If they're not supposed to nerf a 55% win Malzahar, who are they supposed to nerf Karl?  Keep in mind this is a Malz that's currently competing against an OP as hell Brand.  If they nerfed the one AP Mid with a better win rate and a bunch of AD items this patch, I'd think that win rate might even get higher.

Swain and Karthus are just gross.  I don't even enjoy playing Swain, I just like demolishing people and then bragging about my Swain mechanics (called pressing R) because there's just not much fun about the champ except that he does massive damage and doesn't ever die.  He and Karthus have really high win rates right now even though they're hard countered by Brand.  Why wouldn't Riot want to take them down a bit while nerfing one of their biggest threats?

Karthus is still being played primarily by highly skilled Karthus players, very low pick rate for a supposedly really strong champion, it doesn't appear to be reliable freelo like the other mids listed.

Unless they fix that stupid DFT, they're just going to make it the only possible choice for champs with DOT's, so these are pretty tard moves regardless.

Any of about 10 other champions?

It has NEVER been the policy to nerf low playrate champions around 55% winrate, especially if they have strong counter play options.  Amumu has been sitting at ~55% winrate since season 1.  Does he suddenly need nerfs now?

Malzahar has about the same thing, but he has such a low playrate, and he is mostly played by experts, which is what inflates his winrate.  His average games played is getting towards 100, which is pretty damn high.  Champions like this have never needed nerfs, especially since there are a million ways to play around Malzahars.

If you are going to hit champions with playrates around 1% with nerfs, just delete them.  Remove them from the game.  You already had the case where only a tiny amount of mains played them, but Thunder and Riot has decided that even that was too much, and want nerfs to cut down on that playrate.  After all, we should only have people playing the chosen few champions that we see in the LCS! #LCSBigPlays

Or we could let more than a few percent of people play champions like Malz and Karthus before we nerf them, which will lead to lower winrates as nonexperts play the champs and people learn how to play against those champs (seriously, its not hard to figure out how to beat things like Malzahar).

The Malzahar nerfs pretty much only late game anyway, since he levels up W last. The deathfire nerf might hurt a bit more, but it is necessary since everyone with a DoT is pretty dumb with it right now. Seeing every mid rush Liandry's into Rylai's every game is getting a little bit ridiculous, between the massive DoT stacking, the long duration slow and the nice amount of AP/Health/MPen.

The high winrate mages getting nerfed this patch was also important since AD carries received even larger nerfs, with Statik and Longfire no longer stacking, along with a longer build up time on Essence Reaver. They also nerfed Fervor of Battle, which was looking to be a better option since crit was being taken down a notch.

Supports are also being chopped down a notch this patch with the plethora of nerfs to the resolve tree, meaning they will have a harder time peeling for ADC against the amount of damage some mages were capable of putting out.

We don't have the data that Riot has.  We have Leaguegraphs and Champion.GG which are at the core, very flawed ways of understanding how champions are balanced.  

I once saw the play history of a boosted account on Reddit.  Vi Vi Vi Vi Vi Vi Vi Vi Vi Vi Win Win Win Win Win Win Win Win down the line.  Now the build, the runes, and the masteries that booster used are the best?  Now a Vi played by someone with a lot of games is OP?  Nah.  Kinda dumb to decide what needs nerfing on the statistics based off of what Boosters and OTP Challenger Smurfs getting through Plat and Diamond IMO.

So yeah, I don't have the data to know for sure but I'll use what I can.  Right now Malz has a 5% play rate in Plat+ and a 50% - 60% win rate depending on games played.  So the Platinum version of Peter has a 60% chance to win and some guy who has hopped on the bandwagon cause he's heard Malz is OP has a 50-55% chance of winning right?  That seems off to me.

You could have used the same "May as well delete Brand!" argument not too long ago.  Brand had a higher win rate than right now last cycle but was only played slightly more than Malz is currently.  Now Brand is a top ban.  If Riot wants to get ahead of this before we start seeing Malz bans, that is fine with me.

Metagame.

You can't balance champions around their most favorable metagame without giving the meta time to adjust.

Right now, champions like Malz are in their most favorable meta possible.  It's a tank heavy meta, which is great because Malz (etc) are good against tanks.  But the tanks stack armor VERY heavily right now - to the point that many don't build any MR at all, and those that do only build it late.  So double bonus to Malz.

