Either disable blackfire until you fix it or hotfix it like asap.

It's doing retarded amounts of damage. Making Elise into a tank killer. 260 MR, she has roughly 50 magic pen, and I'm getting ripped to pieces by the spiders+autoattack.

Did they even test it?

Actually, they technically tested it before it was originally released on TT with a 5% max health DoT. That was deemed too powerful so they nerfed it to current health. Then they unnerfed it.

I'm not sure what their goal was or if they even had one. Maybe they just don't care about game balance right now since it's "preseason".

We're not privy to all this 'data' that reds are always talking about that leads to these designs; champions, items or otherwise, but with a champion pool of +100 and a reasonably large pool of existing items to draw balancing experience from, I really have to wonder at the thought processes of some of these designers, and marvel that they do this professionally for a living.

Months of design and 'data analysis' and on day one of a champ or item release most sensible players can immediately point out:

Diana's q hits too hard
Jayce's numbers are imbalanced
Katerina's numbers are imbalanced

and the list goes on......

Sadly you're right. I posted in a thread in GD the other day stating how DOM players find trends, champ imbalance and kit flaws, months ahead of SR. But Riot refuse to listen. Within 2 weeks of release DOM players realised how broken Jayce was and how stupid his kit is. Took the SR "pros" like 4 months to finally figure it out.

I've actually noticed this as well.
I've talked (internally) quite a bit about how incredibly difficult this game is to balance in comparison to competing MOBAs (having worked on them). It's because the variance between games is dependent on a lot more factors--AD/AP scaling, runes, and masteries being the biggest offenders. Dominion is interesting because it generally presents the maximized balance case since gold flow is so high. It's a lot different for SR, because there's a bigger focus on PvE play rather than PvP, and the small bursts of PvP can shift the direction of the entire game.

Good to see somebody up there notices.

Something has always bugged me and it's that why bother having runes and masteries? It makes your job of balancing far more difficult than it needs to be.

I played a few low level SR with some friends and I enjoyed it far more without runes or masteries. Actually made things alot more interesting, especially going bot as Naut w/ smite while my friend was Teemo.

I mean people will complain about lack of customisation, but that's the point in Champions being unique from each other in the first place, and theres no reason you couldn't buff base stats to be inline with common rune page setups.

You're right that AP scaling is part of a the issue but AP is just part of LoL's "flavour" of MOBA. Personally I don't have a problem with it, when you get items such as Blackfire that essentially give an AP a 5th source of pretty decent damage, it tends to through balance out of whack quite badly in some cases.

no old blacktorch was not too powerfull, it was ok. it had 20 less ap, no mpen, no CD, half damage from aoe than current blacktorch

Current blacktorch is completly out of control. I totally agree with the op, this item just killed dominion and tt for me. No point playing these mode anymore until riot fix it.

people rush it, although it's cleary a lategame item (counter hp stacking).

And it's just the begining,the 20magic pen with 50%pen is only "10flat magic pen". i can't imagine how absurdly op this item will be at season 3 when the 20 magic pen will apply after %pen.

this item clearly deserve the most op item from lol history award.

Funny thing about dominion is if you have an item you want and you don't build it by your second item or so, you're generally not going to get the completed item effect for more than a fight or two.

Which is fine for items where the final item isn't that much better than the components (warden's and glacial being good examples), but where the completed item has a super awesome effect you generally want it earlier so you get to actually use the full effect for a good chunk of the game.

I'm personally of the opinion that Blackfire Torch has no place in this game due to it making many strong champions even stronger, and most balanced champions still balanced. It is a mess of an item, as I'm sure you'll have found today by spectating featured matches where even Malphites, Yoricks, and Urgots are using BFT with success.

Also, what was the point of reducing mana regen on this map? This didn't impact the top set of champions at all, but it did nerf the balanced and underpowered sets. Kha'Zix, Jayce, Diana, Darius, Maokai, Teemo, Lulu, Wukong and Jax are all still manaless champions as far as any competent player is concerned, and manatank Kassadin couldn't care less about regen. On the flipside, Viktor-level/style mages are having even more issues which the new items don't really help. Reducing the map's chalice effect only increased the distance between the OPs and the non-OPs.

Nome, we have a community here that has theorycrafted solutions and mathed out tons of options all the way since the beginning of the year. Feel free to ask us for feedback on ideas, because we have a lot of constructive discussion to give, and some of the high EU players are also here on the NA forums to centralize communication.

I support Sauron for Feedback President.