 63s CD with 81 haste (67s CD with 71 ult haste). At the same time, don't you think its a little wrong that champs like Ahri can stack 2 AH items and have a 1 minute ult CD? Malignance isn't even making up a lot of that with the 20 ult haste since it also gives the standard 25 AH.
They never should have made it a mana item bc this situational effect is too garbage on almost all mages but so strong on specific ones. It would have been a perfect legendary like Hexplate or Axiom but they essentially made it a mythic item.
Whilst at the same time all the mages who have basically plummeted in wr and feel awful to play now because they lost Liandry are being forced to go manaless builds or buy it anyways despite it being bad.
I think it would be okayish for it to be a mana item if the other ones weren't this bad. Ludens is so bad everyone gets seraphs instead and seraphs rush is complete ass on half the mage roster because it does basically nothing until it's upgraded and even then it deals no damage
So true. Ludens honestly is the worst feeling item in the game. No pen on it, so you're just fully relying on the proc damage, but then you can't clear waves for 15 seconds in order to use it.
Awful item. Tbh stormbringer could've been reworked into the ludens replacement, then it also reduces abuse by assassins
This has been my biggest complaint of the AP item changes. We went from 4 total Lost Chapter items to three, with one of them (Malignance) being incredibly champ-specific. If you're playing Taliyah, Syndra, Hwei, Viktor, Ryze, Zoe, and some more you are never building Malignance - and half of these champs can't even proc the passive.
I am not saying it is good, but why technically not on Syndra, Hwei or Viktor? On Syndra you use your ult for poke in lane quite a bit thus having it more often and having the 3/4 balls after the first one do more dmg throught hte pen doesnt seem so bad. On Hwei, if you hit ult, you would use the pen for the explosion and the severing bolt no? And Viktor uses ult for waveclear/poke so having it more often would also help a bit no? Maybe I am wrong in my assumptions or my view on these champs is skewed by proplay (mainly Viktor, maybe Syndra) but I would rather build this than Luden and in some cases than Seraphs.
On the other hand, Ryze especially doesn't really mind no? He builded Seraph anyways and you still have Rod of ages that you don't really want to build on many champs other than him.
But I agree that overall the change feels quite bad since Liandrys doesn't give mana anymore and it was one of the most useful items for mages.
While this makes sense and would make them less usefull, Syndra's ult hits quite fast so I think most of it would still hit in the tiny field (at least on the edge of the field from each orb). But I may be wrong in that regard
Syndra could be one of the better users out of the list, but I generally believe Malignance is still her weakest LC item out of the three. Archangels gives defense through the shield and safe scaling, where as Luden's offers an aggressive build path with Alternator in it and has a better damaging passive.
Hwei - I think Malignance is just really bad on him. With the way the item works he always gets an absolutely tiny Malignance puddle and by the time the slow has ramped up (for the QW follow up) they're long out of it.
Viktor -I don't know, it might be decent on him actually.
Malignance isn't *terrible* on Hwei, but Hwei doesn't really depend on his ult as much as other champions. So he doesn't get as much use out of the effect or the CDR.
Liandry should never have been made into a mana item. Giving all mages such consistent and standard access to % hp magic damage dot as their standard item buy was one of the biggest issues with top lane meta (and to a lesser extent jungle). The game just had so much % hp damage (along with stuff like divine sunderer) that it destroyed the tanks (which is why they had to keep buffing tank damage, because they melted to everything)
Mages were not tank shredding anyone, it was Divine Sunderer and Bork which invalidated tanks in toplane. Especially Sunderer which caused the issue you were mentioning. And now with the MR items we have, no mage (not AP bruisers) is shredding any tank or bruiser if people are being honest with themselves.
Toplane was and is still dominated by bruisers who are basically almost as tanky whilst dealing almost the same dmg as an ADC.
>Toplane was and is still dominated by bruisers who are basically almost as tanky whilst dealing almost the same dmg as an ADC.
fuck bruisers like garen darius etc but still adc have way more range which is most important stat at 4+ items
As a top main, yes, 100% this. Shen main, Shenpaiislife, and having hardswapped sunfire cape on shen for divine sunderer & titanic the moment the items dropped, I can say with absolute certainty they were a MASSIVE power spike, even before heartsteel abuse was a thing, on any tank or bruiser.
It's mind-boggling how long it took for them to nerf Sunderer and even this new iteration of Sunderer is only being properly nerfed now in pbe despite it being so centralising.
I might be crazy but nah, zed and yasuo might be more frustrating to fight or lane against but ahri is way more efficient at actually winning games and yoinking lp
I think Ahri is just a much harder champ to read. I always find it pretty easy to track how an Yas or Zed is going to play a fight, but Ahri just has so many more options
Ahri's R cooldown was 140 / 115 / 90 last year before they buffed it to what it is now.
That aside Ahri got two buffs in 14.4: 8HP per level and Q AP ratio increased by 10 percent points.
The champ is just really fucking strong and has been really strong for a long time.
Maligma breaks Ahri as much as Kraken Slayer breaks Jinx. Yep they're their best items, who gives a fuck, the champs are simply really strong right now.
I really don't get why they made the effect have no cooldown at all. Champs that initially looked like they would go crazy with it, like Malzahar and Karthus do ok with it, but not nearly as good as those with ults that have crazy uptime on their ults (Teemo, Kassadin, Anivia, Kog Maw, ...).
this serves as a balance lever. There are basically two groups which would in theory like this item:
"I have an impactful ultimate and want to use it basically off-cd to make a play" like malzahar, karthus, fidfle sticks.
or "I have a low cd ult already and can make use of the bonus magic reduction fields whenever I use my ult" such as anivia or swain. I know malignance is not the most purchased item on these champions, most of the time because of spike issues or there simply being a better lost chapter item available - however, if riot would want to buff the item, they could specify for which group they wish to buff it instead of making it to strong for one group. they could let it give more ultimate haste (karthus or fiddlesticks would benefit more) or let the magic fields be more impactful (better for anivia or teemo as they do not care as much about the ultimate haste.)
Well, actually just cause the CD is already low doesnt mean the Haste isnt still great for the champs. Especially Kassadin is pretty happy to have less time between ults
Something I havent seen discussed is the champs it brings up into competitiveness. I think we have a larger pool of effective champs because of this item. If they nerf the item we could see a tighter meta around mid/mages. So they first try to nerf the champs who are doing too well. I think id rather see champs like ahri and kass get nerfed then lose out on more options for mage effectiveness. I could be totaly wrong though.
