Why doesn’t Riot want to add more conversion rates to LoL hero skill sets?

One player’s idea to eliminate custom builds that spoil the game. What’s wrong with it?

There are currently 161 heroes in League of Legends, and each of them generally has a specific build path, which often focuses on attack damage or skill power. Riot is already rather avoiding characters that would have more conversion rates, such as simultaneously enhancing abilities with items that provide AP and AD.

One fan began to wonder about the problem of building some champions in unconventional ways, such as Akali as a Tank or Goredrinker in the Assassin’s inventory. As an example, he mentioned Pyke, whose skill set benefits only from AD and Lethality, which effectively discourages players from building him in other ways. Why didn’t Riot take a similar approach to other champions?

Skillsets with more conversion rates

A player felt that the solution to the problem of creating toxic builds for individual heroes, which keeps recurring, would be to introduce more conversion rates to skill sets to further encourage players to build standard items.

For example, talon could get a negative hit to his AD ratios, but supplemented by adding lethality ratios. This would nerf the bruiser option which violates the rules of being an assassin and forces him to play as an assassin who has high risk and high reward. If bruiser items are too strong still, nerf AD and buff lethality, rather than buffing base stats or alternate fixes.

Each role could have one universal stat that defines the role, such as lethality for assassins, crit for adc, mana for mages, etc.

One of the Rioters – Riot phroxz0n, who is the lead designer on the League of Legends balancing team – spoke out in the comments. He replied that it would cost very little to introduce one additional conversion rate in skill sets, but looking at how many champions are in LoL, the whole thing would be really huge.

We try not to add additional ratios, because each ratio added makes the game 0.1% more complicated. Multiply this by 150 and suddenly the game becomes a lot more complicated. We only do it if we absolutely have to.

It’s already daunting to come back to League as a returning player. Imagine how daunting it is to learn League now as a new player.

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Despite the fact that the skillsets that are coming to League of Legends with the latest champions are getting more and more complex, the developers are trying not to make them even more complicated by introducing excessive conversion rates. The same goes for characters that are already in the game. The developers prefer to look at the unique situation when a non-standard build appears and address it, instead of trying to prevent them by spending a lot of time and complicating the gameplay by adding new conversions.