User blog:Willbachbakal/(Item Concept) Crowd Control

Disclaimer: Originally, I wanted to explain in detail my thoughts on crowd control, the many ways of mitigating or removing it, and what could be done to improve them, as an introduction, but ended up with about three pages' worth of text. I put those in two tabs you can check out below (and I recommend you do, as it explains all of the other changes here), but as an introduction, here are the general lines of what I want to address in this post:
 * CC removal is bad for the game: As long as items like or  exist, champions who are heavily dependent on long-cooldown, CC-intensive ults, such as  or, will be at a severe disadvantage. I think cleanse effects such as these need to be reworked into spell shields, which carry more gameplay and are a bit less reliable, and so can afford to be a lot more powerful and rewarding for both sides.
 * Crowd Control lacks clarity: Effects like suppression, stuns, knockups and suspension all have massive overlap in terms of gameplay and visuals, yet all interact in vastly different ways with items and other mechanics that interact with CC. We need a clearer, more unified system that streamlines all of these as much as possible to make direct visual feedback the most important element of CC, rather than the current problem of book-keeping, where several effects need to be looked up so as to determine how they interact with CC mitigation and the like.
 * Tenacity needs an overhaul: Crowd control reduction doesn't really function as a raw stat, because when stacked it devalues CC and limits counterplay more than it enables it. The Tenacity mechanic, as seen on, and , needs to change in such a way that it allows CC to remain highly valuable, but still provides adequate countermeasures against teams who stack heavy amounts of crowd control.

Removing CC Removal= {{#tag:tabber| Quicksilver Sash=

Changes

 * Total cost decreased to 1200g from 1250g.
 * Magic resistance reduced to 25 from 30.
 * Active reworked: now creates a -second spell shield that blocks the next enemy ability. 45 second cooldown.

Changes

 * Combine cost increased to 950g (total cost unchanged).
 * Active reworked: now creates a -second spell shield that blocks the next enemy ability, granting +50% movement speed for 1 second upon a successful block. 45 second cooldown.

Changes

 * Combine cost increased to 250g (total cost unchanged).
 * Active reworked: now creates a -second spell shield that blocks the next enemy ability, granting +50% movement speed for 1 second upon a successful block. 45 second cooldown.

Changes

 * New recipe: +  + 600g.
 * Cost reduced to 2400g from 2450g.
 * Mana Font passive removed.
 * Active reworked: now creates a -second spell shield on yourself and an ally that blocks the next enemy ability. 45 second cooldown.

Changes

 * Combine cost reduced to 200g from 300g.
 * Total cost reduced to 1100g from 1200g.
 * Magic resistance reduced to 30 from 35.
 * New recipe: +  + 450g (total cost unchanged).
 * Health reduced to 400 from 450.
 * Passive removed.
 * New active: now creates a -second spell shield that blocks the next enemy ability, healing for upon a successful block. 45 second cooldown.
 * Combine cost increased to 800g, from 700g (total cost unchanged).
 * New active: now creates a -second spell shield that blocks the next enemy ability, healing for upon a successful block. 45 second cooldown.
 * Combine cost increased to 800g, from 700g (total cost unchanged).
 * Combine cost increased to 800g, from 700g (total cost unchanged).

Changes

 * removed.
 * removed.
 * New summoner spell, Phase: become immune to damage and crowd control for 1 second. 210 second cooldown.

Changes

 * Passive reworked: now provides 25% crowd control reduction for 5 seconds after being affected by crowd control, stacking once more for a maximum of 50% crowd control reduction.
 * Does not apply to self-inflicted crowd control, such as the slow on or the potential stun on.
 * Crowd control effects from the same source, i.e. the same ability or item, only apply once.
 * removed.
 * removed.

Changes

 * Passive reworked: now provides 25% crowd control reduction for 5 seconds after being affected by crowd control, stacking once more for a maximum of 50% crowd control reduction.
 * Does not apply to self-inflicted crowd control, such as the slow on or the potential stun on.
 * Crowd control effects from the same source, i.e. the same ability or item, only apply once.