But champions like Malz and friends aren't heavily played enough for the meta to adjust back.  So they take advantage of the meta, but the meta doesn't change and punish their (many) weaknesses because their playrates haven't gotten high enough.

Because Riot has decided to PREEMPTIVELY nerf champions before they even get played that much, 2 things will happen:

1) The meta will become ossified.  Because champions that take advantage of the meta are nerfed before they can change the meta, the meta changes much more slowly.  That's boring, and it further enforces the same old status quo.

2) Champions with historically low playrates that get balanced around the most favorable possible meta will be complete trash tier once the meta does change.  This is especially true if they have limited tools in their kit to adjust to meta changes (HELLO MALZAHAR).  They will go down to Urgot level playrates, so diversity will get murdered.

Basically, you have to at least give champions a chance to change the meta before you nerf them.  50% winrate for new players on a champion that fits PERFECTLY into the meta is completely and totally reasonable.  If the meta were to shift at all (which it would if Malzahar and friends became too popular) that rate would drop quickly because Malz has pretty much no tools to adjust.

Also, I don't think that Riot has that many more statistical categories than we do.

The thing thats really annoying about Riot's API is that is difficult as hell to aggregate the stats that you want.  Basically, you can say that you want stats from game number 3248939485, but there is no way of knowing ahead of time if thats a normal game, an ARAM game, or a challenger ranked game.  So you have to grab about a million games to aggregate enough games to get good Plat+ player stats.  It's annoying as hell because an individual user gets like 1 call per second.

But once you get those games, I'm not convinced that Riot actually has many more stats than what they give us via the API.  They've never actually revealed any super secret extra info in their posts (and I think they would have).  So I suspect that they just have MORE data because they can aggregate it better, not more categories or whatever.

Like Brad Wong said, the nerf hammer isn't exactly coming down on these guys.  There is not a Challenger Swain main out there somewhere who will have to stop playing League because his amazing R toggling mechanics has boosted his favorite champions win rate too high and is now getting nerfed to oblivion because of it.

There is some truth to the idea that players that are highly skilled at their favorite champions boost their win rates artificially and make them look better than they are.  Just as all the bandwaggoners who are playing Brand right now are probably dragging Brand's win rate down a bit and he might actually be better than his insanely good win rate suggests?  Scary thought.

Maybe Riot's not perfect about figuring out the difference between a legitimately OP champion and one that just looks good because of the OTP's that main them or a favorable meta.  They at least acknowledge they have a hard task and don't always get it right.

They've talked about Taric and say they're not going to touch him and some other champs because he counters the AD heavy meta going on.  And Amumu is getting nerfed this patch.  Him and every other tank.  Windspeaker's no longer benefiting tanks more than other types of champions, Unyielding's getting nerfed, and the % health mastery Veteran's Scars is becoming flat which is also a tank nerf.

All the hubbub I've been reading over on reddit is dealing with the new fervor of battle changes.  Most are suggesting dumping it completely in favor of thunderlords.  Going to have to give that a go on rene, though I'm not too sure if its a good idea.  Any thoughts?  Trying to decide who I'd still go fervor on 

RE: #meta:

Thunder, i'm a bit surprised with you! You generally seem to understand Riot's ... predisposition for balancing around #LCSBIGPLAYS by allowing certain champions to have "assured viability" but being rather heavy-handed on other champs who honestly haven't had enough time in the spotlight yet.

HOWEVER: ever since the juggernaut patch, champs like Brand, Anivia and Malz have had favorable metas and correspondingly high winrates. Of course, a lot of their recent success is to do Deathfire Touch. i wish they'd just take DFT out back and shoot it rather than keeping it on life support for a few months before pulling the plug... but they probably won't be doing that.

So the "unpopular champs being strong in a favorable meta" argument is a little old. i just doubt that this meta is going to stick around... which can leave these champions in a frustrating state.

Anyway, there has got to be a midpoint between "DFT is my personal-pet and i will feel invalidated if we have to remove it from the game" and "6 months of Patron Warrior - i mean, Brand/Malz/Karthus/Anivia - followed by the Return to Cancer (#LCSBIGPLAYS)".

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@pacov:

Thunderlord is pretty bonkers and it was being used by 2 people pretty much every game... before the buffs \:

The tweaks to Fervor were making it less attractive to ADCs (specifically, the lane-bully ADCs who truly preferred it to Bloodlust), but more attractive to auto-attack bruisers such as Irelia, Jax or Renekton (though they could also go that one life-sapping one in the Defense tree if they were worried about losing lane).

