Ghost should not have a passive ability (and 17 other hot takes)

[left folio]

A lot of people have been complaining that, with the recent addition of dash resets on knock, that Ghost does not have a passive. I disagree, as he didn’t really have much of a passive before and was perfectly fine in terms of gameplay.
However, my title says I have 17 other hot takes, which are: I don’t believe any hunter should have a passive ability. Instead, I believe that every hunter should have passive effects on their lmb and their other abilities. This has a few benefits when done well:

1. Better clarity. Some hunters have redundant information, incomplete information, and/or too much information on their passive ability, and moving the information can make it easier to read.
2. It’s easier to teach players how to play the character. Putting a hunter’s passive(s) on important abilities can express their importance to the hunter, such as with Joule's passive.
3. It offers a new balance lever for Theorycraft. By changing whether a passive is on a basic ability or an lmb can allow them to buff/nerf different characters based on what their preferred level order is. On the other end, putting a passive on an ultimate could make the hunter weaker in the early game.
4. It makes it easier for TC to design new hunters in the long-term. Artistically, TC’s art team no longer needs to spend art resources on a passive ability icon. Design-wise, their game designers no longer need to feel pressured into trying to brute force an unexciting passive onto a hunter. Furthermore, TC could choose to have a level in the ability affect the passive component instead of the active component, which is especially useful if they decide to explore LMB upgrades again.
   The only drawbacks are that it takes time to implement the changes and that the main benefits to players could be rendered pointless if done poorly. For example, moving Myth’s passives onto her LMB would make it much harder to read because her LMB already has so much text.

As a result, I would like to spend the rest of this post exploring how each hunter’s kit would look if it was altered to no longer have a passive, and instead have their passive effects move to their abilities. Note that I aimed to change each of these hunters as little as possible, so every hunter will have their current passives by level 3 and most will have them at level 1.

#The Not-A-Real-Passive Club

• Ghost: passive removed
• Bishop: passive removed, shift CD reset moved to lmb
• Oath: passive removed, stun on wall/player hit moved to LMB and shift
• Zeph: passive removed, effects moved to lmb

These four hunters don’t really have passives, and instead slightly modify the mechanics of their original abilities with no extra gameplay attached. It’s very easy to remove their passive because they don’t have a real passive to begin with, and apart from Ghost would have much clearer information surrounding their kit without the passive.

#Just Move It to LMB

The following hunters would just have their passives moved to LMB due to a combination of their lmbs having short text and their passives having either a heavy emphasis on their lmb mechanics (independently of the previous category), unique system mechanics that cannot be easily modified when put on a leveled ability (like Void’s float or Beebo), or have an effect that works on all of the hunter’s abilities (like Void’s empowerment or Felix). I don’t feel

• Crysta
• Shrike
• Shiv (Malice as an LMB mechanic, Resolve as a passive
• Kingpin
• Felix
• Beebo
• Celeste
• Void

Side note: Crysta and Shrike might benefit in the long term if their ultimates were decoupled from their passives in some way without dramatically altering their damage.

#Edge Cases

• Joule: moved to Shift
  Joule’s passive is completely useless if she doesn’t have her shift available, and her shift is the core focus of her gameplay. Putting her passive onto her shift makes it very easy to teach players the importance of her shift in Joule’s gameplay pattern since they will now hear the sound effects on shift only when they can take advantage of it rather than hearing it all the time regardless of whether they can use her passive.

• Elluna: moved to Shift

Elluna’s passive leaves her very vulnerable if she doesn’t have her dash, so putting it on her dash helps Elluna players make the connection between the two abilities. Furthermore, Elluna’s base movement speed with a wisp is not that much higher than the movement speed of the wisps on its own, shift is something you get at levels 1 or 2 on every hunter anyways, and her passive isn’t very useful at parts of the game where your teammates are dying. Her LMB also has a long description, so I didn’t want to overload it.

• Myth: high jump moved to shift, vision on low-health hunters moved to Q

Myth is extremely weird in that she has more text on her LMB than most hunters have on their passives. Putting these effects as passives of her LMB would most likely make the ability very difficult to read.

Adding the high-jump as a passive on shift (on both Myth and Brall) helps tie her movement mechanics all in one spot, while I put the vision passive on Q partially because it has the range to take advantage of the passive (both in terms of literal range and the ability to cast over walls) and partially because the tooltip was shorter than her RMB.

