14 DAY TRIAL // Riot's latest League of Legends patch has deprived three of the in-game champions of some of their crowd-control prowess, namely their ability to silence was put in check in view of some internal shifts in design mentality.
League of Legends engagements tend to be on the twitchy side, and as any multiplayer online battle arena game, it has a host of abilities designed to control aggression from the opposing team, ranging from complete loss of control over a character to partial effects such as roots, slows and silences.
The latest patch nerfed three such abilities, with LeBlanc and Cho'Gath having their silence durations cut back, and with Kassadin losing its ability altogether. As silence spells prevent the targeted player from casting any abilities and activating items for a short duration of time and thus offer a great tactical advantage, many players were left wondering why Riot would opt to have such strategic decisions play a lesser role during engagements.
Lead Designer Ryan Scott explained that the decision was meant to introduce more balance to the game, as before some of the higher damaging heroes such as Kassadin, an adept assassin, could easily solo unsuspecting players.
"Silences are a problem when the character can kill you solo - it removes response. This is why we haven't lowered say, Fiddles' or Soraka's. Additionally, some old ones are too long - like Rammus/Fids' CC was," Scott explained via Twitter.
Fans were quick to point out that an elegant solution to the balance issue would be assigning such powerful crowd-control abilities to champions that were dedicated support or disruption champions, rather than to ones that specialize on dishing out massive amounts of damage.
Scott agreed to the suggestion, informing that the pattern was prevalent mostly in older champions, when the team had a looser grasp on such things and the game's balance was not as finely tuned. He also added that this would be a factor in designing future champions, with the development team intending to slowly phase out crowd-control abilities from powerful avatars.
Additionally, he pointed out that fans of the nerfed champions shouldn't expect compensatory buffs to follow in the future, as the champs are really strong even without their prolonged silences.
You can read more about Riot's short term plans on ReignOfGaming, most notably the discussion regarding potential changes to Sona, part of the development team's effort to make support players enjoy more meaningful gameplay.