riot has said mel still needs longterm work. but we need to talk about her identity this time.
let me preface this post by saying that this is not another post about how weak mel is, and how she’s in need of a buff. the reason why i’m posting this is because riot themselves have acknowledged that mel’s problems aren’t solely numerical.
after the recent adjustments to mel’s abilities, phroxzon admitted that the team believes that she still needs more work longterm. on top of that, in a later patch review, riot also made an important distinction: mel can be in a balanced state, yet still be in a state that is too frustrating for players. they promised that they would continue to test changes to address her “play against” without compromising her resonance and accessibility for her arcane audience (for clarity, by “accessible” i’m assuming phroxzon means keeping mel relatively easy to pick up for players coming from arcane, rather than how faithfully her kit represents her in the show).
i personally believe that mel mains should be talking about this more, because i don’t think any of her previous updates answered the fundamental question that has persisted since her release:
what is mel supposed to be?
26.3 changed a lot of individual mechanics, but it felt more like riot was adjusting everything around the fundamental problem than actually rethinking her kit as a whole. the adjustments have, rightfully, been described as lazy by many players.
rebuttal lost its universal damage immunity. Q and E became easier to avoid. her passive autos lost all significance. damage was moved around. and since then we’ve watched riot buff her, pull buffs back, adjust her again … only for them to openly admit that it wasn’t enough. so at what point do we stop moving numbers and mechanics around the same design, and actually decide what her gameplay identity is supposed to be?
and why is mel an artillery/burst mage in the first place?
another question that has not only bothered me, but many others since mel’s release.
mel has the range and safety expected of an artillery mage whilst also having a defensive ability specifically designed to punish enemies for committing important abilities onto her. those strengths cover weaknesses that would normally keep each other in check, but if rebuttal is genuinely so fundamental to mel that riot is unwilling to replace it … why was she designed as one of the safest kinds of mages to begin with?
put her reflect on a shorter range battlemage and suddenly the interaction makes a lot more sense. mel has to enter danger to deal her damage. she has an incentive to weave autos and abilities. rebuttal becomes a defensive resource that enables her to operate within a dangerous range rather than another layer of safety on a champion already attacking you from across the screen. ironically, there was a period of time where her passive encouraged exactly that. her empowered autos actually matted enough where entering AA range was worth the risk. riot themselves have discussed encouraging mel to enter auto range so opponents have opportunities to retaliate. but why did we move away from that again?
instead, so much of her power has been shifted towards landing spells and bursting someone to the point where she increasingly just feels like another variation of the burst mage formula. her passive could have supported a very distinctive sustained-combat identity: continually applying overwhelm through spells and autos, becoming more threatening the longer she successfully interacts with someone, then eventually cashing her stacks in. i’d much, much rather riot explore that than continuously trying to make artillery/burst mel coexist with rebuttal.
another thing i find strange is that if rebuttal is being preserved because it’s such a fundamental part of mel’s identity, i genuinely want riot to explain why. as i mentioned earlier, riot has specifically said that they want mel to remain resonant and accessible to her arcane audience … but if arcane resonance is important enough to constrain how much her kit can change, why does so much of arcane mel’s actual abilities and magical identity not exist in league?
mel’s magic in arcane has a very distinctive visual and thematic identity: protection, barriers, reactive magic, the way power manifests around her body, and the transformation/power-up changes associated with it are memorable parts of what people have watched. other adaptations of mel, mainly in tft and riftbound, have even played with elements of that fantasy. league instead made the centerpiece of her identity a projectile reflect, and built most of the rest of her kit around ranged damage, crowd control and detonating stacks.
i’m not saying a league champion needs to reproduce every single scene from arcane literally, because of course gameplay comes first. but riot can’t simultaneously tell us that rebuttal needs to remain because it’s so fundamental to mel, all whilst invoking resonance with arcane players as a reason to be careful with changes. they need to invite the question about WHY it was that specific part of arcane mel that was deemed indispensable.
if preserving the exact current implementation of rebuttal repeatedly forces the rest of mel’s kit to be weakened, reshaped or made less satisfying just so the champion can exist without being permanently banned, i think majority of us agree that preserving it at all costs isn’t preserving mel’s identity. it’s just preserving one mechanic, and those aren’t necessarily the same thing.
i love mel with all of my heart. her being gutted, homogenized or turned into a completely different champion is the last thing i want. but i also don’t want her kept deliberately weak because that’s the only state where the rest of league tolerates her existence. and i especially don’t want another round of “reduce this ratio, increase that ratio, move the damage from here to there” presented as some sort of solution especially when riot already knows the underlying problem remains.
if riot is genuinely considering more longterm work, i hope this time that mel mains are involved in a much bigger and pressing conversation.
what parts of mel do we actually love? what should her mage identity be? what part of arcane mel should her gameplay express? and is rebuttal in its current form worth designing the entire rest of the champion around?
similarly, u/RiotEmizery, u/Phroxz0n and u/RiotMeddler(if he happens to see this) need to start telling us what riot currently sees as mel’s intended long-term gameplay identity. because after more than a year of balancing and an update that still hasn’t settled the issue, i don’t think that answer is clear anymore.