Hypercarries in preseason can be a bit much

Preseason is a special time every year. All of us get together and try out all the new changes. I have already talked about how big this season is and how damn impressive the changes are. The game is fun to play again and it changes every time, but not everything about this patch is sunshine and roses. For the first time in years, some games simply feel unwinnable.

We’ve all been in this game over the past week. We’re playing, having a good time, winning but then boom, suddenly the game hits 35 minutes and Twitch is no longer kill-able. Three shots, you’re dead.

Things seem to be going fine in the top lane. Fiora and Wukong are just poking each other back and forth. But then Wukong hits level three, kills Fiora in seconds and backs. You come up for a gank a minute later: Wukong double kill.

Akali is relaxing in the mid lane and ...

You get the picture. There are champions in the game right now like Shyvana, Xin Zhao, Akali, Kog’Maw, Twitch, Kayn, Wukong and more that can simply get to a point where they are unstoppable. It is extremely rare in the past that a single player is able to solo carry a game. In fact, that should arguably be impossible. League of Legends is a team-based title, you have to work with your allies to win.

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But it’s preseason right now and, you know what, it’s OK. Thing are bad sometimes and great others. My fear comes when I consider if Riot will be able to tackle all of these problems. I haven’t seen many Akalis in my games, but the one or two that I have become so vicious that none of us could do a thing. A Pentakill wasn’t even a question for her. How are her stats?

According to Champion.gg, her top lane play percent is about two (1.5 for mid lane). Compare that to Twitch at seven percent and you can see a big difference. I’m confident that Twitch will get nerfed, I’m not so sure about Akali.

The problem here isn’t that these champions win every game. Champions like Akali need gold and she only has about a 50 percent win rate. The problems arise when they do get fed. Regardless of how fed a champion is they shouldn’t be hopeless. It’s hard to look at a game where one champion is up a few thousand gold and go, “Well it’s Vayne so, we can’t do anything. We can let her kill us 20 more times or surrender.”

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I have seen these kinds of champions 1 v 5 during the preseason and it is a horrifying thing to behold.

Now these problems could be solved with some simple tuning to Keystones. Almost all of these champions use either the Precision tree (where Press the Attack and Lethal Tempo are notoriously OP), Electrocute or Arcane Comet. If Riot tunes them down a bit, maybe that will solve the problem.

I have experienced more solo carries in the past week than I have in the entirety of my League play. As the preseason rages on, players are discovering the broken shit left in the patch. I had hoped that these anomalies would get hotfixed (the aforementioned OP Keystones) but it seems that I will have to settle for next weeks patch.

The preseason is a time for chaos and destruction, but no matter how prepared you are for a mess, losing to a 1-shot Assassin Kayn still feels bad.

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