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while they are cursed, we do want them in the game eventually, so question for my player followers: do you feel its more important that the conditional stays the same difficulty/play pattern, or that the output is an instant win? some options below

each time we pick out future champs for path, we occasionally succumb to considering the "cursed" champs: ryze, fiora, katarina they have alt win cons or go trivially infinite with relics so they'll take much more effort than other champions, but that's also what makes them so alluring

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1) same conditional, not an insta-win (but still exciting/powerful!) 2) harder conditional (scales with adventure difficulty), but insta-win 3) it's champ dependent (e.g. fiora should stay 4 kills, but ryze should stay destroy nexus) 4) abandon these designs and come up with something new

Probably most interested in 1 but would want to see some examples of payoffs in mind, kind of hard from the outside to imagine what you're cooking up that keeps me anywhere near as excited as 'win the game'

yeah it's a rough anchor to break from. examples are in the realm of current expensive/long conditional outputs: ledros, watcher, warmother's call, etc. could also see it more like a planeswalker ult: units cost 1 for rest of game. huge power jumps but you still play it out

my issue with keeping the insta-win is that because the game ends the same way every time, you need to get all of the variety out of meeting the condition. otherwise every game will feel incredibly one note

also balance would be extremely critical: too difficult and you won't even try for it, so the dream is completely lost. too easy and you're back to that one note feeling. that balance has to scale for all adventure difficulties

The easy fix: Just rewrite how Katarina/Ryze/Fiora works. I think that it is healthy for the game if you avoid easy and repetitive champs. There is also the Jinx Effect: She was overpowered at first, but now struggles to win hard adventures. You Jinxed her!

I think that for Ryze and Fiora, you could tone down the insta-win to huge board and/or resource advantage. Perhaps Fiora could just be like board advantage + face burn, while Ryze makes it so that you get like 1-2 free turns (under the idea that Ryze's kit doesn't prioritize pushing damage).

I think part of the reason Katarina is so fun to get as a support champ is because she isn’t an insta win - you have to get the right combination of cost reductions and powers (not to mention draw her), along with her avoiding dying to spells/skills. If you could replicate something like that-

As you said, what makes them so alluring is how "easy" it is to win with them, there are already very broken champions in LOR (fiddlestick, swain..) that are basically an instawin , and Fiora would not be stronger than them because she needs a lot of mana investment

Mana to protect and defend plus you still need to kill 4, and in higher difficult adventures she might not be able to kill anything... meanwhile you can literally win every turn 1 with fiddlestick, basically the right approach is let the players have fun with different wincons

those champs are more alluring for designers because they are more interesting problems to chew on; i don't think players actually like consistent FTK champs so much as they like quick rewards. also players are smart and would def break current Fiora w/ relics + even the weakest deck/powers

I see two issues that compound: rewards and reliable FTK champs. Players like rewards, but when weeklies are stacked with 5 star enemies, the optimal play is to pick an FTK champ and ignore the rules. Over time, players stop engaging with the weekly modifiers because the FTK wins anyway

Obviously it’s case by case, but for me the most important thing with LoR champs is always variety in gameplay and flavor. Does Fiora NEED to maintain the “kill four units with her and you win” loop? Probably not! However, I’d also hate for her gameplay to change in a way where her “best case” -

- or best way to play her boils down to another midrange “make your stats big and beat them down” gameplan. I’ve especially had this though with Soraka - as much as I love Star Spring, should it be in her starting deck/be her main wincon? You could easily argue no - but what I think shouldn’t be

argued is making her into another statstick or giving her the same play pattern as Tahm Kench, as opposed to giving her some sort of gameplay loop around healing. I always enjoy finding alt wincon champs as support champs, but I think keeping their differences alive at the end of the day is more

important than the exact outcome of “instantly win”. And since you brought her up good luck especially with whenever yall have to make Kat because she feels like such an impossible challenge in a completely different way from the alt wincon champs!