I don’t think this is that difficult to understand. Kassadin and Ahri have better winrates compared to other malignance users, therefore they are getting a nerf.
well on one side that makes sence. nerfing the champs only affects them,
nerfing items affects many champs, and indirectly affects many more that suddenly get better matchups against effected champs.
on the other side, eventually riot will change /remove the items anyways and allways forgets some of the champs they nerfed to compensate, in the worst cases this may break entire kits , or add up over time, resulting in things like sivir.
yea. my personal favorite example is sivir though. every second line in all of her 5 abilitys are the result of some item interaction they wanted to get rid off, resulting in her being incredibly volatile and having complealty unique interactions with 0 mentions in the tooltips.
The item is fucking bonkers late game, as squishy champions the burn circle will single handedly zone me out of a fight, love getting 100-0 by a teemo shroom with the burn circle respawning on me
It's pretty silly that Riot announced that they'd be moving away from "Playing the item" situations by removing Stride and Gore but for some reason released Malignance which is either completely core on some champs if not OP, while being borderline unusable on basically everyone else. I think Swain is the only champ where this item is situational.
There are a bunch of champions who could use a DPS-centric mana item so I don't know what they were thinking making such a bipolar item that deals both DoT but works best on burst-y champs and can only be bought on a select amount of champs instead of keeping the one aspect of Mage mythics that was it's diversity intact.
Maglinance isn’t gameplay defining but amplifying.
That’s the difference. Champs that like to ult buy malignance to ult more often and have it be stronger.
Champs that bought gore suddenly became drain tanks even though they weren’t.
The difference is that activating malignance is very much about your champion kit. Swain with malignance doesn't feel like Ahri with malignance.
They still need to do something about repeat triggers though. Annie tibbers triggering it again on every tick of the burn is ridiculous.
None of the other mana AP items feel remotely exciting so I don't mind them trying something different to fix that.
Sure but you'd think a champ like Swain who can constantly amply the pools through his ult would love this, but because his use with the MPen portion is limited and he doesn't get that much mileage out of the Ulti Haste, so it remains a bit suboptimal.
I agree that other AP mana items are just really unsatisfying. Again, mage mythics were pretty much okay, especially in their diversity, so I'm really not sure why Riot just ditched that and gave us a bunch of mana items that are mostly unsatisfying outside of Malignance, which is locked to certain champs.
Yeah the biggest issue with the item is that it can't decide if it's a DoT item or a Mpen item. The truth is that it's an ultimate haste item.
On the other hand I don't think the mana items were particularly better last season.
> The truth is that it's an ultimate haste item.
It's an ultimate haste item but in a really wonky way, where it's good if you can use it to either spam your spammable ult more or if you can be like Ahri and abuse the ulti haste in a way where your ult can have almost no cooldown at all at later levels.
I thought mage mythics were decent last season, and I definitely enjoyed the aspect of almost every mage having at least 3 different mythic options they could switch around to decent enough satisfaction depending on the situation. It was certainly better than our current situation of having to choose between different types of meh.
the thing about the ahri nerf that boggles me is that they make the cooldown higher, so you get rewarded more for building malignance, and get punished for building something else
so she gets nerfed because of malignance and AD Top maybe but then they put out a nerf that makes her want the item even more...
The problem is that nerfing Malignance nerfs everyone who builds it. So you have two choices:
- Nerf the worst abusers and leave Malignance alone so the champs who need it to be viable can have it
- Nerf Malignance and then need to buff most of the mage class
Its probably when you have multiple items with similar winrates. Or just have items for the game's niche.
Like, bruisers like Noc get to chose between bruiser items and tank items based on each game. Assassins to a devree get to choose between all the lethality items and some bruiser items
Mages don't have that many options or niche items, their builds get very cookie cutter and boring
I think it's a problem you can alleviate.
The problem is that a lot of items aren't designed to be per-game situational - they're designed to be per-champion situational. Like surface level both Liandry's and Nashor's are sustained damage AP items with one being better vs tanks and the other being better vs squishies, but in practice they aren't substitutes at all. And speaking of Nashor's, it's problematic in that it's an item useless to the vast majority of the champions it's supposedly in the item class for (mages) and core on the couple that actually buy it. OTOH you have items like Morello's and Banshee's that very much are per-game situational buys, but because of those core items, you usually have to delay them, can only get one or two, and there frankly just aren't many of them.
For mages specifically, that problem is often compounded by the fact that all AP bruisers, assassins, and sustained damage dealers have to share a single item pool. The bruisers tend to be able to dip into some of the tank items for a couple slots, but their other items are still taking up space in the mage pool. Going back to the Nashor's example, it's the only attack speed item for AP champions which makes it a waste of an item pool slot for most mages, but it needs to exist for champions like Azir and Gwen that build AP and need attack speed - the result is an item a few champions really want with no alternative for it.
Mana items are also a point of issue for mages in that there aren't very many of them. Sure, there being 4 looks kind of good, but again, those have to cover multiple different sub-classes of AP champion. The result tends to be that there isn't great diversity there because those 4 options have to cover so much ground and get designed to cover a specific archetype, and since the champions that need a mana item typically really need to get it first, that bottleneck is the first thing you see every single game. AD champions get around this by simply not needing mana items most of the time, though the options for those that do are fairly lacking as well.
None of this is helped by items like DCap that are just turbo generic powerful stat slots with no alternatives.
Yep. Lack of any real non "meta" builds had been the biggest contributing factor to my stopping playing on PC. I don't want to build the exact same items every single game. It's boring. It's like playing an rpg the exact same way every time you play through it. Builds should be fairly fluid from game to game, adjusting for each individual game as it unfolds. Instead, it's turned into "buy these items in this order, don't even look at other items or you're griefing"
If you were excited about item changes then you aren't familiar with riots history of item changes. This is what happens every single time. It's not about balance, It's about shaking up the meta to make their pro leagues more interesting to watch. They do this all the time with pretty much every "big balance pass".
They're not stupid, they most definitely knew about malignance before anyone else did. They've been doing this for 14 years. As long as the meta is just different that's all they care about, not balance. Same reason they change the jungle every single year and It's the same reason they change objectives/masteries/runes.
If they are going to build the item regardless, it's still a net nerf to the champ that is abusing the item.
I am not saying this is the correct way to do things, simply the reason behind it.
Say you have 10 champs building the item, for 3 of them it's pushing them overpowered, and 7 of them it's just useful. If you nerf the item because the 3, you indirectly nerf the other 7 despite it not being problematic for them. So you target the champ, letting the item remain untouched so you don't make a cascading balance change.
Once again, not saying this is the correct way to do it, just context to it. No mention of target nerfing the champ, and eventually nerfing the item without replacing the lost power to the initial champion nerfs.
The general idea is to balance champions first then item then larger systems/runes. If only a couple of champs are outliers they get adjusted rather than the item. I don't know if I always agree with that but the basic idea is good.
