Revelation VR: 1/26 PBE Update: Lunar Revel Login Theme

[Recent News: Quick Gameplay Thoughts: January 26 / Ahri Merch Announcement from Riot Games Merch / Champion Insights: Swain, the Noxian Grand General]
[WIP!] [STATUS: PBE is currently offline.]

The PBE has been updated! As we continue the 8.3 PBE cycle, today's patch includes a new Lunar Revel login theme and more tentative balance changes!

Continue reading for more information!

(Warning: PBE Content is tentative and subject to change - what you see below may not reflect what eventually gets pushed to live servers at the end of the cycle! Manage your expectations accordingly.)

A new login is up on the PBE, themed around the Lunar Revel!

[Still Image / Music]

Miscellaneous

Here's a look at the changes to Rengar's Q from SkinSpotlights:

Balance Changes

* NOTE*: The PBE is a testing grounds for new, tentative, & experimental changes. Be aware that what you see below may be relative to other changes earlier this cycle! These are not official notes.

Champions

Master Yi

Nunu
[Note: Patched to live on 1/25]

Consume (Q) damage lowered from 3/5/7/9/11 (+5 per 100 AP) to 1/2/3/4/5 (+5 per 100 AP)

Rengar

Swain

Items

!
[!]

Runes

Context & Notes

WIP

1) Here's Riot August with a Rengar changelist for 1/26:

"1/26 PBE changes (In honor of Monster Hunter: Rengar)

P -
Fixed a bug where the %AP boost on bonetooth wasn't working

Q -
Empowered Q now consumes ferocity on cast (should fix a number of bugs and feel issues)

W -
AP Ratio:: .8 >>> .7

R -
Closest enemy leap bonus:: gain 4 Ferocity >>> gain 3 Ferocity and shred the target's armor by 10/14/18 for 4 seconds.

Cool Stuff -
Tiamat now uses the Q animation
Casting Q before you leap will now cause the leap to use Q animation
We're looking into bonetooth VO spam. No updates as of yet.
Context:
Turns out bonetooth wasn't amping AP. Now it does. This terrifies me. AP Rengar had already been doing well thanks to the E ratio and Q lichbane synergy. I nerfed W AP ratio to compensate. Still worried that AP Rango may not be different enough from AD and will be "just better" if we make it viable. Will continue to validate.

Full ferocity on ult opened up some cool plays, but due to the timing of the ferocity gain (start of leap) it was messing with Rengar's ability to combo. If he wanted to cast something in air (say Bola Strike) he's be forced to empower it. Hope is that by reducing the gain to 3 it will offer more reaction time for opponents to flash while at the same time opening up a lot of creative combos that will make Rengar feel better as well (air skill into empowered skill). Still curious if ferocity is a good direction for the R. Iteration continues.

Added an armor shred to the leap on closest bonus because we feel it is important that it empower him MORE vs. the guy he leaps on (was seeing instances of him leaping to a random tank to get the ferocity and then flashing on the ADC to murder them). Lethality Rengar has been suffering in our tests since the removal of the crit/bonus damage so a shred seemed like a good middle ground to help him out. The damage isn't upfront, so he can be flashed, but his followup damage will be much stronger (due to how flat shreds/lethality synergize with themselves). Like full ferocity, this may be the wrong direction, will continue to explore and validate (feedback is appreciated).

Also noticed that people liked the old Tiamat and Q leap animations so we hooked up new ones with the assets we have. Did we get it right? Particles look weird on Q leap right now, but if the direction is good, those can be cleaned up in the future."

2) Here's Meddler's quick gameplay thoughts for January 26th, covering Precision stats, Bot late in mid-season, & more:

"Hey all,

Usual Disclaimers

These posts will often contain talk about future work we're doing, or planning to do, that isn't yet guaranteed to ship. The nature of the work could change or, depending on what we discover, projects mentioned may get put delayed or even stopped. If you'd like to see a Tweet whenever a new one of these posts goes up: https://twitter.com/RiotMeddler

Splitting Precision's Stats

At this point it's looking very likely that in 8.4 we make it so Precision splits its stats with your other tree selected. That means Precision primary/Sorcery secondary would give AS and AD, as would Domination primary/Sorcery secondary etc. Same change that was made with Resolve recently, which overall seems to have been a net positive in terms of opening up Rune choice more. It's also got the benefit that now regardless of which combination of paths you're choosing you'll get some of the primary path and some of the secondary (though with Sorc+Domination both are Adaptive AD/AP of course). Not expecting this change to address all the issues with stats in the Runes system, we do think it'll help noticeably though and is something we can change quite quickly.

While we think it will open up Precision primary to a wider range of champs it does have some downside for champions who want to take Precision secondary but don't want attack speed much. Something we'll be testing as a result is skewing the stats split towards one tree in some cases. Sorcery primary/Precision secondary in particular might end up looking something like 70% AP/30% AS, rather than the straight 50%/50% splits Resolve uses with all the non Inspiration pairings.

Mid-Season: Opening up Bot Lane

About a week back we put out a video dev diary covering some of our goals for gameplay in 2018. Worth a look if you haven't seen it:

https://nexus.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/2018/01/dev-diary-gameplay-in-2018/

One thing mentioned there I figured it would be good to talk about a bit more is our plan to open up bot lane to a wider range champions in the farming position. It's something we've been interested in, and talked about, for a long time, but haven't dedicated the needed effort to to properly support non marksmen there. That's meant a game state where marksmen have been effectively a required pick as a result. A lot of players have called us on that, in particular that we've talked of wanting to support more diversity, but haven't opened up the most consistent part of team comps.

Our biggest goal with mid-season is to change that, make it so it's a really effective choice to sometimes run a comp that doesn't have a marksmen in bot lane, or potentially doesn't have a marksmen at all. It's kind of workable at present, but we agree should be a lot more so. That's likely to involve work on items for non marksmen bot lanes, adjusting some supports so that they've got stronger synergies with non marksmen, maybe changes to things like how towers take damage even. We generally want to stay away changing individual champs so that they go bot though, this is about opening up the position to other classes, not putting mechanics on champs that are bot lane specific.

Details overall still being worked on - we're just kicking off planning and investigation right now.

It's likely that, at least initially, we're supporting a range of non marksmen in bot, but that a number of other classes still don't have a way to succeed there (e.g. a lot of mages might be effective choices there, but skirmishers not). Assuming the initial opening up worked well we'd then want to continue to gradually open the position up over time.

Spell Agro Fallout

Very early days on this (writing when we've only seen about 12 hours of play or so). So far though it doesn't look like any champ's got hammered too hard by this change. Pantheon looks to be one of the most affected, but, at least off early data and observation seems to be a fairly mild power loss still. More thoughts to follow once the change has been out for a decent amount of time, no compensation changes planned yet at least though."

Check out [THIS PAGE] for a comprehensive list of the new content & changes currently on the PBE as a part of this cycle or catch up with the individual update links below !