Champion kit critique: Mach
David (@CaptanMarvelous on twitter) recently shared the following champion kit and asked me for a critique:
As a word of warning, this one’s a little bit harsher sounding. I didn’t find a lot that was redeeming, but I do hope to provide a little bit of insight into why I don’t think this kit works. Apologies to David if I come across too negatively.
Hey David! Thanks for sharing your champion concept!
I’ll be brief when it comes to art and narrative, as those aren’t my forté, but I’ve sat in enough ideation meetings to know what stuff we’d look for.
Bluntly, this isn’t a champion that would survive a single ideation session. There is no elevator pitch here, no exciting single sentence summary that would make me want to play him. The art looks like “Ezreal with robot hands”, and regardless of execution quality of the art (which I am not qualified to talk about), there isn’t a single stand-out element that grabs your attention.
Narratively, this is boy-Camille. He doesn’t have much in terms of a unique motivation (except “find out whose life was taken to create him”, which is nice and all, but is a little nuanced detail that you can’t exactly get excited about without knowing anything else about him). In which way does he add to the existing lore of Piltover or Zaun? What does he show us about the people of Runeterra we didn’t know before? How are his day to day interactions with others different from, say, Caitlyn or Vi? If he’s just on a spectrum between less lawful than Cait but less lawless than Vi, how is he adding anything meaningful to our story?
Let’s talk about your pillars!
“High-speed hextech hero”: in which way does this not describe Camille? (She is more about precision than speed, granted, but her E still means she zips around the rift very quickly)
“Tables turning”: I assume Mach is a melee champion? It seems that way. Well, here’s a secret: every melee damage dealer that isn’t an assassin is about “tables turning”. Darius Q heal, Trundle R, Fiora Riposte, Tryndamere R, Master Yi W, Yasuo ult: we call these spells “turn moves”, precisely because they’re about tables turning. You’re just describing what it is to be a melee champion in league.
“Forgive me”: I assume this is in reference to the beat in his story where he seeks to find out whose life was taken to create him? Pillars are best when they refer to all three legs of the champion stool: (gameplay) design, narrative, and art. If you have a pillar that only talks about one of them, ask yourself why that is. If the element isn’t strong enough to be represented in the other aspects of the character, does it need to be there at all?
Alright, on to the game play. I have to make a few assumptions here because not everything is spelled out. My assumptions are: this character is a melee champion with a pretty squishie sustained damage profile. I’m also not quite sure what “he gains passive” means in the description of your E.
High level you have an auto attack focused skirmisher with no real defensive tricks or bread and butter skills. It’s basically a Master Yi with no meditate or alpha strike. This is the ultimate bronze stomp champion: you’ll run at enemies, right-click them, and go make yourself a tea as the game resolves itself.
Let’s look at individual abilities.
Passive: there is a reason we removed dodge from the game. It’s an awfully frustrating mechanic. Unlike crit, dodge is disproportionately more frustrating for the victim than it is for the beneficiary. Crits are part and parcel of what fighting an ADC is like, and with modern crit itemization we quickly approach 40–50% crit, at which point it feels much less arbitrary. Plus crits feel AWESOME to the person dealing them. Dodges just feel sad for everyone. You don’t really notice them as the dodging person, and as the aggressor it feels like you got cheated out of something owed you. That’s bad enough with auto attacks, but single target spells? Holy shit, imagine a 20% chance to just straight up dodge Veigar ult? How is that acceptable? Worse yet, it’s not just a straight up always powerful ability, which we could balance, but it’s an ability with such widely different highs and lows that we’d have to end up balancing it for the highs (blocking a veigar ult), in which case anything BUT the highs will feel completely pointless. This may end up as a max 5% chance to dodge 50% of a single target spell, but not its CC, after balancing, for instance, just because that is still incredibly powerful vs Veigar R.
Q: If I understand this correctly, it’s simply a modifier that breaks the AS ceiling and, if you’re above the 2.5 AS ceiling, doubles your on-hits. It also spins you around a target if you’re latched on to one.
These are two such unrelated effects that I’m struggling to even make sense of this. What’s the thematic reason for it? What’s the use case where you’d want to turn this on?
AS break & on-hit: this is such a frustratingly mathematical skill. I see this a lot if player-made kits. When you spend a lot of time thinking about the mechanical details of league, you start seeing all these mathematical opportunity spaces that seem exciting to you, but I can tell you from experience that players generally don’t care, and worse still, mathematical skills like this become solved and optimized in no time. In this case it seems that based on tuning you’ll just force players to go full on-hit because double on-hit benefit is just too good to pass up, but I can’t say for sure without playing it.
Swing-around: I’m not sure what this accomplishes? It seems you’ll stay at the same distance from the enemy, just that you get placed on the far side of them. Sure sometimes that’ll cut off their escape, but I suspect most of the time they can still run away to the side (depending on cast range). Using it during the ult seems fun though.
