During the pandemic, many Riot Games employees were allowed to work from home instead of going to the company’s headquarters. And during the isolation days, the League of Legends design team, having nothing to do, came up with quite a few notable mischievous ideas.
Riot August – a core member of the League of Legends champion design team recently posted a lot of clips on his personal Twitter, revealing some super quirky ideas they had for their beloved champions (of course, these are just their own entertaining edits, similar to the powerful Nautilus version shared not long ago).
One of the most notable ideas was about W – Decoy of Wukong, which was posted right at the time when this champion’s rework was receiving quite a bit of negative feedback from the community.
Contrary to the recently announced rework version, August’s separate version provides Wukong fans with a rather interesting experience, as they witness the champion transform not into one, but two Nautilus when using W, and both units can attack enemies with their skills.
Although this is just a “playful tweak to alleviate boredom,” some gamers have taken this idea quite seriously. In fact, although Wukong has been reworked in the new version, in terms of the “Monkey King” image in the gaming world, Wukong in League of Legends is indeed just a monotonous and boring model.
Even when the decoy from W – Decoy has more effects, Wukong’s transformation ability and gameplay flexibility still cannot compare to the original model “Sun Wukong”.
On the flip side, the Riot employees’ “playful” idea turns out to be quite interesting: Wukong could transform into another champion and use any ability of that champion on enemies.
This initiative allows Wukong to become a flexible champion and possess a more unpredictable gameplay style. Moreover, it also fits perfectly with the original version, as Wukong in Journey to the West “possesses 72 transformations”, including the ability to disguise as others.
Additionally, Wukong’s transformation ability is completely different from Neeko, as he can also use the abilities of the victim and even split into two.
Of course, because this ability is too powerful, if applied in practice, the other skills would have to be slightly weakened. Perhaps this transformation ability should become Wukong’s ultimate skill instead of W, while Q should become the main damage-dealing skill, thus increasing its attack range, damage, and reducing cooldown.
Clearly, the creators of League of Legends have some extremely novel ideas about Wukong’s gameplay. However, transitioning from ideas to practical application is quite challenging, and if not careful, the balance team at Riot will surely become the subject of trolling from the community due to their somewhat “subpar” champion balance capabilities.
Perhaps for this reason, Riot has chosen a safer approach, even though the rework project for Wukong has been criticized as “half-baked”, but at least it will ensure that this champion does not exceed the limits of the balance capabilities of the developers.