The Lead Gameplay Designer, Riot Phroxzon, revealed some key information regarding the current state of Assassins in League of Legends and where Riot wants to take the role in the future.
Assassins in League of Legends. You either hate them or love them. But one thing is for sure, it seems to be one of the hardest classes to balance in the entire game, with it either being way too OP, or feeling like they're completely useless.
Now, Lead Gameplay Designer Matt "Phroxzon" Leung-Harrison gave some insights into the way Riot is approaching the class and what they're planning on doing in the future for them.
LoL: State Of Assassins In League of Legends Explained
In a long Twitter post, Phroxzon revealed some of the design ideas behind the state of assassins and what the balance team is looking to do. Basically, Phroxzon started off explaining how the balance team approaches assassins and how they want to balance them.
There are different combo types which players can perform, either luxury, standard or low counterplay combos. Luxury combos refer to those that work when a champ is very far ahead and often only work in lower elos.
On the other hand, standard combos are the ones that will work more consistently. Finally, low counterplay combos are those that will land, but shouldn't kill enemies unless the assassin is very far ahead.
Phroxzon explained that "assassins need to be tuned around their standard combo killing for the game to function properly" and that up until this point assassins have had to land luxury combos to get their kills rather than standard combos.
I wanted to make this post about Assassins, not to defend any specific points, but to give some more transparency for how we currently think about assassins if people want to read it.
— Matt Leung-Harrison (@RiotPhroxzon) October 2, 2023
Similar to fighters, there aren't a lot of things we can give assassins that all players are...
It’s just not possible for Ruler playing ADC to realistically die (or any other high MMR ADC) when you have to hit him with Ekko’s W, Leblanc’s QRW, Fizz R or Zed’s triple shuriken to kill him. The game’s fundamental rock paper scissors dynamics ceases to function.
To achieve a decent power level for this class, assassins should be pretty strong in the early stages of the game and then fall off in the latter half of a game. There is a discrepancy, though, with assassins feeling weak early on in higher MMR play compared to lower MMR brackets.
LoL Assassin Itemization
In the 2024 LoL Preseason, Riot will be making some big changes to itemization by removing mythic items from the game completely. To do this they will have to change a lot of items, with some, like Galeforce on the chopping block, ready to be removed.
Now assassins are in an interesting place, with the team making some key sacrifices in itemization to keep assassins from being completely OP.
Haste on Assassin items is what we use to avoid these one-shot or be one-shot metas, which allows Assassins to lean more on their utility spells and ultimates while behind, so they don’t need to be so overbearing when ahead to avoid the agency and counterplay issues associated with this.
By utilizing ability haste, instead of damage, the balance team has a clear stat they can play around with to stop standard combos from turning into low counterplay combos. Therefore, players can also distinguish between an opponent's build, with them either opting in for a lower damage, higher ability haste build rather than a low AH and high damage build.
Ideally, if a build is high Haste, it probably sacrifices some up front burst. That tradeoff may not be manifesting correctly in all places right now, but in my opinion, isn't a problem with the underlying idea, but more about specifically how it's tuned right now.
This response and explanation from Phroxzon regarding assassins and their current state and their future has landed well within the community. These explanations behind certain decisions for League of Legends patches is something the community has wanted, and the transparency is something the player base is in dire need of.
So, one thing is certain, with the removal of mythic items, assassin items will look much different going forward, but we will have to wait for the release of the preseason on the PBE server later this year to find out the exact details.