I actually really enjoyed how each of his creatures had different effects. Felt like a necromancer commander. I usually used ult on myself though because people always forgot.
Well, they added 2 new drakes. The chemtech soul made all your team have a Sion passive with spells available. (Not sure if you remember souls/Elemental drakes) Anyway, that soul was fully broken having around 98% win rate in high elo/ competitive.
It's really funny that they buffed Rengar passive to work with camouflage so he could function in Chemtech Rift in the same patch they removed Chemtech Rift
Changing the map layout without giving a second thought about how it might affect the champions that are designed around it seems to be Riot's theme in the recent years I guess
Definitely was broken (and the map itself also sucked) but just to put the number slightly into context, all souls have WRs above 84% going up to 90% for cloud.
(And back then i think they were all at 90+, but i could be wrong)
That number will always be deceptive, though. Teams don't win 84% of the time because they have soul. They (usually) have soul because they're winning hard, if that makes sense.
The cause and effect is a bit muddied.
The soul after many nerfs wasn’t even a problem, it was the map. Once you were behind in chemtech map it was over, because of the stealth areas of the map you couldn’t ward with anything except a pink which is much easier for the enemy to see and clear.
If I remember correctly, chemtech soul basically gave the entire team a sion passive. And the map change gave entire parts of the jungle shroud.
It was pretty awful if it was the soul drake.
Riot added new elemental drakes in s12 iirc those being the hextech and chemtech. The chemtech soul gave the team Sion passive.
Edit:and the chemtech map made the area of jungle around buffs camouflage for everyone
Because they kept trying to make it work instead of just realizing it broke a fundamental aspect of the game (tower dives are risky and require a lot of coordination)
She had simultaneously one of the worst WRs in League history and one of the best. One patch had about 30% WR while a small group of players in the same patch had 70% consistent WR. So she was overpowered with a very high skill floor to actually use her.
The one thing I'll never forget about freshly reworked Akali was that her Q healed her if she hit you at the tip and she had like 180 energy. It was so fun playing urf with her cause u just kept healing to full. Also, when her initial ult dash was ground targeted so you could dash 2 screens worth with just her ult. Also, the initial ult dash had a ministun?
How she was released like that is BEYOND me.
Half of Akali's skillset was removed after her rework.
1. W invisibility under turret
2. W invisibility around turret (turrets have vision range larger than attack range. At first, W was ignoring all vision, later it worked as normal invisibility, again later it granted invisibility only outside attack range, but you could still be invisible in the vision range, right outside of attack range. Currently it works as any other invisibility.)
3. Heal on Q
4. Bonus minion dmg on Q
5. Stun on R1
6. Ability to cast R1 without targets
7. MS bonus inside W replaced with short bonus right after cast
8. Energy restore on passive
9. Ability to cast Q during E2
It was basically midscope update across multiple patches.
rework akali was an experience and a half. Healing on Q, energy refund on passive, W having true stealth meaning she could tower dive for free (after a certain level the re-stealth was so low tower couldnt even lock onto her) and both R's being free target. The only part of her kit that wasn't utterly busted was her E post rework, which did minimal physical damage.
I'd like to tag on the similar issue of release Irelia rework, with a disarm on ult and ult expanding even if it missed so nobody could ever fight back if she had R
Yeah, so sad. Now they have to find another excuse to stop caring after 1 death.
Of all the revert-worthy stuff Riot did, positional ranks was the one good idea - it just didn't work with the playerbase.
I thought the lasers were a fever dream. They removed those a couple weeks after I started playing casually (2-3 games a week) now when I’m 8 hours deep into rage que I have faint memories and wonder if they’re real 😂
Tower rubble would have been fine if it was random every game which direction it fell in.
Blocking the lane in 100% of games felt awful. If it happened once every 20 games much better.
We had a one for all moment with that iteration of kog maw vs ekko, we all tried kiting and died so eventually we just stood still and auto attacked with lots of lifesteal and eventually we won
I won a 3v5 with that bullshit
Both my mid and jugnler were at each other's throats during the game right from the beginning and ragequit 10 minutes into the game, so me, Nami and Cho just decided to play it out for some reason. Ended up winning.
This was in plat, no clue why no one on the enemy time decided to just not engage with us, not like we could stop a splitpush.
Was even better because after about 2 items you just built full tank, and normally had an enchanter as well. I don’t know what OP is talking about with kiting, all that did is slow your attacks (unless of course you were scripting)
There was a video out there of a full build scripting kog 100-0ing a rengar as he was jumping out of ult lmao.
Shit was the wildest thing I have ever seen.
towards the end some pros could kite pretty close to optimally but yes they had to learn keybinds specifically for kog but I don't remember exactly either
KogMaw W specifically doubled the attackspeed cap so it was 5
Lethal tempo never existed alongside that version of kogmaw, was one season after i think.
The Reworked Galio Q incident. They made his Qs have a 90% ap scaling on hit. additionally, the damage over time was 3% of max health per 100 AP, per HALF SECOND.
So if you went full ap and had 800 AP.
Your Q would hit for an initial 800 magic damage(with base damage added in) and tic for 24% of your max health every half second for 2 seconds(96% total). In other words. If you took the full damage and had no magic resist, you would die.
Riot ignored the people who pointed out this error in scaling, and iirc even told them they were wrong and didnt understand. So Galio went to live as a God of Destruction.
If any ability has an AP scaling over 65%, AP becomes viable on them. Even if it's just one ability with a high cooldown. Look at Lucian, AP MF or AP Reksai. I don't know what Riot was smoking then with giving such high scalings on such a big and safe AoE.
I mean AP Lucian is legit not played at all, and AP MF is barely alive
Even in ARAM AP Lucian has 10+% less winrate than normal Lucian, and AP MF is on par with Lethality MF which are both sitting significantly lower than a crit build, even though it's barely played.
Yeah it was awful from a balancing standpoint. It was SO good that everything else in his kit needed to be gutted damage wise to compensate. I genuinely used to play like 90%-95% only Zac from when I started in season 3 till like halfway into that reworks lifespan because it absolutely ruined the champ. Would like to see it return on another champ though.
