I remember reading once that the balance team and the hot fix team are two different parts of riot, and operate on different timescales. If this is true, are Riot and Diana still part of the "hot fix" team, and will you guys be keeping an eye on them and deciding whether or not additional tweaking needs to be done, or are they moved to the balance team who will get around to addressing them after working through the mountainous-like load of work I'm sure they already have?

Don't want to hi-jack thread here, but can you please address this issue that many, many players have been experiencing for weeks now? You said you'll look into it over 12 days ago and still no answer. I understand that you're busy but this is the most annoying thing i've ever come across in my year of playing LoL and I would at least like an answer which you've promised 12 days ago. Nothing is more frustrating when a consistently bumped thread is deliberately ignored.


http://na.leagueoflegends.com/board/....php?t=2867243

Oh geez Morello is still on his "I was right about Ezreal" high horse.

Seriously tho, viability boils down to "can he do the job?"

Naut is unviable because he cant reliable jungle until he has 2 points in his W. The guy cant even solo a rune camp reliably without help before he gets it. It has nothing to do with other OP champions. Nauts kit is still awesome, and if you babysit his first clear i think he is very viable.

But there is plenty of champions that can clear without help that arent top tier picks, why is it bad to add other "designed and listed as junglers" champions into the group.

The attack speed slow on Sej was not suggested for champions, but rather to give her the much needed sustain on her jungling.

When people whine about their favorite junglers, I like to think they are thinking about the PvE aspect, not PvP. Never heard anyone say "Sejuani and Nautilus can't gank"

Morello can we talk about Irelia? I know you hate her but she needs your help because you guys nerfed all the core items for Irelia and yes, all items in general got nerf but at the same time you added new items. And the problem is that Irelia didn't get anything new and she pretty much builds the same (i belive Zhepyr is not that good on her)

I don't know, you did (well, the balance team did) murdered Rammus out of viability, and the new jungle is not helping him at all either.

Yeah - I'll have the guys take a look.

I'd like to point that there's two different things happening in this thread;

1) Players worry about the balance philosophy. That's the discussion of what we want to do and think about - what I talked about earlier in this thread. This is very, very important to me to get right and adjust as we get better and learn more (and make no mistake, there is no "done").

2) Players worry about balance accuracy. I actually worry about this a lot less; balance details are easy to fix if we're wrong (go go rapid patching game!) and will always, always, always be a primary subject of disagreement.

I also play a lot of games (and many incognito) and read their forums - every forum disagrees with specifics on balance changes or problems. I think the danger for us lies in if we have a bad balance philosophy, or see underlying issues (top lane stuff) as minutia within the champion balance. The Season 3 changes were us actually solving some o0f the problems that balance alone cannot.

Perfect balance isn't even a goal, nor is it important - but having a wide variety of usable picks (especially if they fit in the situational variety like my earlier Kog'Maw example) is a goal. Especially difficult is making them have interesting gameplay, be satisfying, and have strategic differences for why it might be good/bad to bring that champion to your game - and while difficult, this is far more important.

Even in this thread, we see people are worried about the details on two issues; Diana and Rengar. Maybe there's issues there (actually the live team are having a very heated balance discussion behind me as I post this!), and maybe it's "players are used to the old thing and it's weaker now." We're always open to being wrong, but frankly, more often-than-not we get it right or pretty close. This tells me that our philosophy is pretty good, and details will always be contentious - our job is to keep improving and get more accurate, as well as constantly evaluating our values on game design.

On rengar, the problem I feel is deeper than numbers -- right now, his kit just flat does too much and he's gonna take so many individual nerfs it'll suck to use any part of his kit on his own. I've already given up on Rengar because it just isn't fun anymore, and seeing an originally fun assassin/bruiser (mostly assassin) get hit with the Irelia Effect is disappointing. Please ask live design/balance to consider this instead of just making him another lame duck succumbed to the perils of being a swiss army knife

To apply this generally, I feel like Riot is more concerned with bandaiding balance changes to fix design errors - as you said, bruisers are a really big spot (Jayce+Irelia). I would argue that a good third-half of champions would be better served by simple mechanics changes than "remove power here, remove power there, do that till numbers come in line/people stop whining".

Yes, we're not always right. I think this is a clear base of where we need to buff.

For the people asking about Irelia...

http://na.leagueoflegends.com/board/...64961#32364961

Statikk promised an update there.

I don't think that bending them over and brutally violating them with your nerfbat every week until they're nothing more than a mess that nobody wants to touch ever again is a good approach to balancing things. Why don't you just take your time and tweak numbers by making small changes over a period of multiple patches until the champion feels balanced, instead, rather than overnerfing it like an amateur? Mind sharing your thoughts with us or does your marketing department not allow you commenting on this?

While you're at it: Care to explain why you spend time, love and ressources creating an unique and amazing item such as the "Bonetooth Necklace" for a specific champion only to nerf it to pieces a couple of weeks before you decide to overnerf the champion, too? I just don't get it.

I don't think any of the issues people had with Rengar resulted from him having the "Noobtooth Necklace" hence no need to make it S2 Tiamat tier. Isn't it sad when you created something cool and nobody wants to waste an item slot for it, because somebody took a dump on it a couple of months ago and nobody spends gold on ****, right? Then proceeded to wipe his arse with the champion, but that's a different story.

Oh hey, no problem. Not like he's not viable for more than one year or so. Glad you noticed. How about buffing Gangplank while you're at it? You overnerfed him shortly after Rammus. Mind bringing him back to viability some day, too?