User blog comment:Deshiba/No counterplay/@comment-1330314-20140515231813/@comment-1330314-20140518153915

No, the argument still holds (it's also not an argument, it's Riot's own decision), because his rework intended to put him on the same power level as every other fighter. Whether it was successful in doing so is debatable, but at least now he is capable of being balanced, whereas previously it was difficult to do so because there was very little about him that could be tuned in terms of numbers. The nerfs to, and  were justified, because they were outperforming by far most other fighters and assassins (Kha still does, to a certain extent), so their nerfs merely brought them down to the same power level as the others. By your logic, these champions would be the weakest of all fighters, which is clearly not the case. The same goes for 's upcoming rework, which from the last look we had of it made him pretty powerful (perhaps a little too much). Just because fighter champions are getting balanced or reworked now doesn't mean they're getting brought down to their future intended power level just yet. Reworks do help in making champions easier to balance, though.

Aside from the fact that Warwick's current ultimate can be interrupted by cleansing with QSS/Scimitar or using hard CC on WW himself (the suppression's a channel), his new kit makes him capable of outputting potentially far more crowd control than his current version and most junglers in general (including Vi): his ultimate stuns for 2.5 seconds, which even when reduced by Tenacity has a similar duration to his current suppress, 0.75 seconds of AoE CC which, when used in conjunction with his ultimate, can make everyone flee from his target, up to 0.5 seconds of a 95% slow on his E, plus an unspecified slow on his W that lasts after the fear. Even if you cleanse through his ult, he can still output a lot of crowd control, and the fact that it's tied to his basic abilities means he can use it far more often. You are, however, right that nothing is guaranteed anymore for Warwick, and that he has to land his abilities accurately to make full use of them. What this also means is that there's more counterplay associated to his kit, which I (and hopefully you, judging by this blog post) am all for.

However, that's not actually what's important: the bigger issue here is that you can't really compare Warwick to Vi because their playstyles are fundamentally different. Vi is a hard initiator: she ults into a fight, slams her target and generally outputs most of her power within the first five seconds. Warwick is a drain tank: even if he misses his ult, he can still go on and on, because his sustain increases as the fight progresses and he gains bonuses against low-health enemies that allows him to hunt them down. Warwick can afford to fail his ultimate, Vi can't. The other problem here is that you're looking at it completely the wrong way: sure, Vi's ult has no counterplay. By the same logic, you would be railing against, , , (also a point-and click ult, except it stunlocks the target for much longer) and , all of whom have ultimates that render the user immune to CC, provide tons of CC themselves, are point-and-click and/or are practically impossible to play against. Yet Vi is the only champion out of all these that you truly hate.

The thing is, ults with no counterplay are not necessarily bad. If you're a hard initiator, like all of the above champions, it's actually a very good thing, because you need to have a super-reliable playmaking ult that allows you to be useful in a teamfight, otherwise there would be no real point to picking any of the above characters. This is all, however, conditional upon having appropriate tradeoffs: Naut can afford to have massive amounts of CC, most of which is easy to land, because he deals very little damage himself (just like ). The rest are generally forced to build mostly tanky, otherwise they'd get blown up, and so end up not being able to deal too much burst immediately after ulting. The problem with Vi is that she doesn't quite make the tradeoff: her ult is a great playmaker, but she also has so much burst that she can easily destroy squishies with just a. The problem is not that her ult itself has no counterplay, but rather that she has too much burst to follow up with, and that's what's making you complain. If she had the same damage output as, say, Leona, you would be completely ignoring her. I don't think she needs to have her damage output lowered to those levels, but she definitely needs some damage shaved off her ultimate, and possibly the rest of her abilities.

Being able to quickly jump in and out of a fight is not a problem in itself, provided the champion's kit takes that into account and gives them clear windows of vulnerability. Reworked Kassadin does just that: he gets a free super-Flash every 3 seconds, but once he's in a fight he needs to get right up to his enemy's face to deal all of his damage, which gives the opposing team a clear window to jump on him and tear him a new one. The reason this doesn't work so well on Leblanc or Nidalee is because they fall into old Kass's problem where they're never really putting themselves at too much risk: Leblanc only needs to expose herself for a fraction of a second (usually while her target's silenced) to land her full combo before retreating to a safe range, and Nidalee can just use her mobility to keep a safe distance while chucking instagib spears from a mile away. Again, the best way to identify counterplay (or the lack of it) is to look at what you can do in a given situation, given the abilities you're evaluating, and what your enemy can do.