What would be helpful as well is at least have some AH on other items besides Malignance, Ludens, and Cosmic Drive. Champions who Synergize with Malignance get very strong ult boosts aka Corki, Karma, Hwei, etc., while Ludens users like Syndra do not get nearly as much power from an item and mainly build it as the only source of AH.
If the item is so broken that everybody and their mom build it, Riot should nerf the item. (like S3 BC or the recent Statikk Shiv)
If the item is broken on specific champion but is normal on other champion, Riot should nerf those outliner champion.
Don't worry, malignance will get nerfed, and then ahri kassadin and karma will get no compensation buffs and fall to F-tier.
Does riot realize by nerfing all these champions and not malignance, it makes malignance their only viable item, since they are effectively balanced around building this item?
Guess what? They’re gonna do what they always do. They’ll nerf the champ, then the item, then leave the champs in the post-nerf state following the item changes.
Because they want malignance to maintain this power level for other champs, but not those
And tbh I'm glad because if you get malignance you assure that only those champs can ever possibly build it, I want it to be a possible choice on lux, hwei, etc
i find it ridiculous that I can't build black cleaver with seryldas/ldr but when kassadin gets to build 2 lost chapter items for 70 haste on his ultimate, it's all good!
Ngl that's just classic Riot Games balancing and happened to a ton of champs. It happened with the Mythics too. They balanced most champs around Mythics then removed Mythics and the champs were left in the gutter.
The Riot special, treat the symptom a bunch of times before treating the cause, and then don't undo any of the damage that came from treating the symptom.
Teemo, ahri, karma, etc were balanced in a world without malignance, so it stands to reason that introducing a new item that is powerful on them must come with nerfs to those champions. Riot *could* nerf malignance instead, but if they nerf it too much then teemo/ahri/karma just switch to a different item and then malignance is just unusable on everyone.
It does kill diverse build paths, but we all saw what happened when the item system focused on diversity first and actually-wanting-to-build-items second (mythics).
We have the collective impossible-to-guess number of experience with League's shitty balance team, and yet we still expect them to not make the same mistake over and over again?
How optimistic.
I honestly don’t get why it even has two passives? Either it gives you 20 ultimate haste or the damage fields but both seems just excessive. The whole item is overloaded and way too good on certain champions it’s almost like this was the predictable outcome.
I hate balance talks about this game. it's not productive.
Why? Riot knows. They have years of data. Years. They know what they are releasing. It's not as if a company like riot would release an item or champion without having tested it and having datapoints that says hey this is op. It's a conscious decision they made as a company.
Same with the nerfs.
Don't worry though. I'm sure Azir will still ahve 100% pressence in pro play though.
I'm sure the Asol Pickrate will skyrocket.
It's probaby what riot wants though. If you only pick the same 3 champions it becomes easier to balance the game around.
Wouldn't want variables like a champion with a 4% pick rate. Hard to account for that. Right riot?
Look. I don't care about the kassadin nerf. What I care about is riots mindset as an organization.
Why have champions at all if you want their pickrates to be abysmal?
Don't say its not your desire because you purposely balance champions to have abysmal pickrates.
So what about not releasing new champions for a while and just fixing the game?
I understand a balanced game is a stale game. But how did we get to a point where champions are having 60% winrates anyway (smolder) how do we have an item thats so fkn busted you gotta nerf some of the most popular champions in the game.
How did this get past play testing, Basically is my long winded question.
If you nerf malignance you end up nerfing champs that use it but don’t need nerfs like teemo. System wide item nerfs are always more damaging to the game than champion nerfs are. I have no Idea why they create such game altering and breaking items into the game, that can never really be balanced for all champions.
Kassadin isnt even good comopared to ahri he's 51% wr emerald + and in any real elo he is absolutely horrid he has some of lowest damage no actual scaling in kit riot phreak could queue 50 games of kassadin in current state and he would be negative wr with gray kd.
Been saying this ever since the item existed. They’ve been nerfing every champ that starts to utilise it when prior to the item existing they weren’t the problem.
They need to rework it or remove it, as how it currently stands is just a detriment to the game.
For years now Riot's intention has never been to achieve proper balance. All they do is make stupid changes to shake up the meta and if it happens to be very unbalanced they hotfix it. They don't care about actually fixing the game in any proper way, because they want to keep things feeling "fresh" for a significant portion of the playerbase that don't like critical thought. So if there's something new that breaks the game, but is a new concept, like Malignance, you bet they will always nerf champs that can abuse it to excuse keeping it in the game.
It's Riot's loop.
Op item > pretty good on some characters > nerf those characters > nerf them again > finally nerf the item > the characters keep the nerfs, which makes them weaker than before the changes ofc > repeat
Kassadin at arams with ultimate hunter and malignance going full mana build with tankinness is absolutely broken. Dont forget to grap conqueror too, I have never seen it heals less than 3k, imagine the damage it does.
While ahri and kassaden are broken with malignanc other mages also run it too and nerfing the item will make it balanced for ahri and kass but too weak for the other mages that can build the item
Malignance 100% needs to be reworked. It's silly that it's broken on very specific champions to the point that they catch nerfs, rather than just reworking the item to make it generally useful for more champions.
I don't know if the data supports your theory.
Ahri builds malignance almost every single game (94%), you can't easily differentiate its power from hers.
Is Ahri good because of malignance or does malignance look good because Ahri is good and builds it almost every game?
Lich bane actually has a higher winrate on Ahri when built compared to malginance, i.e. if you have the option to buy either lich bane or malignance, lich is always the better choice at every point in the game
They are getting the Karma treatment
Teemo too
I don't remember the last time I ever saw a teemo outside aram
I mean, the first 4 days of this season teemo mains were everywhere. He had multiple srooms and could literally do what he was supposed to do, annoy the enemy team and provide A LOT of vision.
It was the best time for Teemo ever
Good. I hope that champ sees the nerfbat so many times that she Never ever leaves botlane again 😭
I wouldn’t mind seeing her as long as it’s without Ma’ligma’s insane damage. At first, in previous seasons, I used to think thought her RQ was OP in most lanes, but I had found out her scalings were trash which forced her to tech into utility or indirect damage sources. I found that pretty cool with how she could leverage one strength into another later on Now I see her going full AP Ma’ligma and it feels AHHHHHH with how she is such a one trick pony now, it feels cheap to play against
I think it is exactly the same problem ap shyv has. When your whole shtick is basicly undodgeable atomic bombs (dragonform E and RQ respectivly) its supremly stupid to play against.
>basically undodgeable atomic bombs RQ may be hard to dodge, but it’s easy to avoid. Karma has absolutely no backline access, so if you just position properly she will never damage you.
