-
Lead Content Designer
Hey guys,
As expected, there's many balance threads about Dominion after this morning's beta. Discussing your experiences and theory-crafting is always fun to do, and I encourage!
However, I want to set expectations extremely clearly here;
You guys have a very small window of anecdotal evidence to look at. It's not really possible to accurately judge a game's balance on 120 minutes of brand new experiences. As such, while I love the discussion and will probably jump in a bit myself, understand that we're going to let you guys discover things and let the game mature a bit. Other than something egregious that gets discovered, we likely won't be making any changes for Dominion immediately on the balance front. It's just too small of a window to tell.
So, when you see something that seems strong, attempt to counter it. Think about options. Try a different tactic. This is the way you can get a better view of the real issues and what options are. Things like hearing casters are weak makes me suspect, when we've had the opposite of that experience#11 year, 8 months ago -
Lead Content DesignerWill try to communicate goals clearly, though the discovery is fun!True, which is why we all hope that the beta will open up for more than 120 minutes a day.
Sounds great. Keep in mind, though, that explaining your reason and rationale for why things are may help shape our opinions on things. Understanding your design goals will help us understand the game.
Again, communicate. Letting us know that you actually won a game or two with Veigar is a great way to communicate your hard work during the balance phase and salve for those who are trying to play and getting shut down. It's easy for a player to go from happy to upset when something they are used to is not working properly with no information on whether or not what they are feeling is a valid, legitimate concern, or just frustration getting used to a new game mode.
Over-communication here is bestWe are just as passionate about the game as you guys are and sometimes it can feel like our questions and fears and falling on deaf ears. Not always - you guys are great. Right now, though, is a very fragile time when all these months of expectations are finally coming to fruition and for some folks it's getting dashed.
Keep up the great work, Riot. Remember, we love you guys and what you do for us#21 year, 8 months ago -
Lead Content Designer
Oh, you, making things up when you disagree with balance decisions <3 #31 year, 8 months ago -
Lead Content Designer
Bump #443 years, 5 months ago -
Lead Content Designer
This one I agree with #543 years, 5 months ago -
Lead Content Designer
Bump. More threads means this is still relevant #643 years, 5 months ago -
Lead Content Designer
Read the first post :P #743 years, 5 months ago -
Lead Content Designer
Bump! #843 years, 5 months ago -
Lead Content DesignerJust a way to see your contribution in a meaningful way, since K/D/A even gives less of a window into it on Dominion than it does on SR. It's one of those extra-little nice things that helps you see how you did, as well as a non-offensive way for us to say "hey, when you do this, it helps you and your team! Do it more!"I agree with Mor...since Riot is trying to help clam alot of the QQing about balance, can someone address the overall purpose of the personal score? I tried to make a thread about it, but since it didn't have a unbalance champion complaint, it didn't receive any Riot attention.#943 years, 5 months ago
-
Lead Content DesignerWell, there will be Ranked after players get used to it and figure out things like how to deal with Trynd...remember SR when Trynd was OP on release, we didn't change him, and now he's not? Dominion is like that - it's wild west out there, and this phase of discovery is fun!Finally, thank-you! So no intention to help place players better? Or how about a way to track it after the match? like you guys track takedowns and kills...it could just be highest personal score, or something?? I just can;t believe all that time would be wasted just for 12-15min match with no greater purpose!
Personal score though, is just for the session.#1043 years, 5 months ago -
Lead Content Designer
Bump! If you think mages are bad or fighters are the only viable characters, I encourage you to play more #111 year, 7 months ago -
Lead Content DesignerBrackhar can comment best on this, though the short answer is it snowballed really heavily with 1.#121 year, 7 months ago
-
Lead Content DesignerWell, we have played a LOT more Dominion than the community still, and I don't think the balance analysis has been close to correct yet. Though, you guys are slowly getting closerI think it's been long enough now that we can judge the imbalance of the mode.
Are there plans to setup specific balance sets for the different maps? If not I don't see dominion being successful competitively. Items alone cannot balance this.#131 year, 7 months ago -
Lead Content DesignerThere ARE two OP champs. It's none of those.I don't care who you are xin, ram, and GP are OP as nothing else on Dominion. I keep seeing those 3 pop up on teams and there is nothing that can stop them. Its insane how broken Dominion is with these champs.
