Over the Bar: The Lulu Dilemma. Help, Pix!, and Other Sad Stories.
Thank you to polarclaw for compiling the January tournament statistics; you can view his graphs right here. The LCS statistics are accurate through Week 4. Contact me on Twitter @LoLSotere if you’d like to take a look at the Lulu graphs!
Have you ever felt that a game developer purposefully targeted you and your favorite champion, nerfing an enjoyable character or class capriciously?
Most of us have been there. We convince ourselves that our extensive experience with a champion in an online game is our main reason for success, ignoring the fact that we might be playing something overpowered. Most of the time, the game’s developer has its reasons and acts based on quantifiable data. But then there are times nerfs just don’t seem to make sense.
The Lulu Dilemma occurs when a champion does not excel in anything except popularity and receives a nerf in large part because of it. The best example of this derives from the dilemma’s namesake: Lulu.
Lulu’s early game harass makes her a popular and somewhat-feared pick. It’s potent despite receiving a number of nerfs since her release. She also provides a plethora of options to teams and to the summoner controlling her. Lulu’s kit allows for a number of different options – Help, Pix! and Whimsy can be used either offensively or defensively. This allows her to choose between helping a tank initiate or helping to peel for the back line.
Simply, Lulu is fun to play. She has a cute personality and people perceive her to be a strong champion. Unfortunately, the perception of her strength outmatches the results she obtains. Lulu received the following nerfs in patches 3.01 and 3.02:
Patch 3.01 (1/31/13):
- Pix, Faerie Companion
- Damage adjusted to 9-105 from 15-87
Patch 3.02 (2/13/13):
- Glitterlance
- When cast after Help, Pix!, Glitterlance no longer gains an increased area of effect size against the target of Help, Pix!
- Whimsy
- Whimsy no longer interrupts enemy movement abilities that are already in progress
They were not major changes and her win rate has gone largely unaffected, but the question remains: Why was she nerfed to begin with?
She historically has had subpar win rates in solo queue. For the past few months, she has been comfortably below 50 percent, normally sitting at around a 47 percent win rate both before and after the nerfs. Though she is used more frequently at high level play (25 percent pick rate at platinum levels, as opposed to a 15 percent general pick rate), her win rate there does not beat averages, either. These rates are particularly telling: in general, supports receive a bit of inflation to their win percentage because the fact that there is one in the game suggests a team’s composition is sturdy and conforming to the meta (i.e. no trolls).
Her success in solo queue, lacking as it was, surely was not the reason she was nerfed. A look at tournament records suggests that she was not overbearing in competitive play, either. In fact, while she was incredibly popular throughout the course of January (being behind only Sona in number of selections), she sported a measly 40.7 percent win rate, taking the victory in only 22 of her 54 matches. In North American tournaments she was the most popular support champion, yet she only won 27.3 percent of her matches, going 6 for 22.
I was certain that after the nerfs in 3.01 and 3.02 and Lulu’s historically poor competitive performance that she would see less play. This has proven inaccurate. In particular, the North American scene still loves using Lulu and still acquires pretty lackluster results. She has been picked in 34 percent of the games in the North American League Champion Series, but has only won 40 percent of the games. In the European scene she receives less attention, being picked 27 percent of the time and winning half of those games. Instead of having one question, we’re left with two: Why do professional players value Lulu so highly, and why does Riot agree, nerfing her for it?
A function of Lulu and other champions who received similar treatment is their early game harass. Lulu has always been valued thanks to the great poke from Glitterlance, her good auto-attack range and especially for her pushing potential, which is invaluable in 2 v 1 lanes.
It may come down to something more dastardly, though: Lulu remains popular because she is incredibly fun. You feel good when you play her, she makes highlight plays when you watch her; she’s a well-designed champion. In the end, it might just be this popularity that will continue to be her downfall.
Are there other champions who qualify for Lulu Dilemma status?
Many players were quite upset by the somewhat recent Olaf nerfs. Though never overbearing in solo queue, he does not share many of the required traits for the Lulu Dilemma. Mainly, he actually did cause problems in the professional scene, and as Xypherous explained in this thread, Olaf became stronger as the competition level increased.