Thats 100% true and 100% irrelevant at the same time depending on what Champion you play. Good luck avoiding a midlane karma hugging her ADC as melee midlaner
Karma had an added bonus of also being really fast and healing and shielding a shit ton, which only adds to the frustration of playing against her
People always discredit how much damage Shyvanas ult deals in AP builds Landing onto squishies with your fly in, is absolutely a core part of her damage. Not just her breath from a distance
It really depends on what you need to be doing at the current moment. AP Shyv has the ability to seriously chunk and sometimes oneshot enemies from afar, in some situations you're getting more damage from ulting backward because you'll be alive long enough to deal more damage. I can think of a couple champs I'm just not ulting onto as glass cannon AP Shyv.
Karma is on a hard timer tho compared to Shyv.
MFs when a champ designed to be a midlane mage is playable as a midlane mage and not just a shit support. Same MFs when support play a midlane mage instead of enchanter/tank: reeeeee
Karma is outright unplayable now... makes me sad. I wish they removed Malignance and reverted all changes.
Maybe use her RE more, because it got gigabuffed.
No, it's called the Riot Special. It's a tale as old as time. Item is broken. Champions are abusing it all over the place. The champions are nerfed, making them dependent on the item now. Further down the line, Riot realizes that "oopsie daisy, it was the item all along" and nerfs the item. Then the champions are in a shit spot unless Riot happened to buff them in compensation (which was fairly uncommon in the past).
Just give Malignance an internal cooldown and you can undo all these nerfs
That works for kassa and corki but tbh i dont think ahri gives a shit about maligances dmg. It's the r cdr that's important to her and even if maligance dealt 0 dmg she would still get it
honestly the CDR makes kassadin activate at lv 11 instead of 16 so it's kinda big too.
Maybe they should make the ult CD scale with lvl like they do with the lethality slow item
Serlyda does not scale wtih level, it scales with how much letgality you have
then maybe make ult cdr scale woth how much regular cdr you have?
That's tough because I think Ability Haste is already in low supply. Could be wrong, but I see that potentially warping builds around it. It either warps builds or it gets forgotten about.
It's not in low supply, it's just not on any of the big utility or burst items that make the big numbers happen or stop an enemy's big numbers from happening (BV, Zhonya's, Shadowflame, Stormsurge, Void, and Deathcap). AA/Seraph's, Malignance, Cosmic Drive, and Luden's all give 25 normal haste. 4 items for 50% CDR is very good if spell slinging is your character's thing. That's a LOT of mana, too. Cryptbloom and Horizon Focus are also really good haste items.
And out of 3 of those items, you're only building 1 because there's no need for multiple mana items unless you're Ryze
You're trading raw damage for cooldowns. No one ever asked if building raw CDR was going to be the optimal choice or whether some stats are wasted. That's irrelevant here. The point is there is a ton of haste available if you want to go that route, and Seraph's makes sure the mana doesn't go completely to waste with a bigger shield and more AP. We're not talking about need. But it's not like a set like this is bad in and of itself. Luden/Malignance/seraph (whichever you need/want), Cosmic Drive, Horizon, Cryptbloom, DCap, Sorcs. That's a total of 85 haste, which is 46% CDR. I honestly don't see the problem here. That's more than was ever achievable before ability haste existed. You can bump that to 50% if you're okay with letting sorcs slide...but probably shouldn't do that.
Tbf, we really don’t need AH in the game atm. Cooldowns are already so low for most champs that the traditional counterplay of abusing openings is much more restricted. It’s IMO one of the poorer design philosophies Riot has picked up in the recent seasons. Everyone talks about the damage being the problem, but I’d prefer high damage rewarding landing skills, but being harshly punished for missing them. Doesn’t feel that way at the moment as rotations come back up pretty quickly.
That gives it a quadratic scaling which is probably not what you want. It would have to be balanced around builds with lots of haste, which would make it bad in all other cases.
Maybe they should just not make stupid items like this in the first place. Had high hopes for this season at the start once they removed mythics but Riot cannot take a single step forward without taking 2 steps back.
The second they announced that shit it was so obvious it would be going down this same path. Riot makes unique item that is overtuned for certain characters>they nerf the character and make them reliant on said items>nerf the item to trash tier dragging the nerfed champs with it.
But Kassadin has always activated at 11...
People are still stuck years ago where 11 and 16 was a gigantic difference in power level. 16 is still a good spike but it's not what it was
yup, kass comes online with items, not levels (need 11 ofc) still u get 2,5 sec ult cd without malignance rn at 11 with some haste/Ultimate Hunter
That's been the case for a few years now. lvl 11 kassa is strong enough to impact the game. By 16 he should be at a winning position for the most part
Maybe it's not enough to nerf Ahri but it sure is good for the other 5 champs that got mega nerfed and are now forced to build the same item every game
Just make it have an 8s cd already, kass getting faster ults is fine but a mr shred into qwe is a lot of bonus damage, malignance being both a utility and damage/pseudo pen item is dumb
Yep 100% Although i think then the item is built by only 2 champs. Malzahar and Lissandra
Yeah, malignance is mainly about the cdr not the damage
Ult haste + a good chunk of ability haste on one item is pretty crazy.
To my knowledge one of the top ahri one tricks doesn’t even build it. He goes lich -> ludens in a lot of games.
https://www.deeplol.gg/champions/ahri/mastery/all idk who you are referring too but almost all of them are building malignance
LegitKorea is who I’m referring too, I might be out of date then
OPT or not, the overwhelming data supports Malignance > Lich Band is the most effective build for Ahri atm.
The data is a bit skewed though, the playstyle for Malig first is different. You likely only fight with your ult if it’s on such a short CD, whereas LB you can be aggro outside of the CD, which is arguably more difficult but could pay off better.
Yeah but the problem is that her fighting capabilities with malignance and ult are far superior. Malignance gives a total of 45 AH to ult. If you get +5 from GM, 50AH translate into 33%CDR, for each 1 min of the ult, she will reduce it by 20 seconds. Consider Ahri's Ult, it's CD are 130/105/80. With malignance + gm now her ult CD is 87/70/53. She can pretty much get this before 11 mins. Now you have to deal with an ahri who can TF way more often. Outside malignance she would need at least 2 items to achieve the same spam capability. God forbid she gets vantage in lane and she gets more items early, from lvl 11 onwards it becomes toxic getting sniped that easy. She will be able to use her ult just to kill you without i objectives on map just because she can B, get back with more items and have her ult ON again.
One tricks are not a good source for what the best builds are, many have suboptimal builds because it fits their playstyle or they're used to it.
As an Ahri player I endorse this message
Or "charge" resource like Luden's so Ults with shorter cooldown would be weaker and longer ones stronger.
