u/TeutonicPlate

Per Spideraxe

Over 100% gold efficient on base stats

Builds out of phage + tunneler

70 AD and 20% bonus movement speed for Illaoi ult duration

Build every game if this goes through

Just by way of introduction I'm a masters player in EUW. I play toplane and support.

3 years ago, the game devs set out to buff durability in a meaningful way and nerf item damage, with the explicit aim of making it harder to oneshot people and making games more interesting.

There are multiple reasons why, but these objectives feel almost quaint this season. Very out of touch with how this season's mechanics and set of items have developed. This isn't an exhaustive list of the reasons the game feels very snowbally, it's just a few.

 

The first reason I want to highlight is the strength of ignite. Although this isn't the biggest contributor to making champions feel less durable, it kind of runs through everything I'm going to mention below. Ignite got buffed a year ago to try to make it less of an early game cheese summoner and it appears to have worked. Toplaners take ignite, junglers (who can) take ignite, supports take ignite.

 

Next, AD junglers. AD junglers like Talon and Hecarim are running around at 100mph with cheap, high damage items that let them run over games. The entire aim of the game for the losing team becomes "get the shutdown of the hypermobile guy an entire item ahead of anyone else on the map". Last patch it was Naafiri but there are a host of other champions ready to abuse these items once the flavour of the week nightmare gets its wings clipped.

Adding to this, I can remember it being stated that CDR should be less ubiquitous and CDs should be more meaningful. However, there two very strong items whose passive is effectively "this champion no longer has a meaningful ult cooldown" and of course Nocturne is ulting every 40 seconds, making the game unplayable against him from behind.

Bubbling under the cheap ad items are the mage items. Mage starter items are very cheap. For a couple of reasons I won't get into, the main abusers of these cheap items are botlane mages and not midlane mages, but mages definitely contribute to the oneshot meta. The mage playstyle in modern league is to abuse the very strong starter items to try to snowball and generate enough gold to buy the very expensive heavy hitter items you'll need later to carry. Which is fine in itself, but cheap, strong early items can lead to some oneshots.

 

Now, top and ADC have no real inherent advantages since their items tend to be expensive and, generally, not as good. But if either of the players in these roles happens to play significantly better than the enemy, it results in some very brutal snowballing.

You frequently see lvl12 to lvl8 as a totally normal consequence of toplane mechanics - 2 solokills turns into "cutting the enemy off from the wave and letting it die to turret" or "turret diving on cooldown". Enemy top not being able to play quickly turns into enemy jung not having access to topside jungle which quickly turns into an unplayable map.

As for ADC, they contribute to the snowball meta because they just get so much more gold than everyone else. You can genuinely be a winning toplaner with 1.5 items having taken turret and look bot and see a 3 item enemy adc who only has 2 more kills than you but basically makes you look like an ant with fully completed LDR. This doesn't happen every game - but when it happens, it happens. To top it off, not all adc champions are locked out of the powerful and cheap assassin items - Jhin, Draven, MF etc can use a couple of those items to great effect.

 

Defensive items suck. I don't think this matters as much since most snowballing occurs from killing squishies over and over again, but toplaners cannot (and do not even try to) "build defensive to tank the enemy carries" in solo queue. There is just no point. Kaenic Rookern won't save you from fed ap, Sunfire and Iceborn are very weak. All the best defensive items are situational and cheap like Frozen Heart and Protoplasm or support items like Bandlepipes. Most tanks that actually get played build what would be completely random items any other season, like Dusk and Dawn + Titanic Hydra Shen or Sundered Sky + Winters Approach Poppy. Almost nobody wants any of the actual tank items.

 

All of this contributes to people who are behind being complete fodder for whoever managed to abuse the snowball mechanics the most that game.

But fear not, there is a natural counter in the game to this. You see, you can snowball a game, but you can't actually end the game a lot of the time. This is for various reasons that I'm not going to get into much but one of them is nexus turrets respawning and another is letting people race very fast out of the base which lets them get to clearing waves and defending turrets faster. So the games don't actually end faster than they used to.

