The balance in League of Legends does not only depend on that of the statistics of the champions. While this is one of Riot Games’ main goals when it comes to polishing the game, the developer also takes into account other aspects that are more difficult to measure. No one wants champions to be more frustrating than necessary, or their mechanics to be too difficult to master, but sometimes developers go too far by introducing overly abusive capabilities.
An inexplicable mechanic for players
The most recent issue with these other aspects of champion balancing involves Zeri. The champion has stabilized at a very acceptable 49% win rate over the past few days, but players are very unhappy due to a small addition to her spell kit that took place in patch 12.11. His W – Electrocution Laser has a new effect that causes if the ability hits a wall, champions and monsters are critically hit. When played with an AD build, she is already fearsome, but when played AP, the champion has uncommon damage power.
The problem with this build is that it’s not optimal when it comes to winning the game, which creates two problems. The first is that players using the champion have no incentive to take advantage of this ability except in very specific situations. The second, even more serious, is the fact that in exchange for this almost zero gain for League of Legends, it creates a feeling of injustice for the opponents. In this sense, the majority of the community thinks that it is not useful to maintain this type of mechanic. An approach that Riot proved right only a few patches ago.
Zeri’s mechanics are very similar to the Kai’Sa AP version. Although having a little more area damage, the character has a very long range which allows him to hit opponents even off-screen, to inflict a lot of damage on relatively short cooldowns and not to have plenty of other perks in its kit. What we might consider a mistake is the fact that Riot Games changed the Nether Daughter’s AP power only a few patches ago, so it seems unreasonable that they didn’t take it into account this time around.
It is very likely that if the AP build of Zeri leaks out, the company will take action. The champion has been one of the hardest to balance in League of Legends history and has received dozens of fixes since release, and even now Zeri doesn’t seem to have found his footing in the rift yet. summoner. So we can expect more adjustments to come in the next patches.