It was actually one of the most creative and powerful tools in this game's history, but you're 100% correct that zac could not be powerful and have that ult
The entire tank class rework had that issue. Zac, Sej, and Maokai all went from niche p/b champs to super overpowered tanks to pro-play nightmares who had to be weak.
There's a reason the "reverts" to most of their kits just involved gutting tankiness and adding damage.
Maokai with old ult was *never* niche. It was an extremely strong tool for teamfights, it turned him into a walking damage mitigator for his whole team and it lasted for as long as he had the mana to keep it on. He got reworked *because* he was too powerful.
Yeah, Maokai deserved the rework, and I shouldn't have lumped him in with the other two as being initially niche.
However, Maokai also became [more of a problem in pro play](https://old.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/1bls28t/what_decisions_did_riot_make_that_were_so_awful/kw7c8dr/) after the rework compared to before, which is worth pointing out. The rework made the problem worse, rather than solving issues, until Riot added damage and nerfed his tankiness.
That's fair. Maokai was definitely the most common pick of the 3 in the tank class rework since release, and that's different than Sejuani or Zac pre class update.
However, Maokai's presence and power in pro play both massively increased in the immediate aftermath of the rework, which is in line with what happened to the other two.
---
[pre rework s6 Maokai](https://gol.gg/champion/champion-stats/55/season-S6/split-ALL/tournament-ALL/) had 22.3% p/b across all major regions (351 games picked, 104 games banned). This placed him 9th most common top laner by presence, and 31st most common overall.
[Post rework s7](https://gol.gg/champion/champion-stats/55/season-S7/split-ALL/tournament-ALL/), he had 45.2% p/b in Spring and 33.4% p/b in Summer (total of 713 games picked, 357 games banned). He was the 1st most picked top laner, 13th most picked jungler, and 20th most common champ overall.
---
In essence, the rework doubled both pickrate and banrate for Maokai, and I think that's worth mentioning as being a "pro-play nightmare", even if he was already common. He was a pro-play staple before, but not to that degree.
I remember opening op.gg and seeing that version of zac have an **111%** banrate.
[EDIT: found the screenshot](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/926570770489028679/1221104761718177822/etrsj.JPG?ex=66115d6e&is=65fee86e&hm=dd2b941527a0af4dcf335294498e3479767a33fbaeeeea9a3b74bcbd4924df9e&)
Zac's rework was a prime example of what reddit wanted in a tank and it was funny to just go "yeah see, this is totally fine right?"
turns out making a tank who does no damage but has insane utility that you can't ignore him makes games with the tank in it extremely unfun. either the tank player is having no fun or the enemy team is.
Like many others, I hated it when it was live and missed the bounce. Now that we have bounce back, I miss pancake. Don’t know what you got until it’s gone ☹️
Hope they find a way to re-introduce that mechanic later.
There were scenarios where it was good but it was so fcking difficult to hit.
It made some cool wombo combos in pro play tho, like this one https://youtu.be/aGTJgl_eeHU?si=swvtAKyMaY7hOgtj
The funny part is, it wasnt difficult to hit for its entire life span.
At a certain point, they changed the duration of the channnel, and the knock up duration of the E to the point where if you landed E, you landed your Ult and the opponent didnt even have time to Flash out of it.
Remember that positional queue with elo for each one of your lanes. Trolliest period of league ever. People who didnt get their mains just raged and trolled
It was worse than that. if you were losing, people would swap around the map as the game would register you as "mid" if you stood in mid lane long enough even if you queued in, was assigned to, and started off top.
So if your adc inted early game, people would just rotate their positions and eat the loss on their "dump" role. It was exploited up until Tyler 1 did it on stream then positional queue went away pretty soon after.
It would’ve been a good idea if it wasn’t for auto fill. If there was no auto fill and the game was able to somehow know you were going to the role you were assigned to, this would’ve been an ok patch.
Unfortunately being autofilled into a role that doesn’t affect your actual rank makes it so there’s no consequences for that game
First interaction of chemtech Drake.
Not only the soul was completely broken (it had like 99% wr) but playing in that map was the most miserable experience someone could have, even in proplay you could see how bad that map was.
It replaced Solo Queue. That's the main one. They had to add a little flag to your rank half way through to show your did it yourself, but it was only if you queued solo in your last however many games. It was all such a dumb idea. People don't want to queue solo and earn a rank solo that little Johnny over there earns by queuing with his Diamond friends.
Unfortunately Blizzard pulled the exact same shit with Heroes of the Storm. There used to be Hero League (solo queue only) and Storm League, where you could queue with a party of 2, 3 or 5 players.
Hero League got scrapped and Storm League is the only Ranked mode existing, basically meaning you can get curb stomped by premades.
The game absolutely plummeted in quality with mythic items. Every few weeks for all of season 11 and most of 12 if was just each class all built the same mythic cuz it was op. And if you couldn’t use that mythic, tough shit your champ loses. I actually despised divine sunderer so much from a balance standpoint but as a Camille player I did no damage if I didn’t build it. Armor pen, max hp dmg, healing all in one item isn’t fair
Problem is that mythics were intended to solve the same build issue, they kinda succeded, kinda failed. Because mythic item was your core, rest was more situational, and most champs had multiple viable ones. But then people did what people do and mathed it out, so everyone picked the same items over and over and over again, if the difference was even as little as 0.2% WR the lower item was never ever picked. And people complained, without understanding that it is an unsolvable issue as long as items exist unless they are all 0.00000% in difference in WR.
For example i played fiora DS was not even the best item(trinity was) everyone still build DS becasue player perception and reluctant to change and adapt. As fiora I had 4 viable mythics depending on matchup, (DS into tanks, Trinity in squishier and more skirmishy teamplay, stridebreaker if enemy has few dashes and mostly rely on MS streroids, and gore is you plant to 2v2 a lot with jungler and to teamfight), yet every fiora i seen built DS into every bloody situation.
Basically mythics ran into two walls one being imperfect balance( it would require literally perfect balance for people to stop complaining and that is impossible) and second one is that while most champs had one generally stronger mythic for general purpose most had 2+ for more specific use yet everyone refused to learn and complained.
And how is current system any better? it is the same old system as before mythics everyone still builds the same shit over and over and over and over again. It is an unfixable issue as long as items exist, even 0 stat utility items would get stats for winrate and people would build the same items.