Renekton still has a lot of power with Fervor due to his W applying it multiple times, and then animation-canceling with hydra for a fourth autoattack.

Oh?  Tanks are getting nerfed?  But the high winrates of Malzahar et al were due to a favorable meta in the form of strong tanks.  So they would have gone down with tank nerfs anyway just due to meta.  Its a double nerf to them.

This is the problem.  Unlike your typical #LCSBIGPLAY champs, these champs can't adapt well due to their kits, so when the meta shifts on already historically unpopular champs, you get Urgot level playrates.  Which is bad unless you want to see Lee/Thresh and the like every game.

(It's not going to end up being much of a nerf on Amumu because his winrates aren't going to go down - he wasn't dependent on the main tank item that got nerfed, and he is less dependent on the tankiness from masteries than other champs.  So if you consider meta, its not really a nerf I bet).

Yeah, I was following a discussion of some higher elo folks re: rene specifically and they were all about thunderlords now vs fervor.  Didn't make a ton of sense to me.  Old fervor it was super easy to stack up to max with auto's on creeps + the stacking effect on champs.  It just seems a little off to dump it completely in favor of thunderlords, but perhaps the damage differential is enough in their minds.  Even though you can stack fervor on champs, you still miss out on the damage as you aren't starting a fight with 10 stacks.  Still not really sure, guess I'll toy around with it a bit tonight.

I mean... I feel I do get it and I absolutely think that you and Karl are right.  Riot is very silly sometimes and you guys have great points about how they balance.  

However it just get's a little exaggerated and negative for my taste.  A 5% played Malz becomes a 1% played "Mays well erase him from the game!" because he's receiving tiny nerfs while Tanks and AD's are receiving down the line class nerfs as well as specific nerfs to the most OP champions themselves.

It all boils down to that I'm glad they're tuning down Malz before he becomes the next Brand.  How popular does he have to become before they're allowed to touch him?  Do they have to wait until Pacov starts playing him first?

No, i agree that nearly every class was nerfed this or last patc, and i'm generally relatively neutral about Malz/Anivia nerfs (except i wish they focus on DFT first), and Brand clearly needs to be tuned.

i believe that Riot wanted to "only-slightly" increase the "power budget" of all classes over the entire course of the game, but did want to specifically reduce some classes "power budget" specifically (Morellonomicon mages being the big one). Some classes got too much power (Yasuo/Trynd/Fiora), others got much less than expected (Brutalizer/Last Whisper changes hurt Zed/Talon far more than expected).

It does look like there's a lot more wholesale nerfs across the board, since the "power budget" is too high at the moment. However, i do think that Riot needs to be a little more "hands off" for low-playrate champs in favorable metas (even those who have been in favorable metas for a long time like Anivia!) unless they are actually planning on maintaining the current meta for the entirety of next season, while at-the-same-time than constantly pushing #LCSBIGPLAYS.

Urgot is... just a poorly designed champion.  He's my favorite champion, but I admit he really needs a rework.  Badly.  Shifts in the meta and item changes make him go from banned in the LCS to unplayable just like that.  He doesn't adapt well.  He's either OP or useless or a hard counter niche pick that ruins the day of people he lanes against well.  And even though he's my favorite champion I'd rather not have him in the game than ruining games.

I'm fine with a subset of champions that are Play Them Only If You Really Love Them Tier.  Not quite as shitty unadaptable kits as Urgot but kinda a hard countery if you see them in LCS something has gone very wrong type of kits.  Swain is a good example.  Swain can be okay, bad, or good.  That's fine.  If Swain ever comes too close to great, he needs to be nerfed.  Having an unkillable death bird who can point and click slow you so his massive AOE 2 second root 'skillshot' can't miss is not fun to play against at all when he's too good.

I get what you're saying though.  Riot plays favorites.  However I think you look at things too much from one perspective.  

Let me ask you this:  You feel bad for the Malz, Anivia, etc players that I getting nerfs to their champions while the Tanks they go into well are getting nerfs as well thus changing their favorable meta? A legitimate concern.  But what about the Tank players?

Some people like playing Tanks and all their champions are getting nerfed.  Decent nerfs from what I can tell, not just the love tap that Malz is getting.  Assuming Riot gets tanks to the perfect balance level (admittedly unlikely) isn't leaving the Tankbusters like Malz untouched kinda crappy, considering that they would tend to win their games against Tanks when Tanks were OP?