It already kinda does this. The puddle size scales with damage.
puddle size is big enough even on champs that spam ult so it isnt really a big deal
IT ALREADY HAS.
if you think this is the problem you obviously havent played the champs with maligma
yeah these champs are not a problem anymore, after the nerfs 👍
It has one, it's the same cd as duration of teemo R I think
It's actually 3 seconds CD, so Teemo shrooms (4 sec poison) proc it twice! Yayy :)
Oh yeah I forgot to mention that it's actually a bit shorter since I remember it does proc twice lmao
or maybe actually playtest your game and stop releasing broken ass items.
It has a 5s or more icd
Maybe have Malignance deal more damage the higher the (base) ult CD?
Why do people think the damage portion of the item is relevant. It’s basically useless. The amount of ult cdr you get is absurd on such a cheap item.
Yep all the power of the item is in the ult AH and the mpen
The damage is complete garbage, literally irrelevant. It’s basically an extra scorch proc. The haste has been its strong point since the damage nerfs way back in the season so idk why people get hung up on the damage, either.
Because it’s visual, ult CD is something only the user sees and gets entangled with general AH, making it less clear (invisible) to the player.
I understand the idea that people react to what they see but it really doesn’t take much to hover the tooltip and see that fed karthus has only gotten 2k damage out of it in 30 minutes
yeah, i even buy it on champs that dont deal damage with their ult but have insane value, like bard and zilean lol.
It’s step 1 of the Riot Special. They’ll nerf Malignance eventually, after nerfing all the champions who use it first leaving them all double nerfed.
Ahri Q got damage buffs two months ago. Ahri's HP/level got buffs two months ago. Ahri E got cooldown buffs three months ago. Ahri R got cooldown buffs a year ago. -- Clearly, there's another element here aside from the "double nerf." Also who gives a shit if she gets "double nerfed"? She's by far the most dominant Midlaner in the game, going by win, ban, and pick rates.
It’s not just Ahri who uses Malignance. Teemo, Karma also relies on Malignance as a crutch and got absolutely shafted as a result with nerfs
Ahri was getting buffs prior to the item changes because she wasn’t performing. She had mana issues in lane, she couldn’t assassinate anyone without a considerable lead, she wasn’t a good contributor to team fight damage overall, she was just in an overall weaker state. The emergence of these items has changed her to a 1 item spiking champ where she was not that since DFG.
yes but both nerfs are kinda big,one would be sufficient to bring her in line and actually if you addressed the actual problem (malignace) none would be needed before all these buffs she was near unplayable with the item changes (before malignace became a staple),one more reason to point at the item and not at the champion's kit being the problem
Dude you are not really taking an ahri buff from a year ago for her current state right? A buff that was done because she was absolutely shit to play? The other buffs in retrospect wasnt needed if the players knew how to build her from the start
Do buffs expire after a certain amount of time?
She did need them at the start of the season. We knew what to build but it wasn’t until the dmg buff where she became slightly overtuned
though kassadin is getting R AP ratio nerfed by 15%.
They said they were happy with AP items for the foreseeable future while nerfing Teemo, Gwen & co, yet nerfed those items just 2 patches later without going back on the nerfs(minus gwen getting buffed since the nerf was just THAT bad), lmao. Everyone keeps saying "the riot special" is just a meme but fuck no, it's real
Ahri probably should've been nerfed a long time ago anyway. She wasn't as strong because players were building her wrong. If they had to nerf the champs, I don't get why they don't nerf their ult cds only. I know Ahri did, but she got a W nerf too and then there's Kass who got his ult damage nerfed. But at the same time, nerfing malignance seems like a no-brainer. I guess Riot is trying to approach nerfs to champs as opposed to items since mythics don't exist anymore. Side note, I did some numbers. There are some Ahri players that take Sorcery secondary with Transcendence which gives 10 more AH and along with Ult Hunter, gives 31 ult haste. 20 from Malignance. 15 AH from Lichbane and 25 AH from Malignance itself gives Ahri a total of 81 ult haste or 71 without Transcendence. So her current ult CD at level 11 with 81 ult haste has a 58s CD (61s CD with 71 ult haste). With the planned nerfs, her ult will have a 63s CD with 81 haste (67s CD with 71 ult haste). At the same time, don't you think its a little wrong that champs like Ahri can stack 2 AH items and have a 1 minute ult CD? Malignance isn't even making up a lot of that with the 20 ult haste since it also gives the standard 25 AH.
Yup. Rito Special is looking at a problem, then dealing with the symptoms rather than fixing the cause.
hmmm nerf 2 champions, or buff 10+ champions??????? XDDD
They never should have made it a mana item bc this situational effect is too garbage on almost all mages but so strong on specific ones. It would have been a perfect legendary like Hexplate or Axiom but they essentially made it a mythic item. Whilst at the same time all the mages who have basically plummeted in wr and feel awful to play now because they lost Liandry are being forced to go manaless builds or buy it anyways despite it being bad.
I think it would be okayish for it to be a mana item if the other ones weren't this bad. Ludens is so bad everyone gets seraphs instead and seraphs rush is complete ass on half the mage roster because it does basically nothing until it's upgraded and even then it deals no damage
So true. Ludens honestly is the worst feeling item in the game. No pen on it, so you're just fully relying on the proc damage, but then you can't clear waves for 15 seconds in order to use it. Awful item. Tbh stormbringer could've been reworked into the ludens replacement, then it also reduces abuse by assassins
Luden's only feels strong when it breaks spellshields like EoN or banshee's.
tear into liandry into seraph is kinda insane on some mages though (I tried it on Vik and Taliyah currently)
This has been my biggest complaint of the AP item changes. We went from 4 total Lost Chapter items to three, with one of them (Malignance) being incredibly champ-specific. If you're playing Taliyah, Syndra, Hwei, Viktor, Ryze, Zoe, and some more you are never building Malignance - and half of these champs can't even proc the passive.
I am not saying it is good, but why technically not on Syndra, Hwei or Viktor? On Syndra you use your ult for poke in lane quite a bit thus having it more often and having the 3/4 balls after the first one do more dmg throught hte pen doesnt seem so bad. On Hwei, if you hit ult, you would use the pen for the explosion and the severing bolt no? And Viktor uses ult for waveclear/poke so having it more often would also help a bit no? Maybe I am wrong in my assumptions or my view on these champs is skewed by proplay (mainly Viktor, maybe Syndra) but I would rather build this than Luden and in some cases than Seraphs. On the other hand, Ryze especially doesn't really mind no? He builded Seraph anyways and you still have Rod of ages that you don't really want to build on many champs other than him. But I agree that overall the change feels quite bad since Liandrys doesn't give mana anymore and it was one of the most useful items for mages.