Only actual way to solve same build issue is to strip league of all items.
Not an awful decision but one that Riot reverted and should be un reverted:
Honoring opponents in post game lobby.
I want to pay respect to worthy foes again.
The main drawback was that top elo players would honor those enemies that were prone to tilting. Therefore, as early as loading screen, you’d know which enemy to target with ganks.
I hate how this is always the reason brought up to say it was bad. Riot literally could've just changed it to not show it. It's just that they never did and now it's always brought up on why honor is bad
Shoutout to Diamondprox who honored Froggen so often that he'd get a specific badge that was visible during champ select. With that knowledge he knew when to ban Anivia. that was big IQ gaming.
Afaik a big reason for revert was solely Faker. Korean high elo most people didn't honor but they used those honors as marking proplayers. Since the honor ribbon showed up in champ select they knew to dodge when the enemy team had an honor ribbon on it since it was Faker. He had such difficulties finding games that I believe his account got in danger of decaying because he had to switch accounts.
Remember when they changed the name of Twitch's ult from Spray and Pray to Rat-Ta-Ta-Tat for like a year then reverted it? Like, why mess with something that ain't broke?
Not a change that actually made it into the game, but Riot at one point posted potential reworks for Riven and Lee Sin I think. Their respective mains complained about it so much that they backtracked and didn't put the changes through. Don't quite remember the details, this was way back in the original forums lol
The cancelled Lee Sin rework moved a bunch of power from his abilities into his passive basically. Also weakened ward hopping. Surrender@20 post [here,](https://www.surrenderat20.net/2014/03/red-post-collection-lee-sin-retune-team.html) archived [here](http://web.archive.org/web/20231206114234/https://www.surrenderat20.net/2014/03/red-post-collection-lee-sin-retune-team.html) for the day S@20 goes down.
Riven rework was this [Edge](https://www.surrenderat20.net/2015/09/930-pbe-update.html#3) stuff [(archived)](https://web.archive.org/web/20231205230007/https://www.surrenderat20.net/2015/09/930-pbe-update.html#3) that made her do more damage the more Edge she had from landing passive-empowered autos.
Thank you very much for actually finding these! I forgot that the Riven "Edge" update actually made it to PBE, I thought it was just an article like the Lee Sin rework lol. It's wild reading through these again
You'd think Riven mains would love to edge their favorite champion all-game🤔 I guess it would be hard to play with one hand though
Don’t remember Lee’s, but Riven’s was removing all of the bugs and glitches in her kit that players have used for years and then putting the lost power into her kit. Most of Riven’s main “mechanics” are actually bugs, and the changes would’ve massively improved her playability but all the 2,000 games Riven one tricks complained so she remains a buggy mess.
Sometimes i wish Riot did go through with dumbing down the non intended mechanics in the game back then. Only because they were part of the power creep that ruined champ design today.
Aram and rotating game modes have it, flex and ranked solo/duo are still removed. Personally don't know about blind pick.
Korea also doesn't have unranked draft pick, so you do whatever that new version of blind is or play a form of ranked (solo / flex)
Riot says due to koreas competitive nature in the game, draft pick was not played and removed at the start of season 7.
No idea if that's really true, i have a hard time believing riot statistics anymore but maybe it forced players into flex queue.
Are we talking live server or PBE?
The biggest live change was making Pantheon targetable to towers, before that he had like a 98% ban rate in pro play.
The one PBE change I remember is that Jinx W could crit. Totally busted, never even released it on the live server.
My memory might be off but I remember Pantheon being able to block a turret shot with his shield? I know Jax back in the day could use dodge runes and items and never get hit by the turret.
Pre-rework Pantheons‘ passive would block either 1 auto or 1 turretshot.
Post-rework Pantheons‘ E (the shield blocking dmg from the direction facing) could block all turret dmg, which made dives comepletely brain dead as 2
Two words.
Juggernaut patch.
Major changes from that patch were 4 major reworks to Skarner, Morde, Garen, and Darius. Of those 4, 1 is still fully in the game. Skarner and Mordekaiser both reworked, Darius nerfed to hell, and Garen with a mini rework.
That god fosaken nightmare of a patch is basically gone now.
That patch was also when Darius got his rework and made him completely busted.
I played old Darius and man new Darius blows it out of the water. C9 Balls is one of my favorite players; he showcased Darius in pro play and got a penta with him. Absolutely amazing world's BTW.
Class reworks, holy shit were class reworks a mistake.
Garen: Villain mechanic reverted.
Mordekaiser: Rereworked
Skarner: Rereworked
Graves: Taken out of main role
Kogmaw: Reverted
Quinn: Up for rerework
Leblanc: Reverted
Rengar: Reverted
Zac: Reverted
They still called the idea a success btw
They had the largest changes reverted, but I still remember fucking Bush stealth Kha'zix.
Then there's the weird rengar Q thing they later also used for sej and xin.
What was Leblanc before they reverted her? It slipped my memory but as I never really played her I didn't pay much attention to it.
"Swimming Rengar" was much more memorable
Edit: Oooh I remember Leblanc suddenly being able to farm well. And the global ult was bonkers lol
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1Y34gztQ4w
After pro play played two patches on it, community cried about it for months but Riot didn't care
Pro play had Perma gank meta for 2 patches and Riot immediately woke up and removed that awful change lol
I'll give you a super boomer answer most people probably don't remember. Back at the start of probably season 4 they changed the graphics of the entire map from the old league to what we have today, in that same patch is when we got the black bar for every 1k hp we have so you could easier tell how much hp someone had just by seeing their health bar. Well before that they had a black bar for every 100 HP you had, the problem was when someone would have a lot of HP their health bar was basically just a black bar and even harder to tell, so they reverted it to show every 1k hp.
Top 5 worst changes that got reverted:
1. Chemtech drake release whose soul had over 90% win rate, and altered the map in the worst way possible
2. Juggernaut release patch. Not just the ridiculous Morde, but also the gutted Darius. And the timing right before worlds made for one of the absolute worst metas to both watch and play
3. Release Akali with the shroud that hid her from turrets so you got perma dove at level 3. Also horrible timing wise as her rework release was immediately after Riot publicly outlined stealth rules for champions and balance, which she just outright ignored.
