Talk:Flash/@comment-15667791-20131120214457

Flash is simply an OP part of a game like this, and that's why everyone uses it. I remember when a similar thing came out in DotA; Kellen's Dagger or something, forget the name. Cost a huge chunk of money, plus took up an item slot like poor Viktor, gave zero stats, but you got a free flash on it. Within no time the thing had to be nerfed pretty good, making it unusable for 5 seconds after being attacked.

Flash takes all the mechanics that this game works toward and rips them apart at the seams, especially AOE ultimates. Jarvan's ultimate could be reduced in duration and still be effective, but flash counters it insanely well. Sion's ultimate is incredibly powerful, and yet trash because he can't land attacks on too many flighty peeps. It allows flighty champions to tag on that last bit of flightiness to be truly OP, and it allows stagnant champs (think Soraka) to get an instant of flightiness and play with fewer capitalizations on their mistakes. It's a "get out of jail free" card that simply breaks the mechanics of these champions in an instant of whim, hardly a skillful manner, and while some bruisers "need" to Flash in to get the carry, the carry can just as easily string the bruiser out along teammates, which necessitates even beefier bruisers in the game.

If Flash were not in this game, characters would not need to be balanced in such a role-oriented way, as characters would have a flavor about themselves not being tied to flash, just like everyone else. Instead, we have primarily casters trying to imitate carries and supports because they can be just as effective at securing kills in bottom lane, for their flightiness is up to par with the rest of them. The other skills can be balanced somewhat easily, as none of them break the character of an individual champion's moveset. However, Flash makes basically every character play a very different game for a multitude of reasons, and it shows on crazy rebalancing where supports are thought OP because they give a tiny bit of stats to a powerhouse champion given just a tiny flavor of flightiness with flash. Pentakills should not be as easymode as they are at the moment, and yet I occasionally see stuff so OP that they can make it happen, all because we think everything should be able to fly.

I could see Flash in DotA, to be honest, as they have several CC related items that were deemed OP by LoL designers and left out; only the BotRK, Gunblade, and Rylai's have CC unique to LoL compared to DotA, to my recollection, and all of those are slows... Instead, DotA has several CC items, such as pushes and stuns on attack that have become overpowered, but for some reason, even DotA recognizes they can hold back a power like Flash. "But I need Flash to secure awesome super-skilled kills that would not otherwise happen!" Well, thanks to you, your assassin became the beefy, unkillable, over CC'd character it is now, as everyone and their grandpa has an escape mechanism for basically free.

TLDR; Congrats on OP bruisers... Flash made that possible. Carries can escape with Flash, you say? Sure, but if they get held down by another bruiser, the carry is dead, and neither bruiser has any real damage, so welcome to the League of Bruisers.