Revelation VR: Red Post Collection: 2/21 Mid Patch Updates, Quick Gameplay Thoughts: Feb 21, & More

Today's red post collection includes a 10.4 mid-patch updates with several balance changes, Riot Scruffy's quick gameplay thoughts for February 21st, and more!

Continue reading for more information!

2/21 Mid-Patch Updates

The 10.4 patch notes have been updated with mid-patch updates for Sona, Soraka, items, & more!

"2/21/2020 Tiamat and Ravenous Hydra Bugfix & Immolate Items, Sona, and Soraka Balance Changes

Poppy

TIAMAT AND RAVENOUS HYDRA BUGFIX: Fixed a bug that allowed Poppy to proc Tiamat's and Ravenous Hydra's Active from range

Rengar

TIAMAT AND RAVENOUS HYDRA BUGFIX: Fixed a bug that allowed Rengar to proc Tiamat's and Ravenous Hydra's Active from range

Sona

BASE ATTACK DAMAGE: 49 ⇒ 45

BASE ATTACK DAMAGE GROWTH: 3 ⇒ 2

E - SONG OF CELERITY SELF-HASTE: ~~20% (+0.03 per 100 ability power)~~ ⇒ 10/11/12/13/14% (+0.03 per 100 ability power)

Soraka

W - ASTRAL INFUSION COOLDOWN: ~~8/6.5/5.3.5/2 seconds~~ ⇒ 6/5/4/3/2 seconds

W - ASTRAL INFUSION COST: ~~50/55/60/65/70 mana~~ ⇒ 40/45/50/55/60 mana

W - ASTRAL INFUSION REJUVENATION HP COST: ~~Reduced by 40/55/70/85/100%~~ ⇒ Reduced by 60/70/80/90/100%

Immolate

BAMI'S CINDER PULSE DAMAGE: ~~6-23 (+0.02 bonus health)~~ ⇒ 6-23 (+0.01 bonus health)

BAMI'S CINDER PULSE COOLDOWN: ~~10 seconds~~ ⇒ 12 seconds

CINDERHULK PULSE DAMAGE: ~~12-29 (+0.04 bonus health)~~ ⇒ 12-29 (+0.03 bonus health)

CINDERHULK PULSE COOLDOWN: ~~10 seconds~~ ⇒ 12 seconds

SUNFIRE AND FORGEFIRE CAPE PULSE DAMAGE: ~~26-43 (+0.05 bonus health)~~ ⇒ 26-43 (+0.04 bonus health)

SUNFIRE AND FORGEFIRE CAPE PULSE COOLDOWN: ~~10 seconds~~ ⇒ 12 seconds

On the update, Scruffy also tweeted out:

"Some hotfixes coming today for 10.4 to make sure everything ends up as intended. We expect to sometimes have to follow up on changes and want to react quickly.

-Immolate mechanic slightly too strong
-Soraka top nerfed correctly, support too weak
-Sona top still too strong"

Quick Gameplay Thoughts: February 21

Here's Riot Scruffy with a quick gameplay thoughts for February 21st, including thoughts on matchmaking and ranked future, top lane impact, jungle satisfaction, and more:

"Disclaimer

These posts will often contain talk about future work we're doing, or planning to do, that isn't yet guaranteed to ship. The work or goals could change depending on what we discover, and projects mentioned may get delayed or even stopped. That said, I believe it’s important to share as much as we can even if plans may change.

Matchmaking and Ranked future

We’ve been collecting feedback and ramping up on many big and small problems that we’d like to solve around matchmaking and ranked throughout the year. After taking it all in, we’ve created a pretty exciting roadmap for the future changes we’d like to make to ranked and matchmaking over the next year. Expect a dev blog very soon with our plans for the future.

One update I do have for now is that we’re currently working on adding autofill parity to matchmaking - this means we can balance both teams to have a similar number of autofilled players on each team. Our results so far are very promising and we think we can ship this feature pretty quickly and see significant improvement.

Top Lane Impact

With our long term goal of giving top laners higher game impact (ability to carry a game) in high elo, we’re exploring a few different strategies:

Carrying through items - We have a few potential changes to core top lane items like Black Cleaver, Sunfire, and the Hydra items to give fighters and tanks some more carry power later.

Early strategic impact - The dragon creates a highly valued objective that all positions other than top have a strong ability to contest. We’re hoping to get top more integrated into the early objective game through a more powerful teleport summoner or making Rift Herald more comparable in value to dragon.

Turning leads into victories - Finding some ways to slightly amp up the payout in the early game for winning top lane can make it more comparable to the other positions. We’re exploring things like increasing melee damage to plates.

Jungle Satisfaction and Personal Power

With our long term goal of increasing Jungle satisfaction while not pushing their control over the early game too high, we’re testing a few things for upcoming patches:

Reduced Gank Power - in particular lowering the value of a gank (which is currently very high). This might sound counterintuitive for making jungle feel more satisfying, but the goal is to allow junglers to hold a bit more of the power themselves instead of donating it to their laners through ganks.

Introducing a new early game homeguards when you respawn after a death

Slight reduction in shared XP for kills by multiple champions

Slight increase in XP for solo kills (which is a small buff for invade junglers, too)

Increased farm XP

With the reduced gank power we can give junglers more XP through farming the jungle

How snowbally is the game today?

Short answer - it’s in a good state.

Long answer - one of the key game statistics that we monitor and balance systems around is the amount of snowball in the game. Over time we’ve found that there is a sweet spot where we get the core benefits from snowball that we’re looking for:

There is enough snowball that early game leads matter (if the game had no snowball, you could sit in fountain for the first 15 minutes and still win)

There is not too much snowball so that early game decides the game entirely

Some interesting data to show - This is one of our metrics that tracks how decided (snowballed) a game is at 15 minutes. The three lines shown are

Red - Large Lead - One team has a 90%+ chance of winning the game

Green - Medium Lead - One team has a 75%+ chance of winning

Blue - Even Game - No team has a 75%+ chance of winning

We’ve found that this “sweet spot” for snowball in LoL is when at 15 minutes, roughly 25% of games have large lead, 35% of games have medium lead, and 40% of games are close to even. Currently we’re seeing a pretty good state of snowball.

You can see that in the last few seasons there have been spikes and dips in snowball, and through systems changes we’ve been able to re-stabilize that game state.

Here are some factors that we commonly rely on when we want to change overall snowball a lot:

Kill gold/rewards

Early objective rewards (towers, dragon, etc)

Shutdown gold

Death timers

Thanks again for playing and engaging with us about the game. See you next time!

Scruffy
https://twitter.com/MarkYetter"

Miscellaneous

YOUR SHOP is now available on live - check it out for six discounts! Current offers expire on April 13th. You can find more information on YOUR SHOP in this FAQ.

Riot Blizz noted changes to champion recommended items lists coming to test on the PBE soon:

"here is my finalized changelist for recommended items! itll be on live in 10.5, should be on pbe on next deploy. let me know what you think!"

Riot Umbrage noted some Legends of Runeterra friend challenge XP changes coming soon:

[1] Last patch we made a change to friend challenge XP intended to curb surrender win trading. It accomplished that, but also caused a lot of unintended pain to players just looking to game with friends. We’re going to fix this in a couple steps.

[2] Short term (next patch, 0.9.1) we’ll increase friend challenge XP for both wins and losses, but keep the cap on games so players don’t feel compelled to trade again. There are better solutions, but that won’t land for several patches.