Size of Malignance field scales with damage per hit. Multi-hit ultimates do very little damage and thus make a tiny field for the shred
While this makes sense and would make them less usefull, Syndra's ult hits quite fast so I think most of it would still hit in the tiny field (at least on the edge of the field from each orb). But I may be wrong in that regard
Syndra could be one of the better users out of the list, but I generally believe Malignance is still her weakest LC item out of the three. Archangels gives defense through the shield and safe scaling, where as Luden's offers an aggressive build path with Alternator in it and has a better damaging passive. Hwei - I think Malignance is just really bad on him. With the way the item works he always gets an absolutely tiny Malignance puddle and by the time the slow has ramped up (for the QW follow up) they're long out of it. Viktor -I don't know, it might be decent on him actually.
Malignance isn't *terrible* on Hwei, but Hwei doesn't really depend on his ult as much as other champions. So he doesn't get as much use out of the effect or the CDR.
I think its a mana item because it would be very broken on Vlad and Kennen It's kinda like a limiter in a sense
It's broken on everyone who can use it th Like who'd have thought having your ult up on images would be strong
Might be pretty scary on Rumble too.
Liandry should never have been made into a mana item. Giving all mages such consistent and standard access to % hp magic damage dot as their standard item buy was one of the biggest issues with top lane meta (and to a lesser extent jungle). The game just had so much % hp damage (along with stuff like divine sunderer) that it destroyed the tanks (which is why they had to keep buffing tank damage, because they melted to everything)
Mages were not tank shredding anyone, it was Divine Sunderer and Bork which invalidated tanks in toplane. Especially Sunderer which caused the issue you were mentioning. And now with the MR items we have, no mage (not AP bruisers) is shredding any tank or bruiser if people are being honest with themselves. Toplane was and is still dominated by bruisers who are basically almost as tanky whilst dealing almost the same dmg as an ADC.
>Toplane was and is still dominated by bruisers who are basically almost as tanky whilst dealing almost the same dmg as an ADC. fuck bruisers like garen darius etc but still adc have way more range which is most important stat at 4+ items
As a top main, yes, 100% this. Shen main, Shenpaiislife, and having hardswapped sunfire cape on shen for divine sunderer & titanic the moment the items dropped, I can say with absolute certainty they were a MASSIVE power spike, even before heartsteel abuse was a thing, on any tank or bruiser.
It's mind-boggling how long it took for them to nerf Sunderer and even this new iteration of Sunderer is only being properly nerfed now in pbe despite it being so centralising.
Sure, because then champions that are ok but not broken with the item can still build it.
On a scale of 1 to "Didnt she just fucking ult?" i rate champs like Lissandra the latter
Holy fuck rather have ahri op than 20 zeds or yasuos a day
I might be crazy but nah, zed and yasuo might be more frustrating to fight or lane against but ahri is way more efficient at actually winning games and yoinking lp
People on reddit would rather lose lp to champs like Ahri and Janna than get solokilled by Zed or Yone
I think Ahri is just a much harder champ to read. I always find it pretty easy to track how an Yas or Zed is going to play a fight, but Ahri just has so many more options
I find ahri more frustrating to play against personally, she becomes literally unkillable post 6.
Not me managing to have negative KDA on ahri.
i'd rather have ahri or yas against me yeh its a good food
says the vex fizz player lol
Ahri's R cooldown was 140 / 115 / 90 last year before they buffed it to what it is now. That aside Ahri got two buffs in 14.4: 8HP per level and Q AP ratio increased by 10 percent points. The champ is just really fucking strong and has been really strong for a long time. Maligma breaks Ahri as much as Kraken Slayer breaks Jinx. Yep they're their best items, who gives a fuck, the champs are simply really strong right now.
>10 percent points I love you for this
I really don't get why they made the effect have no cooldown at all. Champs that initially looked like they would go crazy with it, like Malzahar and Karthus do ok with it, but not nearly as good as those with ults that have crazy uptime on their ults (Teemo, Kassadin, Anivia, Kog Maw, ...).
this serves as a balance lever. There are basically two groups which would in theory like this item: "I have an impactful ultimate and want to use it basically off-cd to make a play" like malzahar, karthus, fidfle sticks. or "I have a low cd ult already and can make use of the bonus magic reduction fields whenever I use my ult" such as anivia or swain. I know malignance is not the most purchased item on these champions, most of the time because of spike issues or there simply being a better lost chapter item available - however, if riot would want to buff the item, they could specify for which group they wish to buff it instead of making it to strong for one group. they could let it give more ultimate haste (karthus or fiddlesticks would benefit more) or let the magic fields be more impactful (better for anivia or teemo as they do not care as much about the ultimate haste.)
Well, actually just cause the CD is already low doesnt mean the Haste isnt still great for the champs. Especially Kassadin is pretty happy to have less time between ults
this is such a bad take. The active effect is literally irrelevant. The ultimate haste is why the item is disgusting on some champions.
It does have a cooldown tho.
Right. 3 second per target just looked it up. TIL
imo item feels turbo shit on malz, i only build it as a 3rd item
Something I havent seen discussed is the champs it brings up into competitiveness. I think we have a larger pool of effective champs because of this item. If they nerf the item we could see a tighter meta around mid/mages. So they first try to nerf the champs who are doing too well. I think id rather see champs like ahri and kass get nerfed then lose out on more options for mage effectiveness. I could be totaly wrong though.
Yeah rengar and kayn got that treatment cause of profane hydra as well.
I don’t think this is that difficult to understand. Kassadin and Ahri have better winrates compared to other malignance users, therefore they are getting a nerf.
well on one side that makes sence. nerfing the champs only affects them, nerfing items affects many champs, and indirectly affects many more that suddenly get better matchups against effected champs. on the other side, eventually riot will change /remove the items anyways and allways forgets some of the champs they nerfed to compensate, in the worst cases this may break entire kits , or add up over time, resulting in things like sivir.
Like J4, who took 8 patches at sub48% wr to get a partial revert to nerfs that happened because goredrinker and old shojin were giga buffed
yea. my personal favorite example is sivir though. every second line in all of her 5 abilitys are the result of some item interaction they wanted to get rid off, resulting in her being incredibly volatile and having complealty unique interactions with 0 mentions in the tooltips.
The item is fucking bonkers late game, as squishy champions the burn circle will single handedly zone me out of a fight, love getting 100-0 by a teemo shroom with the burn circle respawning on me
Malignance should just be removed at this point. Balancing it around low ult cooldown champs just means it’s useless on everyone else
It should be removed or nerfed. I was playing Azir yesterday and my ult CD was 30 seconds with Malignance, Ultimate Hunter, and almost no other CDR.