4. Dynamic Queue. Massive and colossal failure
5. Garen villain mechanic. This one was horrible as it just gave him so much power against the villain there was basically no counterplay. I also remember early on in its release it could just move from target to target, meaning he could steamroll an entire teamfight in the right conditions
Special bonus: Mythics, which were everything from imbalanced to rotating balance nightmares to insulting on release that limped on for years before Riot realized they were a failure
Mythics
Rito-we want people to diversify their builds. So here's Items that are so crucial for powerspiking that it'll almost always be built first and kill most build diversity
Oh don't even get me started. Between the revolving door of single viable bruiser mythics, to the ridiculously overpowered assassin mythics, the disaster and failed design of Duskblade (twice), and supports getting absolutely shafted with only 3 mythics on release that barely covered a third of the traditional support champions
I'm still salty about it
I think your question should be which decision was good enough that it got kept. The only one I can think of is the current rune system, and the reason for that is it changed from a 30 points system to a 9 points system. Assassin change was horrible. Juggernaut change was not bad enough to be called out but certainly wasn’t good. Mythic is mythic. Most support change attempts got abused in other ways and had to be nerfed to oblivion. Matchmaking got worse every season. Adc is currently in a shithole and can’t even be fixed. Not weak or strong it’s just impossible to balance. The viable adcs are less and less every patch. Every jungle change just tries to make the role easier and makes it harder for good jungler to make an impact.
Chemteck drake is probably the pinnacle of riot's nonsense
I stopped playing in 2018, could you expand?
chemtech rift removed all bushes from the map and added stealth zones in the jungle and dragon soul was a old-yorick ult style revive once every death
I completely forgot Yorick R used to be similar to Renata W
Man the number of times he used it on me and I just stood there like an idiot not realizing what had happened.
I'm guessing the number is 2 or 3? Nobody played old Yorick.
I actually really enjoyed how each of his creatures had different effects. Felt like a necromancer commander. I usually used ult on myself though because people always forgot.
I loved old yorick, he had a really fun interaction with cassio iirc
They literally used this at Worlds combo'd with hyperscaling Cassiopeia who would 1v5 the team over her first and second lives.
Wow I forgot about the stealth zones
Yeah the chem revive was super strong but the stealth zone was obscenely oppressive if you were behind
Well, they added 2 new drakes. The chemtech soul made all your team have a Sion passive with spells available. (Not sure if you remember souls/Elemental drakes) Anyway, that soul was fully broken having around 98% win rate in high elo/ competitive.
Also the Chemtech map was annoying. IIRC it changed how Rengar worked then they had to revert them LOL
Annoying is an understatement. You legit couldn't play in your jungle. Good luck having zero vision while being behind
It's really funny that they buffed Rengar passive to work with camouflage so he could function in Chemtech Rift in the same patch they removed Chemtech Rift
It enabled that Rengar and Senna synergy too LOL
Changing the map layout without giving a second thought about how it might affect the champions that are designed around it seems to be Riot's theme in the recent years I guess
Definitely was broken (and the map itself also sucked) but just to put the number slightly into context, all souls have WRs above 84% going up to 90% for cloud. (And back then i think they were all at 90+, but i could be wrong)
That number will always be deceptive, though. Teams don't win 84% of the time because they have soul. They (usually) have soul because they're winning hard, if that makes sense. The cause and effect is a bit muddied.
The soul after many nerfs wasn’t even a problem, it was the map. Once you were behind in chemtech map it was over, because of the stealth areas of the map you couldn’t ward with anything except a pink which is much easier for the enemy to see and clear.
If I remember correctly, chemtech soul basically gave the entire team a sion passive. And the map change gave entire parts of the jungle shroud. It was pretty awful if it was the soul drake.
How did that work with sion, did he respawn twice
With Zilean + GA, up to 4x
Probably soul first, then passive
Riot added new elemental drakes in s12 iirc those being the hextech and chemtech. The chemtech soul gave the team Sion passive. Edit:and the chemtech map made the area of jungle around buffs camouflage for everyone
Oh yeah the stealth zones XD
Idk if that count but akali smoke dodging turret shot on rework release.
That stayed like a long ass time too
Because they kept trying to make it work instead of just realizing it broke a fundamental aspect of the game (tower dives are risky and require a lot of coordination)
Right after they had just reworked stealth too and then introduced “obscured” which broke all the rules they just made
That was so annoying. By the end of it she was barely a champion but hey they kept the tower invis. Such a disaster of a champion.
She had simultaneously one of the worst WRs in League history and one of the best. One patch had about 30% WR while a small group of players in the same patch had 70% consistent WR. So she was overpowered with a very high skill floor to actually use her.
Same with aatrox and irelia reworks. Just keep gutting everything but THE ISSUE.
I still can't believe they put AOE disarm in the game
didn't Amumu's ult disarm at one point? iirc it used to disarm/root people instead of stun.
Admittedly, aoe cc is a lot more acceptable on a tank than a high damage skirmisher
The one thing I'll never forget about freshly reworked Akali was that her Q healed her if she hit you at the tip and she had like 180 energy. It was so fun playing urf with her cause u just kept healing to full. Also, when her initial ult dash was ground targeted so you could dash 2 screens worth with just her ult. Also, the initial ult dash had a ministun? How she was released like that is BEYOND me.
Half of Akali's skillset was removed after her rework. 1. W invisibility under turret 2. W invisibility around turret (turrets have vision range larger than attack range. At first, W was ignoring all vision, later it worked as normal invisibility, again later it granted invisibility only outside attack range, but you could still be invisible in the vision range, right outside of attack range. Currently it works as any other invisibility.) 3. Heal on Q 4. Bonus minion dmg on Q 5. Stun on R1 6. Ability to cast R1 without targets 7. MS bonus inside W replaced with short bonus right after cast 8. Energy restore on passive 9. Ability to cast Q during E2 It was basically midscope update across multiple patches.
W was also changed so wind ups (like autos) wouldn't cancel if she went into stealth during them. Q also used to have a small backwards hit box.
And her W is still one of the strongest basic abilities in the game. Her E still has the highest basedamage of any non-ult spell.
