Some potential balance ideas for Super frequency and overall Meter gain

A quick disclaimer: I'm not personally attached to either these proposed changes. My feelings won't be hurt if you hate them lol. I'm just trying to brainstorm some potential solutions that might address some common complaints.

Yesterday there was a post on X/Twitter by one of the developers previewing some of the changes in the upcoming Oct 7th balance patch. And this one stuck out to me:

Fuse Changes
- Double Down and 2x Assist are too strong at the moment, so we’re bringing them down in power by reducing damage when using Double Down super and adding assist cooldowns when either fuse is “activated”, similar to Freestyle.

Most people have agreed that Double Down and 2x Assist are a bit over tuned compared to Freestyle Fuse. But for Double Down in particular, I don't know how many people were really complaining very much about needing a longer assist cooldown or double Supers dealing too much damage. Maybe there are some people who want to see those balance changes, but I've seen a LOT more posts discussing things like:

1. The abundance of meter gained and supers used frequently every round.
2. The length of some combos and super animations.
3. For double down, many players choosing to dump 2x super every combo they land due to the "use it or lose it" meter strategy encouraged by resetting back to 1 meter every new round.
4. A specific double down strategy with Jinx + Ekko/Yasuo that uses Jinx beam super into handshake tag right at round start to skip neutral and force a mix up situation (basically no counterplay to this).
5. Not discussed so much on this sub, but content creators like Sajam and others have pointed out that double down is considered the strongest fuse right now because overall meter gain is very high and double down just gives you a quick and efficient way to convert that meter into extra damage.

So at first it seems very clear that most of these issues could be solved by not having both characters start with 1 Super at round start, but many people have pointed out that the parry mechanic is also tied to super meter. So you really need 1 meter at round start to have access to parry, and this becomes very important at mid to high level play. So since that's the case, to solve the complaints above we would need a solution where we keep 1 super meter at round start, but also reduce the frequency of Supers overall.

Here are a couple ideas:

Solution #1: Whenever either character is below the default 1 Super meter (Super stock icon shows a "0"), decrease the active character's overall meter gain by 50%. (Meaning make it equal to the assist character's meter gain while on the bench). Remove this penalty if the assist character is KOed.

Right now, meter gain is not scaled when landing hits in a combo like damage is. Which means it's really easy to dump super meter near round start and build up another 100 meter to threaten another level 1 Super very quickly. But if there was a significant penalty for spending Super meter very early in the round, most mid to high level players will adjust their strategy to build up a bit more meter first rather than spending supers as a combo ender at the very first opportunity (use it or lose it strategy). If having less than 1 Super meter makes meter gain much slower, players won't necessarily want to dump that level 1 super they start with asap. Otherwise they are losing out on a lot of meter gain for the rest of the round.

This would also encourage players to learn more combos routes that end with a limit strike for higher meter build rather than always going for max damage BnB combos that can end with Supers. This should lead to more combo variety in general over the course of a round. And going below 1 super meter also means players will go longer without having access to parry again, since meter is slower to build back up with 0 supers stocked. So that's another trade off the player would have to consider if they decide to spend meter very early.

This also allows people to still use the "shoot em if you got em" Jinx neutral skip option right at round start if they really want that early advantage, but they are going to be heavily nerfing their team's overall meter gain if they do that right at round start. Because spending all of Jinx's meter asap means she and her teammate will both be building just 50% meter until she gets back to 1 full meter. (Meaning Jinx effectively needs to build 200 meter to get back to level 1 super instead of just 100 meter).

But this change would still allow players who are new to the game to just dump meter for extra damage at the start of the round if they really want to (which pulse fuse will typically do for them by default).

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Solution #2: After spending a Super, have a cool down timer of 3 - 4 seconds where the team can't build any meter at all. Have the timer start as soon as the Super animation ends. If using Double Down super, increase the cool down to 6 - 8 seconds.

Similar to the first solution, but perhaps a bit simpler to understand and a bit less punishing for spending early meter. This is also a bit more intuitive since it would work similar to the assist cooldown mechanic. Spend a super, meter build is on a cooldown, that's it. This would also nerf Jinx beam super into mix up at round start because at least that early mix up won't be building any meter if the mix up is successful.

The disadvantage to this is that it might encourage players to play more defensive and run away more often to wait out their cooldown. We already see some high level players backing off until their assist is available again, so this could compound that. This would also nerf install supers like Illaoi and Ekko pretty hard, but perhaps some kind of nerf to those is needed also?

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Like I said at the start I'm not personally attached to either of these solutions. I'm just brainstorming some potential balance changes that could help address some of the most common complaints. Which mostly seem to revolve around watching too many super animations each round, gaining/spending too much meter each round, and some cheap/abused tactics with double down fuse.