From the moment Senna’s first information was revealed, a champion played with position ADC and support, we could feel this was an extremely difficult champion to balance. Riot Games seems to have a team that can create extremely bizarre champions, but the balanced team doesn’t keep up with those changes and makes the game sometimes extremely uncomfortable experience.
Senna is such a champion, she has the tools to both protect herself and still deal just enough damage in combat, whatever the role. Moreover, in the League of Legends, when many positions can become the mainstay, the ADC is sometimes not the main character, Senna is the perfect champion in this form. This has pushed her win rate up too high, about 54% winrate in both the main roles in version 9.23 at every rank.
And Riot Games nerfed Senna in 9.24, but Senna is still strong and is the top pick in the bottom lane. And the player continued to ask for nerfs and modifications to the champion, but Riot Games’ Senna balancing method was only designed by a senior member of the champion balance team, Riot August shared, he was also the designer Senna.
Ask: How are you going to balance Senna so she’s good as a support but not too strong as an ADC?A
Riot August: It’s always been a goal for Senna to be playable as both a support and an ADC. To help make this a reality we added a few position-specific tuning levers to her kit during development. The primary place we’d look to tune is her Passive’s mist collection game. Mist stacks influence the power of nearly everything on Senna’s kit, and making a specific role get more or less of them has shown to have meaningful impact on that role’s effectiveness. This is why souls are less likely to drop from minions Senna kills—ADC Senna gets more gold and more items, so she needs less stacks to be effective. If ADC is too strong in the future we can make it less likely to see souls drop from cannon minions, whereas if support is too weak, we could consider upping the number of souls that drop from minions she doesn’t kill.
Other adjustments outside the passive to consider are how Senna scales with the item system. Support Senna has access to AP builds, and buffing those ratios could help her in a way that ADC Senna cares less about. ADC Senna on the other hand has an easier time saving up for big AD items like Infinity Edge, which makes adjusting her Crit Damage ratio a potent tuning lever if her carry role needs changes.
At the end of the day, we want ADC and support Senna to be close in power level, but they don’t need to have the exact same winrate. The dream is that they both feel viable without one being so strong that it requires us to destroy the other. I’m optimistic that we’ll be able to tune around and preserve both playstyles for years to come, but, if that proves impossible, we’ll prioritize support Senna over ADC.
It can be said that Riot Games designed Senna without many effects that are too bad, such as Akali, Aatrox, Irelia, this champion is too strong in version 9.23 just because her skills have the index so good. Reducing the chance of to 1.65% for the number of souls from minions made Senna the gunner weaken.
However, the consideration of reducing the chance of the soul appearing from the minions was a bit excessive. According to statistics from U.gg, Senna has significantly reduced the win rate in 9.24 and is only about 50% winrate. Perhaps having a champion with a lot of tools like Senna have such a win rate is acceptable.
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