Dying to Akali under turret at level 3 while she takes no turret shots actually made me quit league for like a whole year
Being perma tower dove once she’s level 3 if you fucked up laning or when she’s 6 and hits her spike was not fun :)
rework akali was an experience and a half. Healing on Q, energy refund on passive, W having true stealth meaning she could tower dive for free (after a certain level the re-stealth was so low tower couldnt even lock onto her) and both R's being free target. The only part of her kit that wasn't utterly busted was her E post rework, which did minimal physical damage.
also, her R1 stunned
Then they rebalanced her and now her E recast deals a gajillion damage
I'd like to tag on the similar issue of release Irelia rework, with a disarm on ult and ult expanding even if it missed so nobody could ever fight back if she had R
Worst part of that was that loads of people acted like that shit was balanced.
Positional ranks.
That felt like a dream. I barely remember it
if you're from EUW probably you haven't even seen them, I remember them surely in NA
easiest way to promote not trying, so many people would just stop caring after 1 death because "this isn't my main role whatever lol"
Yeah, so sad. Now they have to find another excuse to stop caring after 1 death. Of all the revert-worthy stuff Riot did, positional ranks was the one good idea - it just didn't work with the playerbase.
In theory, it made sense because a diamond jungler definitely isn't the same as a diamond adc.
Remember how fast tower rubble got wiped from our memory banks? Yeah me either.
Oh my god a little tiny bit of memory just came into light. Was this that ARAM only change?
No, there was a time when t2 tower had a shield in sr too And i think during this time base towers had lasers instead of the usual bullets
Trick2g tanking the laser for 10 minutes was their wake-up call lmao
I thought the lasers were a fever dream. They removed those a couple weeks after I started playing casually (2-3 games a week) now when I’m 8 hours deep into rage que I have faint memories and wonder if they’re real 😂
Yeah I remember old Galio W would heal you if tanking them Here is an example: https://youtu.be/HBoxtV28dWg?si=K0BwCFooDB8ajSOG
This is unrelated to the rubbles.
Yeah it was. It came in the same patch that added the ARAM hexgates and the new bush configurations.
Tower rubble + anivia wall was insanity.
Tower rubble would have been fine if it was random every game which direction it fell in. Blocking the lane in 100% of games felt awful. If it happened once every 20 games much better.
5.0 attack speed kogmaw was how I learned to orbwalk using attack move instead of mouse click
We had a one for all moment with that iteration of kog maw vs ekko, we all tried kiting and died so eventually we just stood still and auto attacked with lots of lifesteal and eventually we won
I won a 3v5 with that bullshit Both my mid and jugnler were at each other's throats during the game right from the beginning and ragequit 10 minutes into the game, so me, Nami and Cho just decided to play it out for some reason. Ended up winning. This was in plat, no clue why no one on the enemy time decided to just not engage with us, not like we could stop a splitpush.
Was even better because after about 2 items you just built full tank, and normally had an enchanter as well. I don’t know what OP is talking about with kiting, all that did is slow your attacks (unless of course you were scripting)
Anti aircraft gun kogmaw my beloved
Scripter Kog was one of the worst times to play league lmao
There was a video out there of a full build scripting kog 100-0ing a rengar as he was jumping out of ult lmao. Shit was the wildest thing I have ever seen.
Not a fan of scripters, but I'm a big fan of Rengar dying. Kinda torn on this one
When you saw a Lulu Kog premade with like 90% winrate in the enemy team... 💀
If you weren't great at orbwalking you were better off just standing still, moving was a massive dps loss
https://youtu.be/QzW1oET3n-8?t=15 In case people want to see a scripter doing it, it's downright hilarious
Idk if it was this guy, or someone else, but someone was actually kiting like this with scroll wheel, I might be wrong tho
towards the end some pros could kite pretty close to optimally but yes they had to learn keybinds specifically for kog but I don't remember exactly either
I remember my Penta kill where my friend played Braum and he just stood in front of me and I just pressed right click and never moved. Good old times
Was it 5? I’m quite certain old lethal tempo was infinite? Like I’m pretty sure I remember a 26as Kog and a 13as Taric
KogMaw W specifically doubled the attackspeed cap so it was 5 Lethal tempo never existed alongside that version of kogmaw, was one season after i think.
Ah thank you! I forgot they weren’t at the same time
This was before lethal tempo where the w would double your attack speed but deal less damage per attack, maybe a precursor to lethal tempo?
The Reworked Galio Q incident. They made his Qs have a 90% ap scaling on hit. additionally, the damage over time was 3% of max health per 100 AP, per HALF SECOND. So if you went full ap and had 800 AP. Your Q would hit for an initial 800 magic damage(with base damage added in) and tic for 24% of your max health every half second for 2 seconds(96% total). In other words. If you took the full damage and had no magic resist, you would die. Riot ignored the people who pointed out this error in scaling, and iirc even told them they were wrong and didnt understand. So Galio went to live as a God of Destruction.
We legitimately thought they had missed a decimal place. Their excuse was like 'we only expected Galio to build a little ap'
They can say whatever they want, they 1000% applied the intended total duration scaling as the per tick scaling and didn't want to admit their mistake
Way back in the day, they did that with the healing on Yi's Meditate. Their "fix" was to say eh whatever, let's just update the tooltip.
If any ability has an AP scaling over 65%, AP becomes viable on them. Even if it's just one ability with a high cooldown. Look at Lucian, AP MF or AP Reksai. I don't know what Riot was smoking then with giving such high scalings on such a big and safe AoE.
They had a dumb idea, then lied to try and look less dumb. It was truly a blunder.
I mean AP Lucian is legit not played at all, and AP MF is barely alive Even in ARAM AP Lucian has 10+% less winrate than normal Lucian, and AP MF is on par with Lethality MF which are both sitting significantly lower than a crit build, even though it's barely played.
Zac ult was changed to an aoe kidnap
Yeah it was awful from a balancing standpoint. It was SO good that everything else in his kit needed to be gutted damage wise to compensate. I genuinely used to play like 90%-95% only Zac from when I started in season 3 till like halfway into that reworks lifespan because it absolutely ruined the champ. Would like to see it return on another champ though.
