Sunday, April 6, 2014

What's wrong with Urgot? - Ultimate Suggestion

What's wrong with Urgot? Well, as of this writing, he is the least picked champion in the game right now with a pick rate of 0.4% and the lowest win rate in the game at 41.62% (lolking.net). Riot Meddler has been working on Urgot and I agree with his analysis below (from LoL General Discussion: Undeath, Terror and Acid Hunters: Let's talk Urgot)

Biggest Gameplay Problems:
  • Insufficient counterplay on Q/E combo.
  • Lot of invisible power (to be shifted to visible power and/or given better feedback to improve visibility).
  • Unclear niche, resulting in some aspects of kit creating awkward moments of play.

Initial Direction to Explore:
  • Push Urgot into more of a ranged bruiser or tough, front line AD caster role (better thematic fit, more interesting than making him more of a standard AD ranged auto attacker).
  • Find a better way of offering homing Acid Hunters that give both more counterplay options for an enemy and more opportunity for skilled use by the Urgot player, in contrast to the current binary outcome (E+QQQ or nothing, with insufficient options for either player after the initial E shot).
  • Investigate fundamentally different options for passive and ult. Both do offer some good benefits, but also generate a lot of problems, power versus satisfaction (passive) and clash with core of kit (ult much of the time) in particular. Also potentially some missed opportunities r.e. abilities that offer more gameplay and capitalize better on Urgot’s theme.

I think Meddler is on the right track, and I think Urgot's most difficult problem is his ultimate. As he said the ult clashes with the core of the kit.  It doesn't make sense for a ranged poke champion to dive into the middle of the enemy team. His ultimate is very fun and iconic though, so changing it or removing it would be sad. People have said they like that Urgot is a Bruiser/Poker, so why don't we enhance that? My suggestion is to make it so when Urgot uses his ultimate, he goes into a 'Bruiser' mode where he becomes melee for 15-30 seconds. His E and Q abilities would change during this time, so he could have moves like Decapitate maybe, which would fit his High Executioner lore better. This would also make his ultimate fit better with his playstyle because he would have a good reason to dive into the middle of the enemy team.

This doesn't address Urgot's other issues such as invisible power from E armor shred and passive, and the lack of counterplay from his Q, but I feel his ultimate is his most difficult problem to solve and there aren't that many options for it that don't involve scrapping it.

Please provide feedback and let me know what you think. Thank you.