• Jin: out-of-sight movement speed moved to LMB, in-combat movement speed moved to shift

I was originally going to put both of his passives on his LMB until I realized how much text his LMB and passive both have. I felt like the first part of the passive was too important as a system mechanic for him to go on a basic ability, but the second part felt appropriate, and helps focus his shift as a movement mechanic.

• Brall: high jump moved to shift, empowerment moved to LMB, heal on knock moved to Q

Brall and Hudson were both pains because their passives were so long. The only reason I moved the heal on knock to Brall’s Q is because I was afraid his other tooltips (particularly his RMB) would be too long.

• Hudson: weak spot and heal on knock: moved to LMB or RMB, armor repair moved to Q

Hudson gave me a lot of choices in how to handle his kit because every ability but passive and ult had little text on them.

Both his mouse buttons had little enough text to put two of his passives each and both have reasonable justifications for each passive. Healing on knock is a system mechanic that makes sense on LMB, but RMB already heals Hudson and it might make sense to put all his heals in one place. Similarly, his weak spot is also a system mechanic, but his RMB is the reason the weak point exists in the first place. Either works quite well.

For his passive armor repair, it makes sense to put it on Q because they have similar themes. In the same way Hudson might collect scrap to restore his armor he might collect scrap to make his barbed wire contraptions, and that connection I think makes a lot of sense. Furthermore, it doesn’t need to be on LMB because it’s unlikely that you’ll lose armor, be out of combat, and not have Q leveled at least once.

[severe kestrel]

The following hunters would just have their passives moved to LMB due to a combination of their lmbs having short text and their passives having either a heavy emphasis on their lmb mechanics
For sake of discussion: for hunters like Void whose passive has parts that have literally nothing to do with his LMB, why move their entire passive to their LMB?
Why not just give the hunters with a pseudo-passive an actual passive instead?

I feel like nuking the passive 'slot' and moving everything in it to LMB (or other abilities where applicable) would be a severe loss of clarity in multiple cases. It makes sense for a hunter like Joule, but it feels weird for someone like Void or Myth or even Hudson.

[rich path]

Just here to say I don't care if ghost gets an actual passive, I just want his mobility back :)

[sturdy fractal]

I'll never miss an opportunity to advocate for the removal of Empower - Binary & unimaginative, would straight up prefer not to have a passive

[left folio]

In the context of not having passive abilities, any passive that affects multiple abilities (like Void's empowerment) or is a system mechanic for the character (like Void's float) has to be on the LMB because they either need to be there regardless of ability order and/or needs to be there at the start of the game.

I understand what you're saying in how some hunters could have a loss in clarity by moving their passives as parts of other abilities. However, I think it benefits a majority of the roster, and you can't just give some characters passive abilities and not give them to other characters because the UI gets messy, it creates a clarity issue where players think a character is missing part of their kit when they're not, and it creates pipeline issues for Theorycraft where they have to decide whether individual hunters need a passive icon or not that could potentially waste time by making an unneeded icon or create delays because the icon isn't ready.

Further, I don't think any single hunter would have noticeable clarity issues if they put their passives on the right abilities with the right language except maybe Void, Brall, and Hudson due to the importance of Void's mechanics to his kit as a whole and the others the sheer tooltip length of their passives.

[severe kestrel]

and you can't just give some characters passive abilities and not give them to other characters because the UI gets messy
Why not give just the hunters that don't really have a passive an actual passive, then - why retool the entire cast's rulestext and hunter UI because some hunters have a fake passive?

[left folio]

Because they don't need a passive. Adding a passive where the hunter doesn't need one runs the risk of diluting their gameplay to the point where they aren't as fun to play as they are without the passive (due to how they would need to shift their power budget) and because it takes a lot more time and effort to make a new passive than it would take to change the UI.

[severe kestrel]

Because they don't need a passive
A few hunters currently having a fake passive means no one gets real passives?

due to how they would need to shift their power budget
Frankly I'm of the opinion that most of the cast needs severe power-budget review and/or reshuffling anyway, so this sounds like an absolute win in my book.

because it takes a lot more time and effort to make a new passive than it would take to change the UI.
Surely no more time and effort that it takes to design an entirely new hunter, with both new abilities and new icons.
Even then, time invested now into bringing all existing hunters up to the same level of quality would be less time spent having to fix them later on when they invariably get powercrept by future designs, no?