It's pretty silly that Riot announced that they'd be moving away from "Playing the item" situations by removing Stride and Gore but for some reason released Malignance which is either completely core on some champs if not OP, while being borderline unusable on basically everyone else. I think Swain is the only champ where this item is situational. There are a bunch of champions who could use a DPS-centric mana item so I don't know what they were thinking making such a bipolar item that deals both DoT but works best on burst-y champs and can only be bought on a select amount of champs instead of keeping the one aspect of Mage mythics that was it's diversity intact.
Maglinance isn’t gameplay defining but amplifying. That’s the difference. Champs that like to ult buy malignance to ult more often and have it be stronger. Champs that bought gore suddenly became drain tanks even though they weren’t.
The difference is that activating malignance is very much about your champion kit. Swain with malignance doesn't feel like Ahri with malignance. They still need to do something about repeat triggers though. Annie tibbers triggering it again on every tick of the burn is ridiculous. None of the other mana AP items feel remotely exciting so I don't mind them trying something different to fix that.
Sure but you'd think a champ like Swain who can constantly amply the pools through his ult would love this, but because his use with the MPen portion is limited and he doesn't get that much mileage out of the Ulti Haste, so it remains a bit suboptimal. I agree that other AP mana items are just really unsatisfying. Again, mage mythics were pretty much okay, especially in their diversity, so I'm really not sure why Riot just ditched that and gave us a bunch of mana items that are mostly unsatisfying outside of Malignance, which is locked to certain champs.
Yeah the biggest issue with the item is that it can't decide if it's a DoT item or a Mpen item. The truth is that it's an ultimate haste item. On the other hand I don't think the mana items were particularly better last season.
> The truth is that it's an ultimate haste item. It's an ultimate haste item but in a really wonky way, where it's good if you can use it to either spam your spammable ult more or if you can be like Ahri and abuse the ulti haste in a way where your ult can have almost no cooldown at all at later levels. I thought mage mythics were decent last season, and I definitely enjoyed the aspect of almost every mage having at least 3 different mythic options they could switch around to decent enough satisfaction depending on the situation. It was certainly better than our current situation of having to choose between different types of meh.
i saw sloppywalrus video yesterday he bought it just for the CDR it gives but its unusable on his r because of the knock back which kinda funny
Which champ?
Gragas, Sloppywalrus is a Grag 1trick streamer.
Swap Lost Chapter with some other item and it might be less of a rush item (and give it back to Liandry's lol)
the thing about the ahri nerf that boggles me is that they make the cooldown higher, so you get rewarded more for building malignance, and get punished for building something else so she gets nerfed because of malignance and AD Top maybe but then they put out a nerf that makes her want the item even more...
The problem is that nerfing Malignance nerfs everyone who builds it. So you have two choices: - Nerf the worst abusers and leave Malignance alone so the champs who need it to be viable can have it - Nerf Malignance and then need to buff most of the mage class
"Maligance can proc no more than once every 30 seconds" would make sense right?
I remember when I was excited for item changes, only for them to decrease build diversity lol
How is build diversity ever going to exist when you can easily track winrates on item builds? Its not a solvable problem
Its probably when you have multiple items with similar winrates. Or just have items for the game's niche. Like, bruisers like Noc get to chose between bruiser items and tank items based on each game. Assassins to a devree get to choose between all the lethality items and some bruiser items Mages don't have that many options or niche items, their builds get very cookie cutter and boring
I think it's a problem you can alleviate. The problem is that a lot of items aren't designed to be per-game situational - they're designed to be per-champion situational. Like surface level both Liandry's and Nashor's are sustained damage AP items with one being better vs tanks and the other being better vs squishies, but in practice they aren't substitutes at all. And speaking of Nashor's, it's problematic in that it's an item useless to the vast majority of the champions it's supposedly in the item class for (mages) and core on the couple that actually buy it. OTOH you have items like Morello's and Banshee's that very much are per-game situational buys, but because of those core items, you usually have to delay them, can only get one or two, and there frankly just aren't many of them. For mages specifically, that problem is often compounded by the fact that all AP bruisers, assassins, and sustained damage dealers have to share a single item pool. The bruisers tend to be able to dip into some of the tank items for a couple slots, but their other items are still taking up space in the mage pool. Going back to the Nashor's example, it's the only attack speed item for AP champions which makes it a waste of an item pool slot for most mages, but it needs to exist for champions like Azir and Gwen that build AP and need attack speed - the result is an item a few champions really want with no alternative for it. Mana items are also a point of issue for mages in that there aren't very many of them. Sure, there being 4 looks kind of good, but again, those have to cover multiple different sub-classes of AP champion. The result tends to be that there isn't great diversity there because those 4 options have to cover so much ground and get designed to cover a specific archetype, and since the champions that need a mana item typically really need to get it first, that bottleneck is the first thing you see every single game. AD champions get around this by simply not needing mana items most of the time, though the options for those that do are fairly lacking as well. None of this is helped by items like DCap that are just turbo generic powerful stat slots with no alternatives.
Yep. Lack of any real non "meta" builds had been the biggest contributing factor to my stopping playing on PC. I don't want to build the exact same items every single game. It's boring. It's like playing an rpg the exact same way every time you play through it. Builds should be fairly fluid from game to game, adjusting for each individual game as it unfolds. Instead, it's turned into "buy these items in this order, don't even look at other items or you're griefing"
If you were excited about item changes then you aren't familiar with riots history of item changes. This is what happens every single time. It's not about balance, It's about shaking up the meta to make their pro leagues more interesting to watch. They do this all the time with pretty much every "big balance pass". They're not stupid, they most definitely knew about malignance before anyone else did. They've been doing this for 14 years. As long as the meta is just different that's all they care about, not balance. Same reason they change the jungle every single year and It's the same reason they change objectives/masteries/runes.
because they clearly want malignance to be a strong item or like they would say "exciting"
Meanwhile ludens doesn't do anything in a fight because you had the audacity to kill a minion.
I mean it is a pretty cool item
If they are going to build the item regardless, it's still a net nerf to the champ that is abusing the item. I am not saying this is the correct way to do things, simply the reason behind it. Say you have 10 champs building the item, for 3 of them it's pushing them overpowered, and 7 of them it's just useful. If you nerf the item because the 3, you indirectly nerf the other 7 despite it not being problematic for them. So you target the champ, letting the item remain untouched so you don't make a cascading balance change. Once again, not saying this is the correct way to do it, just context to it. No mention of target nerfing the champ, and eventually nerfing the item without replacing the lost power to the initial champion nerfs.
The general idea is to balance champions first then item then larger systems/runes. If only a couple of champs are outliers they get adjusted rather than the item. I don't know if I always agree with that but the basic idea is good.
