Kalista’s a classic case of balancing for top-level pro play conflicting with balancing for the majority of our player base. In general, we try to do our best to balance for both these populations concurrently, but when extreme outliers pop up in either general or professional play, we tend to focus in on solving the problem for that audience, sometimes at the expense of the other. In Kalista’s case, this happened with her rather extreme stretch of professional dominance at the beginning of this season. To recap, she was boasting an over 90% pick/ban rate in professional play in Season 6 when we did a set of nerfs in 6.6 (March). Despite these nerfs, she continued to see competitive play for several patches afterwards and didn’t even fall completely off the competitive radar until 6.18, seeing spot picks (mostly against Sivir) all the way up through 6.16. During this period, her overall performance slowly degraded as well, leading to the state we’re at now, where she’s finally fallen completely out of pro play and is too weak in general play to boot.

For long-term balance strategy on the character, we’re in a bit of a rough spot with Kalista. Her iconic features (unparalleled kiting, Rend trumping Smite for securing objectives, and Fate’s Call protecting your support from picks) are all uniquely valuable relative to the Marksman class. As such, we’re probably going to have to pick and choose which of these outputs get to stay and which have to go so that she doesn’t render other carries obsolete when she is viable. For reference, this is similar to the problems we run into with Azir; when your unique strengths are broad enough that they overshadow a large portion of your competition, the difference between viable and pick/ban status is either razor thin or simply doesn’t exist at all.

All that being said, we’re likely to buff Kalista (and Azir) up slightly during the preseason. They both went through Worlds without being picked, so nudging their power up to see if we can find that sweet spot where they aren’t out of line competitively while being in a better spot for the average player makes sense as our next step. If that doesn’t work out though, we will almost certainly need to re-evaluate the fundamental pieces of these types of kits so that we can balance them better for normal play without centralizing the entire pro scene around them.