Master Yi - Working Exactly as Intended?

[TZAstrall]

Won't make any wild assertions as I'm only level 15 and haven't experienced the high end yet. But it looks like somewhere around the 5-7 kill mark, Master Yi becomes an unstoppable human blender. 10+ kills and you could just hit the surrender button right there. For a new perspective I chose to play AS him. Although I didn't dominate the game like many of the more frequent Yi players do, I always had the best K/D ratio and constantly scored the most kills. I had every tool in my belt except a really good AE attack.

It reminds me of back in the day when Ryze was my favorite champion. I loved shitting all over the other team's faces at will but I knew for the sake of game balance it couldn't possibly stay that way forever. I'm wondering if Master Yi is in the balancing crosshairs or if I should just shut up and start playing AS him?

[Sanlaven]

Master Yi is a pub stomper and doesn't become good unless he's fed, and even then all you need is a couple champions on your team with a stun and he's going to go down pretty quickly if you focus fire on him.  Like most carry champions, he only gets out of control if you let him.

[SulatamTZ]

Everyone complains about master yi but either playing as kat or twitch, I've always been alble to gank him easily, even if he was fed

[Rulan]

Just got steamrolled by a Yi who was fed early, it was a little strange that he only had 4-5 kills on me but could 2 shot me as Nasus. Maybe had a good rune setup or something, I dunno. I've seen a Yi with good runes/masteries come in and dominate early without being fed.

[TZAstrall]

Master Yi is a pub stomper and doesn't become good unless he's fed, and even then all you need is a couple champions on your team with a stun and he's going to go down pretty quickly if you focus fire on him.  Like most carry champions, he only gets out of control if you let him.

You're correct that Master Yi is a pub stomper. But given that pub games constitute the vast majority of games played, what does that say about Master Yi?

My problem with the "easy kill" scenario you mention (chain stun and gangbang) is that it will kill ANY champion, and humorously Yi is the second LEAST likely to die from it behind Kayle. If one of those stuns is mistimed Yi is long gone. And the more specific you get in creating an anti-Yi scenario, the more you're building a team not to win, but simply to counter him.

[Searyx]

Yi isn't that great in competitive games.


He drops easily to focus fire, having next to no defense.

He's an easy choice for a team to focus on first in team fights, and he has to be in melee range to even do anything (dangerous place to be for a glass cannon champion).

Exhaust hurts him more than any other champion in the game, since he's completely reliant on normal attacks.

He's not horrible at laning, if only because of Alpha Strike, but shutting him down early game with ranged/caster harassment is pretty easy.

[Harper]

I'd say that Yi's item scale is the best out of any champion in the game.  His ultimate is godmode if he's not stunned, but it's only 6 seconds.  That 6 seconds is about the time he will take to kill someone equally geared.  However, killing someone resets all his cooldowns so that he'll be able to kill a whole team very quickly if he gets the first kill in a team fight. 

Yi is a snowball champion, you have to work quickly to ensure that he gets put down fast (stuns + focus) before he puts you down fast.  However, if you shut down Yi early, he'll be pretty useless for the rest of the game.

It's a fair trade off, imo.

[TZAstrall]

Looks like you high end guys with organized groups have him figured out. And hopefully as I get better it won't be quite the issue. But I can tell you running pickup games from level 0-17 that Master Yi NOW is worse than what Ryze ever WAS.

Harper although I disagree with Yi having a fair tradeoff, I think you might have nailed it. No other champions see the exponential gains in damage output from items that Master Yi does.

[Bailon]

or play teemo with some lfe drain and attack speed.  I love eating yi's. (early that is, by late game I can't kill them in blind their life drain will still bring them from brink of death, but that is why late game you don't face a champ 1v1.  Focus team play + blind = dead yi.)  I hate Jax more than Yi always unless I buy the antijax sword.

[TZAstrall]

Just played another game, same story. This time it was the 6 kill mark. Exhaust did absolutely nothing to him - he ran right through it. I'd really like to play a game with you top level guys. I want to believe this is just a "l2play" situation and that Master Yi is on the same level as all the other champions out there.