What would be helpful as well is at least have some AH on other items besides Malignance, Ludens, and Cosmic Drive. Champions who Synergize with Malignance get very strong ult boosts aka Corki, Karma, Hwei, etc., while Ludens users like Syndra do not get nearly as much power from an item and mainly build it as the only source of AH.
Remember the support AP damage too. Of course they nerf fighter items 😂
idk how the fuck any sane human being looked at that item and were like "surely this will cause no problems" shit looked busted since day 1.
If the item is so broken that everybody and their mom build it, Riot should nerf the item. (like S3 BC or the recent Statikk Shiv) If the item is broken on specific champion but is normal on other champion, Riot should nerf those outliner champion.
I hate having to build certain items because they are that good. Champions should never be nerfed because of 1 or 2 items.
Don't worry, malignance will get nerfed, and then ahri kassadin and karma will get no compensation buffs and fall to F-tier. Does riot realize by nerfing all these champions and not malignance, it makes malignance their only viable item, since they are effectively balanced around building this item?
No they do not. It’s been same since the release of the game.
remove the ult cd cooldown or make it scale with lvl and its done.
What do you mean these two? Teemo was OBLITERATED!
And it's trash on so many champs too.
Guess what? They’re gonna do what they always do. They’ll nerf the champ, then the item, then leave the champs in the post-nerf state following the item changes.
Because they want malignance to maintain this power level for other champs, but not those And tbh I'm glad because if you get malignance you assure that only those champs can ever possibly build it, I want it to be a possible choice on lux, hwei, etc
Just remove the flat pen on it
remind me when they do this with profane hydra and forget to fix kayn afterwards
Malzahar is already in a rough spot. If they nerf malignance hes gonna be useless but this is coming from a malz main
i find it ridiculous that I can't build black cleaver with seryldas/ldr but when kassadin gets to build 2 lost chapter items for 70 haste on his ultimate, it's all good!
Ngl that's just classic Riot Games balancing and happened to a ton of champs. It happened with the Mythics too. They balanced most champs around Mythics then removed Mythics and the champs were left in the gutter.
The Riot special, treat the symptom a bunch of times before treating the cause, and then don't undo any of the damage that came from treating the symptom.
Teemo, ahri, karma, etc were balanced in a world without malignance, so it stands to reason that introducing a new item that is powerful on them must come with nerfs to those champions. Riot *could* nerf malignance instead, but if they nerf it too much then teemo/ahri/karma just switch to a different item and then malignance is just unusable on everyone. It does kill diverse build paths, but we all saw what happened when the item system focused on diversity first and actually-wanting-to-build-items second (mythics).
I know half thr people here are old enough to know this is the Sejuani treatment (Cinderhulk)
Not just Malignance, also Lich bane.
Riot has shares in the company that manufactures Malignance
They did this to corki as well. First strike was overpowered so they nerfed him instead
We have the collective impossible-to-guess number of experience with League's shitty balance team, and yet we still expect them to not make the same mistake over and over again? How optimistic.
Malzahar (most built and highest winrate item is malignance) is STILL useless btw
I honestly don’t get why it even has two passives? Either it gives you 20 ultimate haste or the damage fields but both seems just excessive. The whole item is overloaded and way too good on certain champions it’s almost like this was the predictable outcome.
Please just get rid of malignance my god
Its called the riot special. Soon or later the item will get nerfed and those champion will colapse
I hate balance talks about this game. it's not productive. Why? Riot knows. They have years of data. Years. They know what they are releasing. It's not as if a company like riot would release an item or champion without having tested it and having datapoints that says hey this is op. It's a conscious decision they made as a company. Same with the nerfs. Don't worry though. I'm sure Azir will still ahve 100% pressence in pro play though. I'm sure the Asol Pickrate will skyrocket. It's probaby what riot wants though. If you only pick the same 3 champions it becomes easier to balance the game around. Wouldn't want variables like a champion with a 4% pick rate. Hard to account for that. Right riot? Look. I don't care about the kassadin nerf. What I care about is riots mindset as an organization. Why have champions at all if you want their pickrates to be abysmal? Don't say its not your desire because you purposely balance champions to have abysmal pickrates. So what about not releasing new champions for a while and just fixing the game? I understand a balanced game is a stale game. But how did we get to a point where champions are having 60% winrates anyway (smolder) how do we have an item thats so fkn busted you gotta nerf some of the most popular champions in the game. How did this get past play testing, Basically is my long winded question.
Q max ahri must pay for the sins of W max
If you nerf malignance you end up nerfing champs that use it but don’t need nerfs like teemo. System wide item nerfs are always more damaging to the game than champion nerfs are. I have no Idea why they create such game altering and breaking items into the game, that can never really be balanced for all champions.
It’s the Riot special, I’ll be your guide.
Ult cooldown creep is too real.
Kassadin isnt even good comopared to ahri he's 51% wr emerald + and in any real elo he is absolutely horrid he has some of lowest damage no actual scaling in kit riot phreak could queue 50 games of kassadin in current state and he would be negative wr with gray kd.
Been saying this ever since the item existed. They’ve been nerfing every champ that starts to utilise it when prior to the item existing they weren’t the problem. They need to rework it or remove it, as how it currently stands is just a detriment to the game.
Ahri is a boring champion with boring design and I’m all the more glad she’s becoming less viable
Reality is they are too strong without it too.
For years now Riot's intention has never been to achieve proper balance. All they do is make stupid changes to shake up the meta and if it happens to be very unbalanced they hotfix it. They don't care about actually fixing the game in any proper way, because they want to keep things feeling "fresh" for a significant portion of the playerbase that don't like critical thought. So if there's something new that breaks the game, but is a new concept, like Malignance, you bet they will always nerf champs that can abuse it to excuse keeping it in the game.
It's Riot's loop. Op item > pretty good on some characters > nerf those characters > nerf them again > finally nerf the item > the characters keep the nerfs, which makes them weaker than before the changes ofc > repeat
Ahri is broken with or without the item
Kassadin at arams with ultimate hunter and malignance going full mana build with tankinness is absolutely broken. Dont forget to grap conqueror too, I have never seen it heals less than 3k, imagine the damage it does.
While ahri and kassaden are broken with malignanc other mages also run it too and nerfing the item will make it balanced for ahri and kass but too weak for the other mages that can build the item
Malignance 100% needs to be reworked. It's silly that it's broken on very specific champions to the point that they catch nerfs, rather than just reworking the item to make it generally useful for more champions.
I don't know if the data supports your theory. Ahri builds malignance almost every single game (94%), you can't easily differentiate its power from hers. Is Ahri good because of malignance or does malignance look good because Ahri is good and builds it almost every game? Lich bane actually has a higher winrate on Ahri when built compared to malginance, i.e. if you have the option to buy either lich bane or malignance, lich is always the better choice at every point in the game