- Red Post Collection: Gameplay Changes Boards Post, Riot Games Merch Drop, & More
- Champion & Skin Sale: 8/10 - 8/13
- PBE Preview: Enduring Sword Talon & Divine Sword Irelia
Table of Contents
Quick Gameplay Thoughts: August 10
"Hi folks,
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 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
Some 8.17 balance changes
We've just finished work on 8.16. A fair bit of time at the moment's going into exploratory work on preseason as discussed earlier this week. We'll be doing some balance changes in 8.17 too though. Some things we'll be looking at below, we're also expecting some champs will probably need follow up changes after the 8.16 nerfs to burst from runes. Waiting to see where those land though before picking targets.
- Annie Buff - Getting back to this after other work delayed it. First direction tested will be increasing her AA range back to its previous values.
- Garen nerf - Garen's too strong at this point. We'll be looking to take power out in ways that nerfs him more in lower MMR, less in high, given it's low MMR that he's particularly out of line
- Yorick nerf - Same deal as Garen, targeting low MMR
- Rek'Sai buff - Not sure on details yet, likely just targeting overall power
- Lee Sin assessment - Our 8.15 changes to Lee were intended to be a slight buff, looks like they’ve potentially ended up being a slight nerf however. We’re considering some followup changes to add a bit more power to him as a result. We tested some stuff during the 8.16 dev cycle, but weren’t happy with it so concluded we’d hold off and assess again in 8.17, see where he was up to.
- Yasuo assessment - Similar deal to Lee Sin. 8.15 changes (crit items in this case) nerfed him noticeably. We looked at a buff in 8.16, but weren’t happy with the specifics we had in testing. That was an increased AD ratio on his ult. That had the benefit of addressing cases where his ult was getting outdamaged by one of his auto attacks (some bad feels) and helped push him towards heavier AD builds (versus going tanky, which cuts into his counterplay quite a lot). Had the downside of also making more of his damage front loaded however. We’ll be assessing him again during 8.17 too.
The Zoe playing against experience
We’re also doing some work on Zoe, which is less about power and more about improving what it’s like to play against her. Not certain exactly which patch that will be in yet, or what the specific changes will be. Could be 8.17, more likely somewhat later though.
Smite in champ select
Something we're doing with Nexus Blitz is making Smite a required pick for both junglers (gets put on you automatically in champ select). That's not necessarily something that'll be the case forever, but it's how we want to have for initial testing at least. We believe double jungle's optimal, but that's easy to misunderstand when first trying out the mode. We'd like to avoid early testing at least being distorted by people who aren't aware you'll want two junglers per team, hence the forcing smite.
As a follow up to that we'll also be making it so, if you're put into champ select as a jungler on SR, you'll also have Smite as one of your Summoner Spells when you join the lobby. For SR you'll be free to change it should you want to swap positions with someone else, jungle without Smite or whatever (it's a default, not a mandatory thing). Goal there is to remove cases where a player forgets to check Summoners after playing a different position the game beforehand and loads in without Smite unintentionally, putting their team at a significant disadvantage. Still figuring out exact timing on that change, shouldn't be too far away, but will be a bit later than Nexus Blitz going live.
On My Way Pings
Speaking of things that are coming soon, though not in the very next patch, we've got some improvements to the on my way ping. We'll be making it so that the ping also conveys some information about how far away the champion pinging is (really close, kinda close, really far etc). That'll happen both through different chat messages and somewhat different ping sounds. It's something we've been testing internally for a while and as you'd expect have found is helpful in coordinating ganks especially."
When asked for details on the planned Morgana & Kayle reworks, Meddler replied:
"As with most VGUs we'll be leaving the specifics until close to their release. Directionally Kayle's likely to stay pretty similar in terms of what she does, but with some of the details being different (similar power curve and playstyle, but spells changing, kinda similar style to Akali probably in terms of degree of change). Morg's unlikely to change much kit wise, there are some small opportunities for improvement there certainly, but overall she's already in a pretty good spot."
On Pyke, Karma, Lulu, Sona, and Nami, Meddler commented:
"Pyke - Seems in a reasonable spot, though tankier builds are potentially still a bit too effective. Pretty happy with how he's gone overall, especially given support assassin's a trickier space to work in.
Karma - Mini update work on her's being tested at the moment. Current focus is on seeing whether we can bring back one of her old gameplay effects that got removed in a healthy, useful way. Early days still on that, but it's showing some promise.
Lulu - Seems ok. She doesn't have the same consistency of performance some enchanters do, but tends to be really dominant and must pick when she does.
Sona/Nami - No immediate plans, watching both though. They're on the strong side, but not oppressively so to the degree they're crowding out other picks or don't have clear ways of being dealt with."
