League devs claim they want Assassins to be “less about one-shotting”

Lead League of Legends Champion Designer Phroxzon took to Twitter to discuss the dev team’s goals with ability haste in relation to Assassins, and the direction he envisions hasn’t gone over well with many Assassin players.

Assassins are always a pain to balance when it comes to multiplayer titles. The archetype has a great many pitfalls, ones that can lead players to feel as if they don’t do enough damage to assassinate their target or, alternatively, that those getting assassinated die way too quickly.

League of Legends is no stranger to such balance discussions. In some metas, Assassins can feel unfair to play against and have easy one-shot combos. In others, Assassins build tanky and can still dish a ton of damage despite building bruiser items. And, at other times, Assassin items feel so weak that they get pushed out of the meta.

Balancing the class is hard, and Riot is trying to take a different direction with League’s Assassin items going into Season 14’s pre-season by being less about one-shotting and more about throwing out more abilities.

Assassin item changes spark controversy among League players

Season 13 has seen a series of sweeping changes to Assassin items. Big or small, most items have had a move away from damage and a move toward utility.

From Prowler’s Claw getting a full rework, Duskblade getting multiple nerfs, Shojin getting buffed, and many more item changes, Assassins and their items have been gradually moving away from the high damage potential of the past.

Phroxzon responded to the ongoing criticism and contributed to the conversation amongst players, claiming that Assassins may be better off if they have less one-shot capability. Needless to say, Assassin players weren’t happy.

Phroxzon detailed their design philosophy in a lengthy tweet, one that comments on the recent trend of ability haste being on many items and some of the game’s strongest champions taking advantage of items like Spear of Shojin.

“We’ve been trying to move certain classes away from damage and into other outputs (eg. Assassins using Haste instead of damage to make them more about repeatability and less about one-shotting).” said the lead designer of the direction he’d like to take Assassins.

He also spoke on the so-called “haste creep” that’s come from putting AH on so many items, but feels it’s better than Assassins having too much damage. “For assassins, we still need to find that thing that assassin players still like that isn’t haste or damage that will allow us to diversify their outputs (things like Assassins buying Umbral Glaive is good for this reason)”.

Many claim that this could take Assassins in a direction where building bruiser items is incentivized, betraying the identity of the Assassin class to be able to, simply put, assassinate a target.

It’s hard to say how League’s continued efforts to diminish the one-shot capabilities go over as time goes on, and whether the devs can find a happy medium that makes Assassin players happy without ruining the lives of, say, an ADC player who’s susceptible to getting one-shot.

As if the balance team didn’t have enough balance nightmares on their hands considering what players are doing with AD Ahri at the moment.