Just my 2 cents.
GP is a little OP on SR anyhow, and that does translate to Dominion.#141 year, 7 months ago -
Lead Content Designer
Agreed generally, champs who are strong on SR are also strong on Dominion, typically. #151 year, 7 months ago -
Lead Content Designer
Than anyone individually, yes. #161 year, 7 months ago -
Lead Content DesignerBased on what? Popular opinion after a short amount of play? That is the fallacy in your statement - stating things as facts when you have no analysis, data, or enough experience to back it.You need to stop dancing around this. Dominion has a lot more than 2 op champions and you know it, or atleast its your job to know it.
The fact that jungling wasn't seen as required (and in many cases detrimental) on SR's launch is indicative of the type of thing I'm talking about - it's not an insight into the real situation, it's lack of the game's maturity at that point. This is the type of thing I'm talking about - there's a few clear cases we can adjust, but the game is wild west and nothing has matured and solidified. First impression balance is always like this, because it's indicative of a small number of experiences with a lot of unknowns.
Is it possible there's more than 2 overpowered picks? Absolutely! Can we actually determine that yet? No - not entirely. We have plans for some "oh, definitely this and that" changes planned, but it's not "nerf all tanky DPS" or "remove Rammus" or anything else so over-the-top and full of hyperbole. Those things are reactionary and not analysis. For long-term health, we want a clearer picture.#171 year, 7 months ago -
Lead Content DesignerThe prevalence of the fighter/assassin OP thing is much more real in solo queue. If you do premade 5's, this falls away fast - though you see a similar division in SR (Tryndamere OP, for example).But in total the community has played thousands of times as many games and can conglomerate opinions. Obviously there will be ridiculous bandwaggoning into certain directions but there is value there if you can find it. You've been extremely dismissive of basically every opinion and I think that's short-sighted. You're relying on an extremely limited sample, not in terms of games played per player but number of different players playing. Most players have huge strengths and weaknesses and only play certain champions, causing your small pool to sink into weird metas that wouldn't necessarily develop in the wild.
You've stated that conclusions can't be reached until the metas have been fleshed out more and more games have been played, but I would argue that it was IMPOSSIBLE for your internal testing to ever do that, no matter how many games you played. There simply aren't enough people in your internal testing pool to mature and evolve the Dominion game as far as it could go.
If everyone played a few games and all noticed a certain champion was out of hand, that's pretty strong evidence, even if they didn't play five hundred games over the week of beta.
For example, you've said that mages were strong in internal testing and the community likes fighters/assassins. It could be that in internal testing your players were much stronger mage players than specific fighter/assassin players, maybe they played too aggressive or too passive when they were playing fighters and it didn't show the true strength. With the disorganization and the need to 1v1 often, divers like Akali and Poppy and Jax are extremely hard for mages to deal with. E.g., as Brand your cooldowns are too long to get two full rounds off before Akali has already killed you, at nearly any point of the game. Making it almost impossible to defend a point against her solo. So while I like Brand against most champions I do not like him against Akali. So calling him a "beast" is only true if they have no Akali. If they do, he is respawning too often to be a beast.
I think your assessment is correct - Jax, Poppy and Akali are the biggest offenders. Jax's double-dip becomes a guarentee on this map, Poppy has the lack of farm to keep her in check in SR, and Akali is able to rip people up piecemeal. Of these, I find Akali to be the least problematic.
This assessment is partially based on internal tests, but a lot of it on running some raw analysis of the capabilities, then testing those theories in both live-fire and controlled environments. Takeaways are, though, there are a couple visible outliers, but "only play fighters/assassins" is flat out incorrect and there's no real evidence to support it. That kind of overstated feedback is all I'm objecting to, while real discussions I think have a lot of value.#181 year, 7 months ago -
Lead Content DesignerJanna beasted the Hell out of us. She single-handed defended against Talon/GP. I don't know what more you want@Morello :
I just played you in dominion 5v5(I was akali, you were leona iirc)
As you can tell our Janan became pretty much useless fairly quickly into the match. What can you say about the role support champs will have in dominion, if any? It seems almost like a waste of burst dps/cc slot after just 4 or 5 minutes#191 year, 7 months ago
