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Over the course of season 12, both Zeri and Yuumi have proven to be some of the most difficult champions to balance for the League of Legends developers.
Zeri, in particular, has seen her name on the patch list on almost every single official note ever since her release in January this year. The Zaunite has been nerfed more times than one can keep track of, but still enjoys an excessively high pick and ban rate on the professional stage.
Especially when paired with a Yuumi, Zeri can snowball out of control very quickly, and her speed and slipperiness make her one of the most difficult champions to pin down in League of Legends.
In a recent Quick Gameplay Thoughts blog post, Riot Games came clean about some of the problems they were facing while trying to balance the champions. They feel that there are primarily four values these two possess that contradict one another.
The values they pointed out are:
- Perceptions of fairness and counterplay
- Champion is exciting to play and has “high moments”
- Performance in Elite/Pro play
- Performance in Average play
The problems that arise when balancing the two champions are not linear, and there are multiple factors to take into consideration.
Why are the League of Legends developers having a tough time balancing Zeri and Yuumi?
When speaking about Zeri, Riot Games pointed out some of the key aspects of her kit and stated that the Zaunite has a very fun kit to pilot. Her highs are amazing, and her abilities allow her to kite opponents easily, setting her up to completely take over a team fight.
If played right, Zeri can avoid damage while dishing it out herself, making her incredibly hard to deal with in the late game. Riot pointed out that:
“Every champion needs to have exciting high moments or else they risk feeling boring to players and don’t end up getting playtime. Having said that, high moments often conflict with an opponent’s perception of fairness, because flashy and cool moments for one player can often feel frustrating for their opponents.”
While talking about Yuumi, League of Legends developers addressed the synergy that she has with multiple ADCs in the game.
Addressing her synergies and abilities, Riot stated:
“Looking at Yuumi, she has been very synergistic with Zeri, Twitch, and Sivir in the meta and we’ve had to nerf her as a result. We wanted to tap down some of her multiplicative, team-focused outputs from her E, and have her success be more dependent on taking aggressive action (like poking with her Q). Longer term, we think Yuumi’s laning phase performance should be more important to her success.”
League of Legends patch 12.16, which was introduced last week, brought in a significant number of changes to both Zeri and Yuumi. The update was focused around the upcoming 2022 World Championship, which looked to bring changes to some of the outliers in the game.