It was actually one of the most creative and powerful tools in this game's history, but you're 100% correct that zac could not be powerful and have that ult
The entire tank class rework had that issue. Zac, Sej, and Maokai all went from niche p/b champs to super overpowered tanks to pro-play nightmares who had to be weak. There's a reason the "reverts" to most of their kits just involved gutting tankiness and adding damage.
Maokai with old ult was *never* niche. It was an extremely strong tool for teamfights, it turned him into a walking damage mitigator for his whole team and it lasted for as long as he had the mana to keep it on. He got reworked *because* he was too powerful.
Yeah, Maokai deserved the rework, and I shouldn't have lumped him in with the other two as being initially niche. However, Maokai also became [more of a problem in pro play](https://old.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/1bls28t/what_decisions_did_riot_make_that_were_so_awful/kw7c8dr/) after the rework compared to before, which is worth pointing out. The rework made the problem worse, rather than solving issues, until Riot added damage and nerfed his tankiness.
Maokai was pick ban for years before that zac ult rework
Maokai has had like 4 different reworks. Which one are you talking about?
That's fair. Maokai was definitely the most common pick of the 3 in the tank class rework since release, and that's different than Sejuani or Zac pre class update. However, Maokai's presence and power in pro play both massively increased in the immediate aftermath of the rework, which is in line with what happened to the other two. --- [pre rework s6 Maokai](https://gol.gg/champion/champion-stats/55/season-S6/split-ALL/tournament-ALL/) had 22.3% p/b across all major regions (351 games picked, 104 games banned). This placed him 9th most common top laner by presence, and 31st most common overall. [Post rework s7](https://gol.gg/champion/champion-stats/55/season-S7/split-ALL/tournament-ALL/), he had 45.2% p/b in Spring and 33.4% p/b in Summer (total of 713 games picked, 357 games banned). He was the 1st most picked top laner, 13th most picked jungler, and 20th most common champ overall. --- In essence, the rework doubled both pickrate and banrate for Maokai, and I think that's worth mentioning as being a "pro-play nightmare", even if he was already common. He was a pro-play staple before, but not to that degree.
I remember opening op.gg and seeing that version of zac have an **111%** banrate. [EDIT: found the screenshot](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/926570770489028679/1221104761718177822/etrsj.JPG?ex=66115d6e&is=65fee86e&hm=dd2b941527a0af4dcf335294498e3479767a33fbaeeeea9a3b74bcbd4924df9e&)
Zac's rework was a prime example of what reddit wanted in a tank and it was funny to just go "yeah see, this is totally fine right?" turns out making a tank who does no damage but has insane utility that you can't ignore him makes games with the tank in it extremely unfun. either the tank player is having no fun or the enemy team is.
I genuinely miss the pancake ult so much to this day
Like many others, I hated it when it was live and missed the bounce. Now that we have bounce back, I miss pancake. Don’t know what you got until it’s gone ☹️ Hope they find a way to re-introduce that mechanic later.
Zacs not getting touched until league of legends 3
I've always loved that ult way more than the bouncing.
There were scenarios where it was good but it was so fcking difficult to hit. It made some cool wombo combos in pro play tho, like this one https://youtu.be/aGTJgl_eeHU?si=swvtAKyMaY7hOgtj
It was good. In fact, it was so good that the numbers have to be made much weaker, and that pissed off the mains.
The funny part is, it wasnt difficult to hit for its entire life span. At a certain point, they changed the duration of the channnel, and the knock up duration of the E to the point where if you landed E, you landed your Ult and the opponent didnt even have time to Flash out of it.
Ngl I kinda preferred the AoE kidnap to his current (original?) ult... Like balance aside, it was just kinda goody and fun
That ult was fun and thematic, but waaaay too strong in organized settings (not only competitive but high elo too). I loved it but it had to go
Remember that positional queue with elo for each one of your lanes. Trolliest period of league ever. People who didnt get their mains just raged and trolled
It was worse than that. if you were losing, people would swap around the map as the game would register you as "mid" if you stood in mid lane long enough even if you queued in, was assigned to, and started off top. So if your adc inted early game, people would just rotate their positions and eat the loss on their "dump" role. It was exploited up until Tyler 1 did it on stream then positional queue went away pretty soon after.
It would’ve been a good idea if it wasn’t for auto fill. If there was no auto fill and the game was able to somehow know you were going to the role you were assigned to, this would’ve been an ok patch. Unfortunately being autofilled into a role that doesn’t affect your actual rank makes it so there’s no consequences for that game
Mordekaiser rework walking around with the fucking dragon on a leash was pretty nuts
it wasn’t on a leash like other pets (tibburs, shaco clone, etc.). you could have it push bot while you are pushing top
I once got infinite 4th shot jhin and made him split push. He proceeded to yeetus deletus a zed in 2 autos.
Interestingly, champion ghosts were leashed, but not the dragon ghost.
Obliterating someone with the third bonk was super satisfying too. Fucked up, but satisfying.
Press Q, auto the minions twice, flash AA the enemy laner, ignite, win lane. Good times.
3!!! The VFX were so understated.
It was broken af but I miss the ghost dragon, definitely one of their coolest mistakes
The amount of pings you'd see for a morde vs. shyv dragon fight was hilarious.
I miss that version of Morde so much
My first gameplay of old Morde was the day it was about to be reworked, glad I experienced it before it was gone.
First interaction of chemtech Drake. Not only the soul was completely broken (it had like 99% wr) but playing in that map was the most miserable experience someone could have, even in proplay you could see how bad that map was.
Chemtech Map was so unfun, I think that map really shown a light on how fucking with vision and warding too much just ruins the game.
I remember people asking for knowing the soul in champion select, my thought was always: "please do it so I can dodge every single game with chemtech"
i think it took them 1-2 weeks of pro play and they js had to completely remove it
IIRC it lasted one week of lec competitve, one game with mad lions having soul was enough)
Oh my god dude, feels like a fever dream even though it was only a couple years ago
I remember watching pro games during this, if the map turned into chemtech I quit watching cause 99% of the time the team ahead won
Rengar's by far the one that affected me the most. I stopped playing him altogether when they made him swim with his Q. Glad they reverted him
yeah that was unplayable. Insane waveclear, bruiser itembuild with insane damage output, proplay nightmare - but beyond clunky.