Changes

 * Passive reworked: now provides 25% crowd control reduction for 5 seconds after being affected by crowd control, stacking once more for a maximum of 50% crowd control reduction.
 * Does not apply to self-inflicted crowd control, such as the slow on or the potential stun on.
 * Crowd control effects from the same source, i.e. the same ability or item, only apply once.

Changes

 * Passive reworked: now provides 25% crowd control reduction for 5 seconds after being affected by crowd control, stacking once more for a maximum of 50% crowd control reduction.
 * Does not apply to self-inflicted crowd control, such as the slow on or the potential stun on.
 * Crowd control effects from the same source, i.e. the same ability or item, only apply once.

Changes

 * Tenacity and Slow Resistance removed.
 * Now grants +250 health.
 * Health removed.
 * Now grants +15 movement speed.
 * Health removed.
 * Now grants +15 movement speed.

Champions

 * : Currently grants up to 30% CC reduction when active. I think Mundo needs a rework overall, as he doesn't really present rich gameplay or a unique gameplay fantasy (he's a meatshield, but he could fulfill that role in a more unique manner). Most of his kit's power is placed into passive bonuses, including this, and I think it needs to be made more interesting and interactive overall.
 * : Currently grants 30% CC reduction for up to 5 seconds. Garen isn't really in good shape: sure, he's a great learning champion, and his recent buffs made his sustain relevant at all stages of the game, but he just doesn't do much other than bully people in lane. He's easy to counter at higher levels, and he quickly becomes irrelevant. Despite this, I'm not sure if he really needs a rework. Rather, I think he needs to be able to express his power in more unique and team-contributive ways, so removing his free Tenacity could be an opportunity to buff other parts of his kit.
 * : Currently grants up to 40% CC reduction. Irelia's been a mess since her release, and I think she has so many serious issues with her kit (unclear sustain, uncounterable damage, low interactivity) that she may need a rework or even an overhaul. However, her passive is by far her biggest problem: alone, it already makes Irelia extremely hard to deal with in teamfights, and when she builds Merc Treads she becomes nearly impossible to lock down properly by any individual champion. With Preseason 5's new itemization, she can reach 75% CC reduction, which is ridiculous, and a prime example of why Tenacity shouldn't be a stackable stat.
 * What not to remove: . Currently it grants up to 25% slow reduction. Unlike the above effects, which carry little to no gameplay, Frost Armor requires Sejuani to be in combat and does present a certain level of interaction. It's not exactly the most interesting or visible effect around, so if it were to be replaced with another bonus that accomplished a similar function (bonus movement speed, for example) I'd be all up for it. As it stands, however, I don't think Sejuani would become problematic with her existing passive, even after itemizing for Tenacity.

Masteries
The only CC reduction masteries out there are and, both in the Defense tree, and I think it would be fine to keep them. Unlike items and champion kits, which need to provide visible gameplay (in theory, at least), masteries can allow themselves to grant less visible and more passive bonuses (though, arguably, they should still be fun). With the above changes, I also think stacking CC reduction to abusive levels would be impossible (that's the goal, anyway), so keeping these would likely not cause harm. In fact, it may help out tanks and tank-oriented bruisers, who might like a bit of pre-emptive and more general CC reduction even outside of teamfights. }} Unifying CC= Right now, there are too many different ways of locking people down. There are stuns, which can be mitigated with Tenacity, and knockups, which cannot. There are also suspension effects, which look like knockups but can have their duration reduced, and Suppression effects, which look like stuns but cannot be softened. It's a big case of lack of clarity, and one I think can be solved by unifying all of these effects.

For starters, I think one big move towards clarity should be to make knockups reducible by Tenacity and cleansed by whichever abilities can still do that (,, etc.). This would make knockups identical to suspension effects (, and ), and functionally identical to stuns bar their interaction with, though the difference would be clear. While this alone would be a nerf to him, the changes I want to make to Tenacity would leave his initiation potential unharmed. The only exceptions I want to make to this is lateral displacement: its clarity depends on its consistency, and breaking that consistency with CC reduction would seriously harm its clarity and its gameplay. Aside from that, stuns and knockups would both fall into the exact same CC category, with the only difference being in visual feedback and interaction with Last Breath.