An early prototype for Camille’s hook shot was a two-activation spell: the first would shoot a tether into a wall, and the second would select a direction (left or right, relative to the attachment point) in which she would swing along a circular path. This was fun as hell but also incredibly hard to learn and harder yet to balance. It turns out that once you give players sufficient range and speed for this to feel like an appreciable skill, you’ve basically made a hyper-speed move block. I remember play tests in which I’d go from top lane to mid lane in basically less than 10s on the power of two hook shots (it was on an ammo system then). Add to this the “hit an enemy to stun them” rule and it was nearly impossible to use.
That’s with the spell targeting walls, which famously do not move. Against MOVING opponents with smallish hit boxes? Forget it. (This is about the ult interaction)
W: Attach a cable to an enemy, grounding them. Pull yourself to an ally. There’s some life in this spell! We tried a billion versions of hookshots on Camille, and I think we had an ally targeted one at some point (at least on paper). The main reason against it is that defensive spells (which “pull yourself to ally” fundamentally is; either for you or, through your threat projection, for the ally) need reliability. Shooting a skillshot against an ally is not very reliable at all, which you know if you’ve ever tried to AS buff allies with Ezreal W in a fight. Everyone is dodging everything in a fight, and even if they don’t see your incoming skillshot, their random movement will make it unlikely you hit them.
Against enemies, it only grounds them? That seems… weak. I mean, Q swinging around them is cool, and stopping flashes and dashes is powerful to be sure, but you want some noticeable, appreciable pay-off on hitting a skill-shot vs enemies. Probably a sharp decaying slow.
E: My assumption here is that this ramps up and stacks rapidly. I’m not sure what “he gains passive” means.
So this is a ramping threat kiss/curse mechanic, with a partial curse refund, although I assume “heal missing health” refers to overall missing health, not just the health lost due to this ability. You’re giving Mach stickiness and melee sustained damage here, the least reliable of all damages in League. What’s going to happen here is he’s going to get condemned away, or slowed (even mild slows clobber crazy MS buffs due to the order of execution combined with where we run into diminishing returns; basically, hastes are applied first, run into aggressive clamping, and then the resultant heavily clamped value is multiplied by the slow, which almost always results in the slow winning out), or, hell, bursted and killed instantly, and that’s that. Again, you have a mechanically very powerful ability if the enemy doesn’t know how to play around it that would be of almost no use in coordinated play.
R: What happens if he misses? Oh, I guess he’s just going to be in the wrong place and the team fight is going to happen without him. The AS hook here is highly prescriptive: get to 10 E stacks before you use this, also make sure your Q is on. Lucian had a prescriptive combo like that once: W would add a flat amount of damage every time a missile Lucian fired would hit an enemy marked with W. This meant you NEVER used R unless you hit a W first. Very similar here, only there’s even more risk (as you’re launching yourself in).
Okay, pulling our head out of the tactical nitty-gritty, what do we have here?
We have a high risk melee dps without the burst of an assassin or the defensive tools of a skirmisher. We have a kit that will likely outstat enemies who don’t outplay him correctly, and will most likely be powerless against good kite comps.
More importantly, no one part of this kit screams “this is fun and new!” to me. Q is reworked KogMaw’s rulebreaker (which we reverted as the input complexity was really not worth the novelty, and a ranged character is likely to have an EASIER time orbwalking than a melee character), W is neato for allies but not that exciting when used on enemies (between Amumu, Thresh, Blitzcrank, Lee Sin, and Nautilus we have well and truly stripmined the “skillshot rewarded by a relative change in positioning between caster and target” design space), and while R could potentially be a super cool high moment if used correctly (that is, if you hit anything), it’s nothing new, fundamentally. It’s just a super long range Sejuani Q.
When we think about the gameplay of a new champion, we like to talk about the following things:
Unique inputs: What’s unique to learn about this champion? What button presses feel uniquely “this champ”? Draven’s axe catching, Azir’s soldier attacks, Taliyah’s worked ground are examples of unique inputs.
Unique outputs: How does this champion make the game different for everyone involved? Good examples here are Tahm Kench’s Devour, Kalista’s ally ult, RekSai’s Tremor Sense etc. Basically give enemies and allies something to think about they never had to think about that changes the way they play.
Strategic niche: Amongst champions of the same functional class, why do I pick this champion over others? This champion’s numbers being better does not count because eventually we’ll have to equalize them. A good example here is artillery mages. Once upon a time, Lux, Xerath, and Ziggs competed for the same space. They all did damage at a distance. After some sharpening, we now have Lux’s “pick enemies off at a distance”, Xerath’s “indiscriminate sustained damage at a distance”, and Zigg’s “shove and counter shove from a safe distance” (which is why he is picked bot lane in a gold-taking role, while Lux and Xerath aren’t).
I don’t see a lot of answers to those questions in your kit. It mostly feels like a mathematically different spin on existing stuff; the 180 degree spin-around and its application to the R may be the exception here, but even then I don’t see a lot in terms of unique outputs and strategic niche. Specifically, fragile high damage melee characters tend to have a “defensive trick” move that often serves as their unique input / output. Fiora Riposte and Yasuo Windwall are good examples. Without a trick that allows you to express skill, characters often devolve into “do I do more damage than the enemy?” style stat checks.
Sorry if this is overly negative, but I promised to give fair and accurate feedback. This is more or less what I would tell a designer had they presented a paper kit like this.
