Consider this quick scenario. You’re playing a casual game of League of Legends as a bot lane carry. You’ve just won your lane, and now you’re heading up to the mid lane. We know, you winning lane is a bit of a stretch, but try to imagine it actually happened for once.
When you arrive, you start farming, and the enemy mid laner, a Galio, throws a Q at you. It hits, taking out half of your health bar in the process. “Wow,” you think to yourself. “He must be really fed.” This is when you glance at the scoreboard to check his record, only to find out that you’re only his first kill, and he has a single item finished.
Tragic, right? Yeah, no one wants to be chunked by a Galio Q in the current meta, but unfortunately, it’s something that happens all the time. Galio, as it turns out, is one of the most popular mid lane champions at the moment. We’re not a huge fan of where he stands right now, and it’s no secret that most players view his newly-tweaked Q as a little overtuned. That aside, he’d probably be in the meta even if he wasn’t OP, because he fits into it perfectly. And that really sucks.
Any meta that welcomes Galio as one of the most popular champions is a rough meta to be a part of. Lately, a lot of flame has been directed at the bot lane for the Lucian/Ezreal/Jhin meta that has completely taken over, but the mid lane meta is in just as tight of a spot. Galio, Cassiopeia, Kassadin, and Malzahar run the show there, and they’re all about stalling the game, avoiding fights (unless you’re top lane Cass), and eventually using their abilities to melt through carries with little issue. Unlike other mid-game scaling champions, sort of like Katarina, these champions really just need to farm and survive.
They don’t need kills to snowball, and they almost always get to their power spikes. When they arrive, it’s certain doom for almost anyone on the enemy team, since their abilities can shred through frontline tanks with ease, too. They don’t fight often, there isn’t a lot of interaction to be had by them or their enemies, and the result is a boring, slow meta that provides little room for skill expression.
So what can be done? Buffs to individual champions are out of the question because they could result in more damage being done to the meta than help. Rather, buffs could be pushed for runes or items that entice early-game fighting and a little more aggression than what’s present in the mid lane right now—Electrocute, perhaps, or a small nerf to some defensive runes that favor the stalled-out mid lane meta.
Either way, we’re hoping something happens soon.