As for next year's VGU schedule, Meddler noted:
"I can't confirm for certain which VGUs we'll have next year or in what order. Can say I think it's very likely Morde is one of them though."
When asked about death recap work, Meddler commented:
"We could skip skins for a year and it wouldn't help us work on death recap - the issue there's what expertise is needed for each job. Skins are mainly artist dependent. Death Recap by contrast primarily needs engineer time. That means the trade offs we'd need to make for Death Recap work are things like working on client bugs, FPS optimization, enabling new features for game modes etc. Completely with you that Death Recap isn't in a good state, our conclusion's been that other work like that's going to improve people's experiences more (on average, certainly not for every given person) though."
When asked for details on Yorick work, Meddler replied:
"Quote:
I am interested in how you intend to nerf Yorick for lower MMR games without impacting his ability to be useful in higher MMR games?Not sure yet, investigation hasn't started yet. Couple of examples of possible approaches hat come to mind for me personally:
- Could involve shifting some power out of his summons to something that's more dependent on the player's performance. Summoned minions generally don't scale in effectiveness as much with MMR, so they have historically contributed towards low/high MMR skewing (Heimerdinger's old kit being a particularly strong example).
- Could make part of his play more dependent on mechanical execution, macro understanding or something else that tends to increase with MMR. Specific combo timings, more game state dependent pushing power etc.
It's also possible we end up just having to cut some power in general from him, depending on how things test and other demands on the team's time. Goal's to adjust power by MMR certainly, but do want to be open that, as always, it's possible we have to go with a simpler change."
Meddler noted more details on OMW pings:
"OMW pings will be back in chat."
When asked about work on starting items, Meddler commented:
"For Runes we'll be making it so you pick a stat, or possibly a couple of stats, while picking your Runes.
Starting items is a space we might revisit at some point, for this particular issue though we think we're better off just offering a direct pre game choice, avoid having to make so many different starting items to cover all the possible combinations."
Meddler gave more details on automatic smite in champ select:
"Quote:
For the automatic smite, is that getting put on D or F by default or is it going to try to be smart about it? (e.g. replacing not-flash if they had flash as one of their summoners previously.)From memory:
- Goes on the non Flash key
- Can be swapped between hotkeys on Nexus Blitz
- Can be removed entirely on SR (it's a suggestion, not a requirement there)"
Ask Riot: Victorious Skins & More
Here's this week's Ask Riot, including some of the most interesting questions recapped this week:
"It can be tough to keep up with every edition of Ask Riot, so this week, we’re recapping some of the most common, most talked about, and most… interesting questions we’ve seen this year.
Check out the previous recap post for more hot topics.
Is riot games going to follow the newest trend and add battle royale to the game?
I think to make a game in 2018, you are supposed to have some kind of Battle Royale mode.
Seriously, though, we had a really hard time even getting Hexakill to work. I’m not sure if we could get 100 or more champions in the game without a ton of engineering effort. We’d want to be pretty confident that level of investment would lead to something really fun.
On the other hand, there are some really cool things that Battle Royale does that we’d love to be able to bring to League. For example, the expectation that you probably won’t win—you’ll probably lose—is a really nice element. In League, statistically if matchmaking is working really well, you’re going to lose about half of your games. We’d love if there was a game mode where you’re there to kind of do crazy things and see how far you can get, versus just crush the enemy team, but whatever form that takes probably can’t be a Battle Royale.
Design Director, League of Legends
What method or criteria do you use to choose which champion gets the victorious skin each year?
We start looking at options for the Victorious Skin in the Spring. Making any skin takes time, but the Victorious Skin is also teased one month before it’s released. With this in mind, we need to plan ahead for the Victorious skin, especially in comparison to a normal skin.
To begin, we take a look at champions that had a big competitive impact so far that year—this is largely based on Ranked and Pro play. Once we have some ideas for potential champions, we narrow down that list by eliminating champions who:
- Already have a Victorious, Championship, or Conqueror skin. We wouldn’t do Conqueror and Victorious Karma in the same year, or Victorious Elise 2.0.
- Play the same role as a recent Victorious Skin. Since we had a top laner last season, we tried to avoid picking a top laner again this year.
- Have another skin coming out soon. We try to spread out skin content across our whole champion pool rather than drop a bunch of skins for one champ at the same time.
- Have a very small number of skins. Since the Victorious Skin can’t be attained by everyone, we don’t want that to feel like the only skin your favorite champ gets.
- Have a big balance change incoming. This is definitely the hardest criteria to figure out because balance can be fluid and we’re trying to predict the state of the game six months or so in advance.
Designer, Competitive
With the new ranked system for the new year, are you thinking of implementing a ranked system for aram too? it’d be nice to have something to say like, “look, this player is good at this mode.”
ARAM is a weird beast. If you imagine a game of SR or even TT, the hope is th
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