Another big change I want to make is get rid of the Suppression effect completely. A suppress is basically a stun, but implemented in such a manner that it cannot be reduced. I think the best example of how to change the effect would be : it's a silence that cannot be mitigated by Tenacity, as its application is dependent on the target standing in the AoE, and not on their itemization. Suppresses could work along the same lines, by working as stuns whose conditionals do not depend on CC reduction:
 * , and  should all stun the target as long as the channel lasts. This is pretty much the same as their current functionality (hard CC against these champions breaks the suppress), so there would be no change in gameplay, particularly as all other exceptions to suppression would be removed. These champions likely all need gameplay changes, as their CC is point-and-click and often associated with heavy damage, but this change would just remove the mention of suppression.
 * should just stun the target as long as the link between them and Skarner holds, with the link lasting seconds. Again, no gameplay change, but this would remove the need for an extraneous form of CC.
 * Not a suppress, but 's taunt, which is immune to CC, should just be tied to his channel: as long as the channel holds, all enemies in the AoE should be taunted by Galio. Again, this wouldn't really change gameplay, but it would standardize the framing of Galio's crowd control according to existing rules, instead of being another exception to look up.

Farther down the line, I think changing CC as a whole would likely lead to lower durations on super-long CC such as or. Their strength looks inflated specifically to deal with Tenacity, and in a game increasingly focused on quicker plays these overly long disables are becoming less popular, and less fun to deal with. Changes like these would likely invite further rebalancing of the champions in question (they could become more powerful elsewhere, or have more opportunities to lay down shorter CC), and I think it would be for the better. What's Wrong With CC Removal?= One of the core gameplay tenets of League of Legends is meaningful counterplay, that is, the ability to react to, mitigate, recover from or take advantage of the plays an opponent makes, in a manner that is fair to both parties. Skillshots are a great example of a mechanic with meaningful counterplay, for example, because any champion can move out of their way, which also allows them to carry enough power to have a significant impact when they land. There are two opposites to meaningful counterplay: one is just a lack of counterplay, pure and simple, which occurs when an opponent's plays are difficult or impossible to outplay to any significant degree. A good example of this would be old 's point-and-click stun, which dealt a ton of damage and was impossible to avoid once in range. These are usually easy to identify, and are being phased out of the game. Another, more subtle detractor from meaningful counterplay is non-meaningful counterplay, that is, the ability to counter a play or mechanic that does not hinge on genuine skill, gameplay, or any kind of investment approaching the one put into the original play/mechanic, and that is therefore not meaningful. This kind of counterplay is harder to identify, but usually takes the form of a hard counter: hard counters are effects that harshly impede or completely nullify another mechanic, to the point where the existence of one invalidates the other. True sight, for example, hard counters stealth by completely removing it, and Grievous Wounds (healing reduction) hard counters healing and regen by reducing them to excessively weak values. Another hard counter, and the main target of this post, is crowd control removal.

CC removal, as found on, and , is the ability to completely negate crowd control after its application. This also makes the effect a hard counter, since its use nullifies another mechanic (CC) entirely without any gameplay (i.e. the effect is just a reactive button press, rather than something you'd use in anticipation of an ability). While this hard counter potential is mostly mitigated by the effect's high cost (these actives have high cooldowns, and the items required to use them are typically expensive), this no longer applies when used against abilities that are, themselves, high-cost, namely ultimates such as, , or. Cleanse items are one of the reasons why the likes of, and  tend to not be viable in competitive play, because their biggest and most important plays (and therefore their heaviest investment) can be negated by the press of a button. However, simply removing cleanse wouldn't work, since a lot of squishy immobile champions would then get popped the moment they get locked on. To resolve this, I propose to shift the gameplay in these effects, and place the reward on anticipation, and not pure binary reaction. Basically, instead of cleansing CC, these items should offer active spell shields, which wouldn't hard-counter CC (you can't remove a stun/root/etc. once it's applied, and your opponents can anticipate your spell shield), but which in exchange could afford to be a lot more powerful, rewarding and versatile.

