Why League Of Legends' Ryze Is So Difficult To Balance

Ryze was one of the original champions created for League of Legends, and when you've been around as long as he has, you've seen quite a few changes. Sion, Warwick, and other champs that were released initially alongside Ryze have gone through their fair share of updates and reworks throughout the years since the game's 2009 release, but Ryze's character has been elevated to meme tier when it comes to reworks with every champion reveal jokingly referred to as another iteration of the Rune Mage. He's proven to be a difficult champion to balance throughout his forms, and Rioters addressed why that's the case.

"Ryze has been a hard champion to balance due to things about his kit that make him perform much better in some circumstances than in others," explained Meddler, the lead gameplay designer for League of Legends.

Within the Ask Riot post about the mid lane mage, Meddler explained in more detail the parts of Ryze's kit that makes him tough to balance. Interestingly enough, one of Ryze's main difficulties he faces doesn't come from his abilities or damage, but rather from the player's connection and ping as well as who's on the champion's team. Here's the three main areas that make Ryze a tough cookie to balance:

• Ryze's ult rewards team coordination heavily. He performs much better for organized teams than randomly match made ones as a result.
• Ryze gains more power from low latency server connections than most champs.
• Ryze has a long, steep mastery curve. That means that there's a much bigger than average difference between a new and an experienced player on Ryze than would be the case for most champions.

Meddler explained that if a player can take all of the above factors into consideration and find a way to successfully manage each of them, Ryze is at his strongest state. The issues then arises when they have to balance two versions of Ryze: One that has all of these factors working for the spell-flinging mage and is quite strong, and one that is missing one or more of these components and is subsequently weaker.

"If we're balancing for Ryze when he's played by an organized team, on a good connection, by someone who's played 100+ games on him however he's going to really struggle when played in a random team, with average latency, by someone who's only played a dozen games or so," Meddler continued.

The Rioter closed the explanation by stating that every champion is affected by these three factors to some degree, it just so happens that Ryze's playstyle causes them to affect him more than others, perhaps more so than any other champion.