the thing about qss is that as it stands it's a bad defensive item because of how ubiquitous it is. the game's at a point where you buy the item regardless of the enemy team having cc, zed or fiora, adcs just buy it every game because cleanse and a bunch of ad and lifesteal why the hell not!
and that's not how defensive itemization works, defense items are meant to be reactive and very game dependant
if you don't, then basically the game's balanced around "well at the 25m mark every adc has cleanse" so balanced will start being balanced around that. that's always been the issue with aegis, when it was first buy support every game the reality of the game was that teams at the 20m mark or whatever just had 20 more mr
so now they're saying ok qss is the item you build when enemy team has ashe, malzahar, leona, whatever. it's an anti-cc defensive item, not an anti assassin item. and it's also important cos the champions that are countered by qss right now like fiora and zed have their special effects completely nullified by a single item, while cc is a thing that can usually be applied by multiple champions in the same team, often by multiple abilities on the same champion. as lizzy if you don't space out w and ult the enemy adc can just bluff and qss your second ability, but if you try and call the bluff they might just away. that creates gameplay vs the zed thing of ok he ulted you ok no he didn't
and zed and trundle (i don't say fiora cos she's been olafed afaik) will have to be balanced around this brave new qssless world, but that's a good thing because those champions' are kind of dumb. similarly maybe it's time to buff ga again, or whatever. i think countering assassins should be a more team thing than build thing anyways so i think this is a good direction for the balance of these classes
note: zhonyas is also at fault for making champs like zed useless but it's getting its cooldown heavily nerfed and even when it wasn't stupid expensive like it is right now it never was as popular as qss is right now with adcs. the stats are good but mages don't tend to want resistances too much as they don't have the healthpools to make good use of the armor and also the active has enough risks that it's acceptable
but zhonyas might have to be looked into too, specially since it now gives cdr which makes it a much better bundle of stats than before.
edit: someone pls read this post i spent all my commute to work thinking about it lol
guinsoo is gonna be so broken on 6.9.
it's a big nerf to it, at least on ranged champions since it'll synergize worse with hurricane thanks to the aoe stuff going away
the build path part is an upgrade but tbh balancing items around awful build paths is dumb so it's a necessary change
Oooooh Sterak's and Maw shield are now the same unique passive so you can't have both, noceeee
that's really big and really appreciated
Why are they lowering the AP on it even more? It's almost at half the AP that it originally gave... Also why are Riot suddenly having CDR erections and putting it on all the new AP items?
sometimes i feel like you just wanna get mad at riot for everything
like, just think about it for a second and it'll be pretty obvious. cdr is a stat that all mids love. more spells = more dmg, more cc, more utility, etc. as a mage you live and die by your spells being off cooldown, so naturally you want as much as possible. tanks get a lot of cdr off building normal items, supports have cdr in like every item, adcs that use cdr can opt into a ton of it with essence reaver, etc.
all mids run cdr/lvl blues all the time. other classes don't do this because they have natural access through items to 40% cdr, while mages have 20% and then blue buff/lucidty but those two aren't ideal. (you could also do double morellos sometimes but they've made the cdr on it unique so that's dead)
so now you can get ap/lvl blues, flat mr, etc.
also lowering the ap on zhonyas just makes sense cos it's supposed to be a defensive item. it only had high ap to push tanks away from it but building out of fiendish codex achieves pretty much the same thing and makes more sense for you as well as makes it more affordable.
you don't build zhonyas for dmg, you build it to survive zed. lower cost, easier build path and cdr as well as still being a good chunk of ap (70 is not a ton but it's a good number) are all buffs to the item's use case
My main issue with the item update is that they've just lowered ap across the board with no new big items to make up for it, and they nerfed the zhonya active hard because I guess we can't go two patches with zed having a less then 60% winrate, rip qss as well
do you even know what the mid meta is right now?
they nerfed roa and abyssal really hard, specially on "i just wanna survive lane" champions and they gave morellos 100 ap
That would make sense if they hadn't gutted the cool down for the active
? it's not gutted, it's a super strong active (probably the strongest active in the game) that now has a reasonable cooldown that leaves a small window for your opponent to exploit vs no window
now trading zed ult for zhonyas means that you gotta play safe when there's still 30s on your zhonyas timer
