Thought: Syndra and Malzahar

Yesterday I talked about winrates and how they do not necessarily indicate a champion is overpowered or underpowered. While that is correct, large deviations from the average typically indicate a problem.

Today Syndra's winrate has risen to 30%, up from 25%. This is 20% below the average. To an extent one expects technically challenging champions to start out below-average and work their way upwards. However, even Rengar had a 37% winrate at worst, and that included a bugged, unreliable snare. You could argue Syndra is more technical than Rengar, but to that large an extent? Not likely.

There isn't one problem which defines Syndra, but a plethora of small issues. Aiming her E to push her spheres into targets isn't easy, and is a critical skill for asserting lane control and sieging turrets. The substantial delay between the command to throw a sphere or minion to a location and its arrival is also an issue. Her mana costs across the board are hefty, with players claiming even Chalice is insufficient to solve her mana problems. To cap it off the range on Syndra's ultimate is dramatically shorter than all of her other abilities, a mismatch which cripples her. Taken all together, Syndra is a difficult champion to play for very little reward (aside from buff grabbing hijinks).

Yet, if LolKing or Elobuff's data went back two years one could find a champion who was even worse than Syndra. Malzahar, everyone's favorite prophet of doom, had the most underwhelming skillset of any champion ever launched.

The issues affecting Malzahar were many. His Voidlings moved significantly slower and attacked whatever they pleased, which was rarely anything useful. His mana costs were higher, making him even more reliant on his Malefic Visions to maintain his mana pool. His ultimate's range was pathetic, an amazingly bad 475. To add insult to injury his ultimate's duration, and by proxy damage, were shortened by Mercury's Treads and completely countered by Cleanse. Malzahar was utterly horrible.

Malzahar was so bad that in the patches that followed he received a total of fifteen buffs, with one small nerf reducing the effect of a previous buff. It was half a year after those buffs, and a substantial shift in the meta, that he saw any further changes. Since then he's received as many buffs as he has nerfs, making it clear just how underpowered he was initially.

Syndra reminds me of Malzahar because her issues are similar in nature, though not as severe. I expect to see changes to the responsiveness of her abilities, the range of her ultimate, and her mana costs in the near future, mirroring many of Malzahar's early buffs. She's also very fun despite her issues, which was the case for Malzahar as well.

Thought: Winrates and Balance

It's becoming extremely popular to judge the value of a champion by their winrates (as recorded by LolKing or Elobuff). Champions with winrates below 50% are judged to be underpowered, while those above must be overpowered. This idea seems logical enough, but it has a few flaws.

The primary problem is that the League of Legends community is both stubborn and fickle. The community is quick to label flavor of the month champions as overpowered, underplayed champions as underpowered, and throws new champions into either category based on initial impressions alone. It generally takes months for the community to changes its mind, and even then the process is slow and begrudging. Only in extreme cases, such as the abusive Nunu top build pioneered by SmashGizmo, is there a sudden flip in perceptions.

As a result, champions or meta-shifts that might counter those with high winrates often go unnoticed. When Nautilus was released he was considered a subpar jungler, unable to keep up with Shyvana, Mundo, and Udyr, the titans of farming. It took three months for him to slowly shift from being underpowered and ignored to a first-ban meta-breaking ganking machine. Nautilus almost single-handedly shifted the jungle meta toward tanky, gank-heavy initiators, where it has remained ever since.

Before Nautilus everyone had simply assumed that Shyvana, Mundo, and Udyr were overpowered farmers with no counters. While LolKing and Elobuff weren't around in those days, it's very likely we would have seen all three with above-average winrates. Today, long after Nautilus received nerfs and faded from the spotlight, those three champions still sport below-average winrates. Defeating them only required a simple shift in community awareness and the meta.

This sort of obliviousness is pervasive, and means we cannot take winrates at face value. There is a correlation between winrates and a champion's strength, but that isn't the only possible cause. It is necessary to account for the community's blindspot and carefully the role the meta, typical champion picks, and playstyles play in determining a champion's strength. Winrates, like all data, are at their most useful when appraised carefully.