User blog comment:BIA-Kaboose/The Problem Behind Balance/@comment-24242333-20131211145617/@comment-24242333-20131211205919

I know that,. I probably shouldn't have used the word casual here, but well...

What I'm trying to say is that champions that do very well in the hands of very high level players gets nerfed (hard, sometimes), despite them needing a high skill to reach that level of efficiency, which that your average player that wasn't doing so well at the start may simply drop the champion because learning it would just be a massive pain.

Take Lee Sin for example. He certainly isn't the easiest champion to master. Imagine if he was suddenly nerfed (this is something that could happen someday; he is really powerful when mastered). Many players would try him, do terrrible, and then simply never play him again.

Of course the game shouldn't be balanced only casual play. If it was, Tryndamere, Akali, and in general any champion that benefits highly from the enemy team not knowing how to deal with them would be nerfed into oblivion. But I think Riot should think a bit more about it before nerfing a champion that did well, and try to see how that change things for most players as well. In the Gragas case, for example, in high level play the range nerf is probably a big drop in power while the instant activation may be closer to a quality of life change. In more modest level play (i.e mine), Gragas is now a nightmare to lane against, because I (and others) can't predict every single barrell, and with the instant activation I get hit much, much more often.