Another effect that ties into this is : right now, it's fallen out of favor, mainly because it can be easily replicated through items. I think it could be possible to combine it with in order to form a much cleaner, tighter summoner spell, one that would carve out its own niche without having to do more than any other spell (which is Barrier's current problem, as it's outperformed by ). What's Wrong With CC?= In a League of Legends that stresses the importance of clarity and direct visual feedback, crowd control as a system is surprisingly lacking in either, despite being core to the game. The biggest example of this is the sheer amount of CC effects that overlap, but have wildly different counters, namely stuns, suppresses, knockups and suspension: all of these hold your champion in place and temporarily remove control, but while stuns and suspension are mitigated by CC reduction, suppresses and knockups are not. All of these effects, except for knockup, can be cleansed with a, but suppression can't be cleansed with Mikael's or the Cleanse summoner spell. There is no visual differentiation between suppression and stuns bar the status indicator, or between knockups and suspension (i.e. 's bubble, 's E or 's ultimate), and they all accomplish the exact same function, yet they can't be dealt with in the same way. This creates a serious book-keeping problem, where knowledge of these effects boils down not to immediate and clear visual/gameplay feedback, but rather to looking up which effect does what and is countered by which mechanic on the wiki.

A symptom of this lack of clarity is knockup creep: out of the ten most recently released champions, eight have some kind of effect that knocks their target into the air or displaces them (the only two exceptions being and ). It's not uncommon to see team comps with more knockup than any other kind of crowd control, and so we might be seeing a form of knockup creep in the same vein as mobility creep, where most new champions have some kind of gapcloser. Just as mobility creep runs the risk of devaluing less mobile champions, knockup creep devalues typical means of dealing with CC, namely CC reduction, as well as CC that is mitigated or countered by those same means. The main reason given for this surge in knockups is that they're clearer and more easily appreciable than more "traditional" forms of hard CC, such as stuns. Effectively, what this means is that stuns and other, "older" forms of crowd control are just not clear enough, and need to be brought up to par with modern standards of clarity. What this means, in most cases, is that older champions would need to have visual updates that emphasized the visual feedback of these crowd control effects, so that they'd be as impactful as knockups. For example, 's ultimate gives very poor indication of its unique Entangle effect (you can't move or attack, but can still cast spells), as it looks exactly like a stun, whereas 's Polymorph gives amazing visual feedback, since the crowd control it exerts (silence, disarm and slow) directly relates to being turned into a harmless critter. As long as more traditional crowd control remains unclear and difficult to appreciate, knockup creep will remain a real risk.

The end goal of this, I think, should be to streamline and standardize CC as much as possible, so that there's no redundancy to effects that have the same impact on gameplay. Suppresses could easily be turned into stuns, knockups and suspension could be made the same (they look the same already), and all of these effects could follow the same rules of mitigation and gameplay, with the sole exception of their interaction with (which has clear visual indication). What this means is that knockups should be mitigated by CC reduction: while this might be a nerf to Yasuo (who could just as well have compensatory buffs elsewhere), this would also be a buff to most bruisers and tanks, who currently have a lot of trouble moving around in teamfights due to knockup creep. However, I also think Tenacity needs a redo: currently, it becomes abusive when stacked to high amounts (hello ), and when strong tends to just devalue crowd control as a whole, but it also doesn't always help in situations that involve multiple overlapping forms of heavy CC. I think it needs to be redone in such a way so that it doesn't diminish the value of initial CC, but should kick into action if multiple crowd control effects start getting piled on in quick succession: that way, bruisers and tanks could still get dealt with using well-timed crowd control, but wouldn't be shut down completely against heavy CC comps that focus on continuously locking them in place. This might also allow champions like and  to have hard CC with slightly lesser durations, since their 3-second stun/root is likely also the product of CC inflation in order to compensate for Tenacity's current 35% crowd control reduction.

The only mechanic I think doesn't need to be reduced in any situation, aside from certain ultimates, is lateral displacement (i.e. knocking targets in a certain direction), since it hinges on set distances and focuses on repositioning a target, rather than simply locking them down. There's no point in reducing this, particularly since doing so would mess up the feedback of the ability for both the champion with the displacement and the target.

What do you think? This post is a bit long, and I recommend you first look at the last two tabs to understand where I'm coming from: what's your opinion on CC as a whole? How well do you think the system works, and do you think it needs to change? If so, do you agree with the above suggestions, or would you suggest something different?