[meager heart]

Adding a passive where the hunter doesn't need one runs the risk of diluting their gameplay to the point where they aren't as fun to play as they are without the passive (due to how they would need to shift their power budget)

counter-point: passive abilities when done right are a great way of summarising what hunters do with their gameplay without having to take in the whole kit and consider its interactions at a macro level, it is one central tooltip for enforcing a character's unique gameplay and I am guessing you probably cannot visualise this as you don't play a lot of games with passives in as I remember from our previous discussions, but since the devs love being compared to League...

[left folio]

I played League of Legends for 4 years so I know exactly what you're talking about.

League has passives on every champion because the passives themselves are, you know, real passives. Katarina passive doesn't arbitrarily work on one ability only like Ghost passive does, she gets full resets on all her spells. Same thing with the rest of the roster: no one uses their passives to explain how a single ability works, unless something change in the past 6-7 years.

League also has multiple examples of what I'm looking for: active abilities with passive effects, such as Sion's health gain on W or Soraka's health gain on W when landing her Q. League is both an example of how to do passive abilities right and an example of how to do passive effects on active abilities right. If Supervive isn't going to do passive abilities right then they can at least do passive effects on active abilities right.

[meager heart]

right but ability specific passives are often complimentary to actual passives, like with Sion and Soraka having you know... innate passives, in addition to ability specific passives

[left folio]

Time spent changing the existing roster is time not spent on new content. Tine is a resource both scarce and in abundance, and spending it designing some arbitrary passive that brings a hunter to some arbitrary standard of mechanical complexity is not time well spent.

My suggestion saves TC time in the future by reducing the time needed to create art assets, which means you benefit from having more content to play with over time.

You also talk about power creep as if Supervive doesn't have balance patches and as if a hunter with three passives is somehow stronger than a hunter without one. Power creep is an issue of balance, not an issue of design, and older designs could still be strong in the game, regardless of how many passives they have.

[severe kestrel]

and spending it designing some arbitrary passive that brings a hunter to some arbitrary standard of mechanical complexity is not time well spent.

mechanical complexity
Not what I said.

Time spent changing the existing roster is time not spent on new content
Time spent updating the current roster and fixing the problems that they have had for quite a while already is time spent not doing that in the future, freeing up time for content later.

You also talk about power creep as if Supervive doesn't have balance patches
I talk about power creep as if Supervive has not had the same design problems for years, because it has that problem and it has started to powercreep what with Saros, Crysta, and Beebo to some degree.

and as if a hunter with three passives is somehow stronger than a hunter without one.
Depending on what those passives are, yes, they absolutely can be stronger than a hunter without one.

Power creep is an issue of balance, not an issue of design
If a hunter is designed to be stronger (do more than anyone else, do it faster, etc.), that is absolutely a design problem. You can try to balance them later by tuning their numbers down, but having a superior action economy to everyone else in the game will always be an issue with the base design.

and older designs could still be strong in the game, regardless of how many passives they have.
I agree.

[stuck folio]

How do we know saros will be an example of power creep?

[severe kestrel]

ReliQ got to show a gameplay trailer. Saros has Shrike range with basically the same LMB style more team utility and infinitely better AOE damage.

[stuck folio]

Sizzle reels always inflate power levels.

[meager heart]

...and looks awfully familiar

[severe kestrel]

I was in the focus group test that test-ran an early version of him. If he turns out anything like Beebo and Crysta did after the same test, then he'll be notably stronger than how he was in testing.

[stuck folio]

Well then that's more meaningful, and not what you started with.

[meager heart]

the kit itself, the utility, that's the strong part regardless

sizzles can't hide what shit just straight up does

[severe kestrel]

Also they show damage numbers, but this may be better suited for a different thread.

[stuck folio]

Aren't numbers contingent on builds, relative leveling, etc.?

[severe kestrel]

Yes, but you can kinda back-track numbers. Also he does 801 damage on an LMB with white items and lvl 8 against a player target with no armor.
There's a physical hard-cap on how much AP he has, so that's a lot of damage coming from somewhere other than raw AP scaling.

His bomb is shown to hit un-armored player targets consistently for 700-ish damage in an AOE roughly equivalent to Shrike bird bomb.