The theory is that this gives time for the weaker team to mount a comeback with all the shutdown gold they could get. However, this hasn't been my experience to be honest this season. Instead a lot of the time you'll have what I call "zombie games". 35 minute games where one team snowballs early but takes a while to end while always being ahead.

 

Anyway tl;dr cheap items and the new mechanics lead to snowbally games, tank items are weak, newer "comeback" mechanics don't work properly to mitigate snowball.

I'm one of the highest ranked Illaoi mains in the world. I was briefly the highest elo Illaoi in the world at the start of the split, peaking at 436lp and rank 1500 overall for the EUW server. I mostly play stormraiders surge on her but I also play grasp, which is objectively stronger but also boring.

Illaoi as a champion feels very dead in high elo. This is because people stand outside your range and CC and kill you, basically. Her worst matchup, Varus top, does all of these things.

Because I'm aware she's a bit of a pubstomper, I understand that people aren't interested in hearing about "Illaoi buffs" (although she does regularly get changed anyway) but I thought I'd suggest some minor touchups she could use that relate to her kit being outdated or inconsistent.

The first change relates to the distance tentacles are able to spawn from eachother in toplane. When the map was changed a while ago, it became harder to spawn tentacles opposite eachother on walls (especially near turrets on either side). The lanes are just too narrow to get the right setup a lot of the time. I'd suggest slightly lowering the required physical distance between tentacle spawns to make it easier to set up two tentacles opposite eachother.

The second change relates to what happens when Illaoi dies. When Illaoi dies currently, tentacles stop slamming the vessel (the curse lifts). However, if the person becomes the vessel after Illaoi dies, they get slammed normally, which in some situations makes it counterproductive to kill the spirit if you are going to die soon after - you might as well let your tentacles kill it later because you will get more slams that way. This is a remnant of when her curse used to be 60 seconds long. Since the curse is only 4 seconds now, I'd suggest getting rid of the curse vanishing on death, especially since it currently works pretty inconsistently.

The third change relates to tentacle spawns on Nexus turrets. Currently, if the enemy is sieging your base and will take the inhib and pressure to end, you cannot set up tentacles until they have taken the inhib (meaning you will have at most one tentacle to defend Nexus turrets). So far as I'm aware this applies to all structures that are not yet able to be attacked. I'd suggest allowing her to set up tentacles to defend the base before an inhib is taken so she doesn't get caught flat footed by a quick enemy push. She's supposed to be the "setup a zone and fight" champion but because of how the modern map works she can't do this in the base.

The fourth change is making Illaoi slams count as "ability damage". The rune which seems to make most thematic sense on Illaoi is conqueror, but Illaoi can't really stack it because her slams don't count as ability damage. If you think about it, her non-passive slam abilities don't actually get cast that often, most of her damage is done with those slams. Most fights with conqueror, Illaoi finishes stacking at the very end, which just feels like a gut punch when you get the "stacked" sound after the fight is already over. If passive slams counted as ability damage, this would help move her away from the obnoxious grasp W spam variant and give her a bit more to do in fights with conq being an option.

The last change is to how the dash version of W (non melee version) works. For those who don't understand, Illaoi has 2 versions of W, a melee version which acts as an auto-reset and the ranged version which dashes. I think it would be a good idea to make it so that if you flash during ranged W, the damage and slam effect still goes through, as if you cast the melee version. Basically you have to be careful repositioning with flash as Illaoi as it stands because you can heavily grief your own damage by flashing during the W dash windup if it's the ranged version of W you're casting. This change would help make her more dynamic in skirmishes.

Summary of the aim of the changes I've suggested: make tentacle setup a bit less clunky, make her w feel a bit less clunky with flash, reward you a bit more for killing the spirit in tight situations, give her another keystone option which she's been somewhat locked out of.