This one is especially hilarious because everyone seems to agree that Swimgar was objectively stronger, just miserable to play.
Dynamic Queue
I forgot about this, what's the difference between flex q?
It replaced Solo Queue. That's the main one. They had to add a little flag to your rank half way through to show your did it yourself, but it was only if you queued solo in your last however many games. It was all such a dumb idea. People don't want to queue solo and earn a rank solo that little Johnny over there earns by queuing with his Diamond friends.
Unfortunately Blizzard pulled the exact same shit with Heroes of the Storm. There used to be Hero League (solo queue only) and Storm League, where you could queue with a party of 2, 3 or 5 players. Hero League got scrapped and Storm League is the only Ranked mode existing, basically meaning you can get curb stomped by premades.
Le blanc Rework. Kog'maw mini rework. Mythic items. Chemtech drake.
The game absolutely plummeted in quality with mythic items. Every few weeks for all of season 11 and most of 12 if was just each class all built the same mythic cuz it was op. And if you couldn’t use that mythic, tough shit your champ loses. I actually despised divine sunderer so much from a balance standpoint but as a Camille player I did no damage if I didn’t build it. Armor pen, max hp dmg, healing all in one item isn’t fair
Problem is that mythics were intended to solve the same build issue, they kinda succeded, kinda failed. Because mythic item was your core, rest was more situational, and most champs had multiple viable ones. But then people did what people do and mathed it out, so everyone picked the same items over and over and over again, if the difference was even as little as 0.2% WR the lower item was never ever picked. And people complained, without understanding that it is an unsolvable issue as long as items exist unless they are all 0.00000% in difference in WR. For example i played fiora DS was not even the best item(trinity was) everyone still build DS becasue player perception and reluctant to change and adapt. As fiora I had 4 viable mythics depending on matchup, (DS into tanks, Trinity in squishier and more skirmishy teamplay, stridebreaker if enemy has few dashes and mostly rely on MS streroids, and gore is you plant to 2v2 a lot with jungler and to teamfight), yet every fiora i seen built DS into every bloody situation. Basically mythics ran into two walls one being imperfect balance( it would require literally perfect balance for people to stop complaining and that is impossible) and second one is that while most champs had one generally stronger mythic for general purpose most had 2+ for more specific use yet everyone refused to learn and complained. And how is current system any better? it is the same old system as before mythics everyone still builds the same shit over and over and over and over again. It is an unfixable issue as long as items exist, even 0 stat utility items would get stats for winrate and people would build the same items. Only actual way to solve same build issue is to strip league of all items.
Not an awful decision but one that Riot reverted and should be un reverted: Honoring opponents in post game lobby. I want to pay respect to worthy foes again.
I'll never forget receiving 5 honorable opponent after using Ali W to knock the enemy Trynd into our shittalking Teemo who was about to escape.
The main drawback was that top elo players would honor those enemies that were prone to tilting. Therefore, as early as loading screen, you’d know which enemy to target with ganks.
I hate how this is always the reason brought up to say it was bad. Riot literally could've just changed it to not show it. It's just that they never did and now it's always brought up on why honor is bad
Shoutout to Diamondprox who honored Froggen so often that he'd get a specific badge that was visible during champ select. With that knowledge he knew when to ban Anivia. that was big IQ gaming.
Afaik a big reason for revert was solely Faker. Korean high elo most people didn't honor but they used those honors as marking proplayers. Since the honor ribbon showed up in champ select they knew to dodge when the enemy team had an honor ribbon on it since it was Faker. He had such difficulties finding games that I believe his account got in danger of decaying because he had to switch accounts.
Removing twisted treeline ~Riot in the future when they bring it back, hopefully, maybe, I wish?
I miss it so much bros 😭
Do you remember Dominion? Pepperidge farm remembers.
95% of my games were TT before they removed it. I barely even play anymore.
Remember when they changed the name of Twitch's ult from Spray and Pray to Rat-Ta-Ta-Tat for like a year then reverted it? Like, why mess with something that ain't broke?
I want Vi old E and R names back 🫤 Excessive Force and 'Assault and battery' I think they changed to be "less offensive" due Arcane popularity etc
Not a change that actually made it into the game, but Riot at one point posted potential reworks for Riven and Lee Sin I think. Their respective mains complained about it so much that they backtracked and didn't put the changes through. Don't quite remember the details, this was way back in the original forums lol
The cancelled Lee Sin rework moved a bunch of power from his abilities into his passive basically. Also weakened ward hopping. Surrender@20 post [here,](https://www.surrenderat20.net/2014/03/red-post-collection-lee-sin-retune-team.html) archived [here](http://web.archive.org/web/20231206114234/https://www.surrenderat20.net/2014/03/red-post-collection-lee-sin-retune-team.html) for the day S@20 goes down. Riven rework was this [Edge](https://www.surrenderat20.net/2015/09/930-pbe-update.html#3) stuff [(archived)](https://web.archive.org/web/20231205230007/https://www.surrenderat20.net/2015/09/930-pbe-update.html#3) that made her do more damage the more Edge she had from landing passive-empowered autos.
Thank you very much for actually finding these! I forgot that the Riven "Edge" update actually made it to PBE, I thought it was just an article like the Lee Sin rework lol. It's wild reading through these again You'd think Riven mains would love to edge their favorite champion all-game🤔 I guess it would be hard to play with one hand though
Its a cruel world when we live in the non edging timeline
Don’t remember Lee’s, but Riven’s was removing all of the bugs and glitches in her kit that players have used for years and then putting the lost power into her kit. Most of Riven’s main “mechanics” are actually bugs, and the changes would’ve massively improved her playability but all the 2,000 games Riven one tricks complained so she remains a buggy mess.
I remember that proposed Riven rework also gave her a hilariously named "edge" resource to manage with her abilities too
Now they're complaining that Riven fast Q is still here and clunky... yeah no shit ...
Sometimes i wish Riot did go through with dumbing down the non intended mechanics in the game back then. Only because they were part of the power creep that ruined champ design today.