[Torrack]

Ya, I dont know why everyone keeps saying exhaust hurts Yi, since all of Yi's power is in his Ultimate, and it makes him immune to exhaust. Yi is a glass cannon tho, and stunning/focus fire wrecks him fast. Tho, what I always do for group fights is to make sure to stay out of it at first, hit ultimate to run in so that hopefully the other team will be focused on someone else at the time/have burned stuns, target the quickest enemy champ to kill to reset cooldowns(if I get my first 4-5 items in my build, any caster goes down in about 2 seconds to Yi's Ulti), hit ulti + wuju again, and mow the rest of the other team down. It really depends a lot on if the other team makes sure to use their stuns on Yi or not.

[Searyx]

Focus fire should take care of Yi. I'm not sure what else to say about it. He is good, and awesome in some situations, but nobody playing competitively right now would argue that he's imbalanced.


if you're talking about a situation where it's "Master Yi was 12-0 and killed me in two hits!", then the problem is him being 12-0 (and your team being 0-12). Any champion is going to wreck you in that situation. If you shut him down early, he ends up being absolutely useless in the late game. I can't remember the last match I played where a Yi actually carried.

[Loote]

Focus fire should take care of Yi. I'm not sure what else to say about it. He is good, and awesome in some situations, but nobody playing competitively right now would argue that he's imbalanced.


if you're talking about a situation where it's "Master Yi was 12-0 and killed me in two hits!", then the problem is him being 12-0 (and your team being 0-12). Any champion is going to wreck you in that situation. If you shut him down early, he ends up being absolutely useless in the late game. I can't remember the last match I played where a Yi actually carried.

This. I see just as many Yi's fail as I do them own face.

However, playing with Serif could alter your perceptions about Yi. But you will be playing 4v5 most of the game, haha.

[gildis dhorentath]

Yi is great in the mid game if he's been fed, but when people start doing the big group fights in the end game (the 5 vs 5 ones) then he seems to die in 0.4 seconds.

Also; in 5 vs 5 fights, if Yi doesn't want to die early then he has to stay out of the fight and wait for an opportunity - which means it's a 4 vs 5 fight to the disadvantage of Yi's team until Yi can join in. Meaning the opportunity for Yi to engage depends on his mates winning a 4 vs 5 fight. Not that good.

[Serif]

"Rock is overpowered. Paper is fine." - Scissors.

Yi is just like any other champion. He has his counters, and his strengths. He is a carry/squishy killer, where his weaknesses are tank type heroes with disables, such as Alistar, Rammus, and sometimes Malphite assuming he's any good. Jax is probably the strongest yi counter in the game right now with his dodge and stun response to yi's fast attack speed.

There is no real problem with yi, though I agree he needed the reduction from 12% double attack to 10%. The problem is the the current matchup structure/game mode. Currently it grabs 5 people, lets them pick their champions, then throws them against 5 people randomly. Something they are working on, that will make everything much much more fair and less of a crap shoot in regards to horrible matchups, is the draft system that most dota-like games have, where the game starts, then you take turns picking heroes to counter eachother.

In the meantime, things that help against yi is not playing a team of all carries. I can't tell you how often I see 5 man teams of carries that complain about getting completely trashed by yi. That's what he does. He eats carries. Teams need a balance of hero types to be effective. Learn to play other heroes and stop chain picking ashe and katarina because you can get easy kills on them. Learn to use a support hero and your wins will likely double/triple.

As per the remark about yi's ult making him immune to exhaust, it does not. Cleanse on the other hand...

In regards to the team fight being 4v5, that isn't a very big problem assuming your team isn't completely retarded and at least damaging some one. Yi can come in and clean a whole team up if they blew all their stuns in the big fight, especially if he still has cleanse up. Some exceptions here are teemo, with his blind, tryndamere if he can scoot through some trees and be far enough away from yi for his ult to wear off before he catches up, rammus because well, he was made to put yi in his place.

Everyone likes to complain about his ult a whole bunch, which is basically trynds ult... He is invincible if you are stupid enough to try and fight him through it. Trick is to stun and run till it wears off. He'll chase, as most yi's always do cause they hate wasting their ult(spoiled by the fact that it refreshes if you get a kill), when it's about to wear, turn and smash his face. Most yi's will turn and run without ult =p. Seriously though... You don't go beating on trynd when he ults do you? No you run the fuck away and turn back around when he starts to run cause his ult is almost up. You can't use the same strategy to kill every hero... Some of them actually require just that... Strategy. LoL is more of a strategy/arena/rpg. Don't forget the first word. Strategy.