[meager heart]

there are ways to reverse engineer equipped gear based on the UI, and Oatmeal did spreadsheet Void LMB at all charge levels last month so...

honestly just glad they're kinda implicitly forced to update the roadmap publicly I would like to see if they back away from this content cadence whilst they're overhauling half the damn game

[latent magnet]

First auto does around 300dmg so there is probably an execution mecanism like Brall RMB

[stuck folio]

Alrighty. Just seems like it's seeking the problem to despair about a character not out yet. Though in this case you're doing homework enough and have some playtest insights that there may have validity. I'd just wait two days and see how he lands personally.

[meager heart]

regardless how the fuck did we go a whole two (2) hunter releases just to end up with another bomb entity in a 20 hunter roster? like make it make sense as if they couldn't give some passives some love

[stuck folio]

Are we counting all damage aoes as bombs?

[meager heart]

damage aoes with separate health bars that can be interacted with

[stuck folio]

Huh. Guess there might be something like that based on the clips. And that's a problem for it's resemblance to the mechanics of beebomb?

[meager heart]

it's a problem in that why have we committed to monthly hunter releases when it's gonna be this samey going forward

Hudson was the last release that felt like he had his own spot in the roster

Jin felt like weeb Brall since Brall lost his Ronin inspirations

Beebo literally has a slingshot referencing other hunter projectiles

Crysta is the most generic range poke to ever range poke

and now we're back to interactable bombs again

[stuck folio]

Not sure I agree with those assessments, especially since "all the characters since hud are generic" relies on ignoring beebo's wacky as heck kit in favor of pointing out he has a reference amid one of his wacky abilities.

Like, oftentimes characters will explore similar niches or be somewhat reminiscent of each other. It's a means of making a cast less brittle (people who want to do a specific role aren't beholden to a single character's idiosyncrasies, and another style of that broad niche might appeal) and gives characters on ramps towards each other (you like x character, try y). But tc is still releasing characters like beebo whose niche and function push the cast, and none of the others have been anything like properly derivative - Jin is a melee guy with a sword, Crysta is kind of a combo mage elementalist, Saros has a gun that shoots far. I'm personally not convinced those are creative duds or complete overlaps.

[left folio]

I think your issues aren't an issue with the presence of passives and more an issue with depth in the rest of a hunter's kit, where some hunters don't have as many tools as others and suffer because of it. Passives don't change that aspect of the game, and moving passive effects onto attacks and active abilities only consolidates that information into a smaller part of their kit. More importantly, passives don't give you a greater action economy by themselves, and even if they did the changes I'm proposing wouldn't reduce that action economy and there's no guarantee that adding a passive would increase that action economy.

Hudson is the perfect counterexample to everything you stated: he has 3 passives and is quite weak (according to strong players on most tier lists I see), and none of his passives affect his action economy. Beebo is also counterexample: Beebo has a shot passive, a high action economy, and was really weak on release.

I agree that everything you said is a problem, but none of what you said is a problem that affects passive design specifically. We could have hunters with the same mechanical depth, with no loss in the tools their kit has, without needing to use a dedicated passive ability to explain parts of their kit.

Finallly, I'm sorry. I put some words into your mouth (particularly about mechanical complexity), and I'm creating a lot of friction into this conversation by antagonizing you within our conversation without even realizing it.

[left folio]

Sion's W passive is more core to his gameplay than his actual passive. His actual passive (assuming it hasn't functionally changed since his rework) is a gimmick that doesn't meaningfully contribute to his gameplay unless you use it for cheese strats, like the one I used to win a small side bracket at my university.

This brings me to the other difference between hunter passives in Supervive and champion passives in League of Legends: most of the time, Supervive uses hunter passives to point to how the hunter is supposed to be played only when it's redundant with the rest of the kit (which is at least half the roster). Heck, in Bishop's case it's the exact opposite: landing big rockets isn't the focus of her builds unless she maxes shift, and giving her a passive related to her LMB makes it harder to understand how to play her.

[rich path]

My guy has never watched TheBaus. Sion passive is core to his entire game plan in solo queue and in pro play. It is absurd to say it's only good for cheese strats.

[left folio]

There's a very reasonable argument that inting Sion is at the intersection between cheese strat and exceptional macro, as evidenced by how often TheBaus gets reported for his playstyle in spite of winning with the strategy.

This doesn't include the fact that, for the average Sion player, his passive isn't all that useful for his actual game plan unless you're doing a cheeky invade.