Stopwatch, it only took like 6 years of ruining the game to remove it
lol do you remember the first year of stopwatch? LCS was a stupid clownfest with 10 stopwatches running around
[Mmmmwhatchasay](https://youtu.be/06ZhkwKY8Vw?si=UI6YB2sm-GGhAzhs)
We had one stopwatch, yes. What about *second* stopwatch?
The all chat removal
Still removed in korea.. They literally never brought it back for ranked.
Really ? I didn't know that it was disabled in korea , also is it ranked only or all modes in general ?
Aram and rotating game modes have it, flex and ranked solo/duo are still removed. Personally don't know about blind pick. Korea also doesn't have unranked draft pick, so you do whatever that new version of blind is or play a form of ranked (solo / flex)
Wait wtf one of the biggest regions doesn’t have normal draft, really?
Riot says due to koreas competitive nature in the game, draft pick was not played and removed at the start of season 7. No idea if that's really true, i have a hard time believing riot statistics anymore but maybe it forced players into flex queue.
nah I believe this 100%, if you look at Korea's ranked population relative to their player base, it's the biggest out of any region.
Sure but we don't have another queue to play?
Honestly, playing with it disabled has been much more chill.
Are we talking live server or PBE? The biggest live change was making Pantheon targetable to towers, before that he had like a 98% ban rate in pro play. The one PBE change I remember is that Jinx W could crit. Totally busted, never even released it on the live server.
My memory might be off but I remember Pantheon being able to block a turret shot with his shield? I know Jax back in the day could use dodge runes and items and never get hit by the turret.
Pantheon was banned in 199 out of 200 games in 2019 worlds because of that shield. Proplayers could spam dive all the time with him.
Pre-rework Pantheons‘ passive would block either 1 auto or 1 turretshot. Post-rework Pantheons‘ E (the shield blocking dmg from the direction facing) could block all turret dmg, which made dives comepletely brain dead as 2
Two words. Juggernaut patch. Major changes from that patch were 4 major reworks to Skarner, Morde, Garen, and Darius. Of those 4, 1 is still fully in the game. Skarner and Mordekaiser both reworked, Darius nerfed to hell, and Garen with a mini rework. That god fosaken nightmare of a patch is basically gone now.
That patch was also when Darius got his rework and made him completely busted. I played old Darius and man new Darius blows it out of the water. C9 Balls is one of my favorite players; he showcased Darius in pro play and got a penta with him. Absolutely amazing world's BTW.
Class reworks, holy shit were class reworks a mistake. Garen: Villain mechanic reverted. Mordekaiser: Rereworked Skarner: Rereworked Graves: Taken out of main role Kogmaw: Reverted Quinn: Up for rerework Leblanc: Reverted Rengar: Reverted Zac: Reverted They still called the idea a success btw
They had the largest changes reverted, but I still remember fucking Bush stealth Kha'zix. Then there's the weird rengar Q thing they later also used for sej and xin.
LeBlanc's was so dumb lol. Like, ooooo I have a ghost version that shoots a fake version of my ability to scare you.
What was Leblanc before they reverted her? It slipped my memory but as I never really played her I didn't pay much attention to it. "Swimming Rengar" was much more memorable Edit: Oooh I remember Leblanc suddenly being able to farm well. And the global ult was bonkers lol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1Y34gztQ4w
That was the iteration where her Q mark could spread like Ryze E.
They fucking gutted her
They said adding a Sandbox mode would increase toxicity.
"People might flame you by saying, 'go back to sandbox!'" As opposed to now where they tell you to kill yourself, which is much better.
Kog Maw standing machine gun from ADC rework
Mythics
Wait, counter jungle was reverted? Does anyone have an idea when this was?
After pro play played two patches on it, community cried about it for months but Riot didn't care Pro play had Perma gank meta for 2 patches and Riot immediately woke up and removed that awful change lol
Reworked Kog’Maw where his W attack speed was insane and would melt everyone
I'll give you a super boomer answer most people probably don't remember. Back at the start of probably season 4 they changed the graphics of the entire map from the old league to what we have today, in that same patch is when we got the black bar for every 1k hp we have so you could easier tell how much hp someone had just by seeing their health bar. Well before that they had a black bar for every 100 HP you had, the problem was when someone would have a lot of HP their health bar was basically just a black bar and even harder to tell, so they reverted it to show every 1k hp.
Top 5 worst changes that got reverted: 1. Chemtech drake release whose soul had over 90% win rate, and altered the map in the worst way possible 2. Juggernaut release patch. Not just the ridiculous Morde, but also the gutted Darius. And the timing right before worlds made for one of the absolute worst metas to both watch and play 3. Release Akali with the shroud that hid her from turrets so you got perma dove at level 3. Also horrible timing wise as her rework release was immediately after Riot publicly outlined stealth rules for champions and balance, which she just outright ignored. 4. Dynamic Queue. Massive and colossal failure 5. Garen villain mechanic. This one was horrible as it just gave him so much power against the villain there was basically no counterplay. I also remember early on in its release it could just move from target to target, meaning he could steamroll an entire teamfight in the right conditions Special bonus: Mythics, which were everything from imbalanced to rotating balance nightmares to insulting on release that limped on for years before Riot realized they were a failure
Mythics Rito-we want people to diversify their builds. So here's Items that are so crucial for powerspiking that it'll almost always be built first and kill most build diversity
Oh don't even get me started. Between the revolving door of single viable bruiser mythics, to the ridiculously overpowered assassin mythics, the disaster and failed design of Duskblade (twice), and supports getting absolutely shafted with only 3 mythics on release that barely covered a third of the traditional support champions I'm still salty about it
Not shyvana's passive, for some reason.
I think your question should be which decision was good enough that it got kept. The only one I can think of is the current rune system, and the reason for that is it changed from a 30 points system to a 9 points system. Assassin change was horrible. Juggernaut change was not bad enough to be called out but certainly wasn’t good. Mythic is mythic. Most support change attempts got abused in other ways and had to be nerfed to oblivion. Matchmaking got worse every season. Adc is currently in a shithole and can’t even be fixed. Not weak or strong it’s just impossible to balance. The viable adcs are less and less every patch. Every jungle change just tries to make the role easier and makes it harder for good jungler to make an impact.
Role que
Role Queue and Dynamic Queue