I personally think Alpha Strike is what gives any imbalance he may have if any. It makes him hard to focus. He gets an aggro wipe every fight pretty much, more than once if it's a long fight. They nerfed the range though which was a very good thing. It was admittedly just broken before the enormous range nerf.

[Harper]

Yi's ultimate does make him immune to both the exhaust slow and blind.

[Serif]

Yi's ultimate does make him immune to both the exhaust slow and blind.

No, not blind. And yes exhaust slow, but not exhaust blind. If you played a yi that was unaffected by this it's because he cleansed.

[Kanmuk_Sealclubber]

Unless they changed it recently, Highlander blocks both the blind and the slow, because they are applied at the same time.  Thus being immune to slow makes him immune to blind.  LOL mechanics had problems with dual effect abilities like that for a while.

I haven't read the patch notes in a while, though.  It might have been fixed recently.

[TZAstrall]

Just thought I would provide an update, and hopefully some interesting insight for you guys:

Now that I've moved up in levels and am usually playing with 30's, I very rarely see Master Yi anymore. And when I do he barely makes a difference. However I started a smurf account to play some low level games with my friend and sure enough there were Master Yi's running around just about every match shredding people effortlessly. Granted this was before the patch that adjusted his attack speed buff. It reminded me of my old days as a bard killing Pandemonium members geared three times better than myself simply because bard DOT songs were bugged to ignore resistances.

I don't care because I don't play at the lower levels anymore. I had almost forgotten about how much he could take a game over because I haven't even played with him in a month. But it does bring up an interesting POV for the developers: Is too much focus being placed on balancing for the top 10% of the playerbase? Is the assumption that balance for the top players trickles down into balance for everyone else? I don't think it does. I can tell you from experience that players with a low to moderate understanding of the game have no capacity to limit a character like Master Yi. So he runs around unmitigated at super speed, killing people even as they sit safely under turrets.

It's something that wouldn't make sense to you higher level players. It seems so logical that in a group context, you time your stuns and focus firepower. You can even do this without speaking with your teammates. But at level 1-15 this doesn't occur to players and the result is a champion that VERY quickly avalanches into a war machine.

[TZAstrall]

Quick note - what I described above happened the week before Yi's abilities were made additive instead of multiplicative. So maybe it's been handled.

[KacerRex]

Unless they have changed Yi since I played significantly, his ult increased his run and auto speed, and made him immune to movement/speed effects.  All i remember seeing is jumping into group fights and seeing a million "immune" messages pop up when I used it, but never a debilitating status effect.

[Jong]

But it does bring up an interesting POV for the developers: Is too much focus being placed on balancing for the top 10% of the playerbase? Is the assumption that balance for the top players trickles down into balance for everyone else? I don't think it does.

Maybe not, but you have no choice but to balance at the highest level, or else the game would be less balanced as people get better, which doesn't make any sense.  The game should be pretty well balanced for the best players; anyone below that will probably just assume that they haven't learned every facet of their champion yet.  Also there probably isn't even a way to balance at a lower level, since so much of the imbalance in low level games is derived from just plain ol' lack of skill, that at some point every champ seems OP and UP.

[The Wrath of Luxberry]

It doesn't matter who you use at lower levels... if you're a good player you will dominate. I went something like 10-2-9 with alistar yesterday on my smurf account. Our kassadin had kills but its safe to say I did most the facerolling.

[gildis dhorentath]

A good player will still get more kills with Yi than with Alistar though, in that regard champion choice does matter.

[Serif]

Even if you could do something to nerf Yi pre level 20, would you really want to? Then these new players would hit level 20 with one impression of how Yi worked, then Bam! One big Yi snowball in the face. Honestly I think Yi shines Early-mid and even more mid-late if he has been farming right. Late late game, he is much less overpowered, and just normal powered. He just farms fast enough if you are playing him right (which usually means leaving your team to fend for themselves unless they happen to be where you are) to look like he has hit late game by about mid game. This really is a practice you can apply to all carries. That's what you do in DotA. Carry farms, other team either stops him, or gets raped for letting him farm. MMORTS not MMORPG.

Yi is a very heavy handed snowball yes, but he is much less impressive in higher tier play, at least when it comes to being able to effortlessly slaughter teams. I think he teaches new players teamwork, as well as the concept of a carry.