A more fitting example is Ezreal. The Prodigal Explorer peaked in popularity and power thanks to buffs to his Essence Flux and the release of the Pulsefire Ezreal skin. But nerf after nerf befell him and his win rate went down accordingly. Even after he was no longer clearly the optimal choice, he remained incredibly popular. And then you come back to the dilemma, wherein a champion must be overnerfed because he is fun. There is no reason to play Kog’Maw or Miss Fortune over Ezreal unless they are significantly stronger. Ezreal has multiple skillshots, a very smooth escape and easy creeping with Mystic Shot. So he received more nerfs even following a pronounced drop in popularity and winning percentage.
Riot has an incredibly difficult task ahead of them. Newly created champions tend to feel better, be more fun and have the potential to do more because their kits frequently present more options. But how does Riot balance competitive capability with the “fun” factor at the same time? That will remain a tricky question leading into the future, and the answer may have dire repercussions to some of our favored champions.
Category: Over the Bar
About the Author (Author Profile)
Sotere is a Diamond level player that loves dabbling in all things League of Legends related. He quit his job as an attorney to focus on playing, shoutcasting, spectating, and writing about LoL.Subscribe
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In my opinion this same thing happened to Nautilus. When he was released I was very critical of his design, saying “All of his mechanics are just slight alterations of existing spells. Riot is really phoning it in.” When he was free the next week however I tried playing him AP mid for giggles and soon found that his toolkit just works so well with itself. It doesn’t matter if he does any damage at all, it’s just fun spidermanning around and landing slow, heavy feeling attacks. He was soon my favorite champ, and I immediately bought his skin as a sign of commitment. I’ll admit he was really strong for a while due to all the CC he had available. But Riot decided to fix him by nerfing his already dreadful first clear of the jungle. He can barely clear in season 3, and he has no lanes to go to because he doesn’t scale at all anymore.
Thanks for the comment! Nautilus is a tricky cookie to balance. He provides so much CC that if you give him decent clear times and some damage/tankiness to boot, there’s little reason to pick other junglers.
He has been recently overshadowed by the ‘quick-clearing’ bruisers. Hopefully he’ll have another day to shine soon. I actually don’t know how much he needs buffs after some of the other top picks are brought down to reasonable levels. Hope you get to make good use of his skin again soon!
Try him as support, he does surprisingly well there. If you get enough assists, you can be your team’s tank. Otherwise in teamfights you just stay in the back and peel for your backline.
I think Shaco was the subject of unnecessary nerfs. His Q got nerfed for the only reason that his early game ganks were strong…but that was already made up by his weak late game.
imo the lcear speeds are still managable. his q cd was so low, you could go in with grabing him, staggering blow, [insert cc from your laner here], and then you were able to pull again. it was silly
the real issue with Lulu, is that she just does too much, Sona was another character that suffered from that as well
back when Kayle was unpopular i tried to run kayle as a support and did not work bad. except that Lulu did everything she did and more
I don’t play ranked, but it’s almost impossible to want to play any support other than Lulu– except maybe occasionally Lux. Lulu’s kit is just too /fun/ to want to play anyone else, even when someone else (like Taric) might be more sensible.
I agree that the main reason for the lulu nerfs are due to how she can do it all. Janna, for instance, is much harder to punish the other team with. Many bot lane combos hit 6 and go for a kill – Janna can’t really do this, but she can usually prevent the other team from doing so.
The main reason I’m commenting though is win rate %s. Do you think it’s really fair to judge lulu based on her win% in lcs? With 9 other champions in every game, and different players/teams using her, I feel like there are too many variables. When does the sample size become sufficiently big to make up for that?
There are a lot of variables but she remains the constant in those games. I had ZeroCardinality run some numbers (our resident stats major going for his PhD) and he said that the sample size was large enough to determine that her actual win rate was below 50%.
I imagine that’s subject to some debate, but I don’t know anyone more qualified than him so I’ll go with his response.
Lulu was nerfed because Riot hates supports.
I tried out Lulu a while ago on a free week and she is just so much fun as a support. The way her Q works and the offensive/defensive options on two skills means you are always thinking about your next move. I play a lot of Taric, and maybe I have played him too much going bad to S2, but he is dull compared Lulu. With Taric I walk up and down a bush firing off the odd stun at the exact moment my ADC decides to run away waiting for the lane to end so I can have some team fight fun. No more nerfs Riot, we like having fun.