[2019] The Zac ult revert as it currently exists will be a failure and should NOT go live.

Heyo, I'm Riot Maxw3ll, the designer responsible for the Zac Revert. Figured I should go through this point by point to hopefully clear some stuff up.

Knockback Distance:

The old Zac ult had a flat knockback distance that counted from their position. The way we tend to do knockbacks nowadays is to count it from character center, ie, Zac's position. This means that whether you're next to Zac or on the edge, you'll get knocked to the same point 500 units away. This helps with understanding where your target will be when they land. I have increased the knockback distance from what it started as on PBE, so you should notice some difference and you should always get knocked back at least some distance.

Number of Blobs:

This one I did change to match the E paradigm, as essentially what it does now is drop 1 blob per champion hit. This rewards a Zac who gets a huge ult off, as well as encourages players to move around in a fight and get more knock ups. The old way is certainly more DPS in 1v1s, but I'm pretty sure in team fights, R > W > instant W refresh from multiple blobs > W again is probably more damage, and certainly more AoE damage as well.

Direction of Blobs:

This one is fairly strange, since I really don't do anything different with the blob code than the other spells. It's also strange because I just used the phrase blob code in an honest to god sentence at my day job and I might spend the rest of the day reviewing my life choices. In the mean time, I'll take a look at this because I can't see at first glance why it would be different.

Flashing during Ult:

I actually tried to repro this for like twenty minutes and got nothing. It's possible I have a different version or something, but if you had a video or could tell me how to repro it, it would help a lot.

Zhonya's:

The way it worked in the old system, where Zac would continuously deal damage while stasis, in my opinion, is the bug. I generally judge this off of how embarrassed I am to explain the interaction to a player who's never seen it before (So, he's immobile and immune, but can still bounce on me and kill me?). I understand there was a fair bit of survivability here that Zac utilized in a squishier AP build. My general planis to keep an eye on AP zac and see if he needs a compensation buff, but there's enough different about the world we live in today than back then that I don't think it's worth doing without some data.

Voice Lines:

Looks like these didn't get hooked up with the rest of the sounds. I pinged our sound person. I don't know if they weren't included because we don't have them anymore or if we just forgot. No promises, but I'll follow up with our sound engineer to figure it out.

Thanks for posting, and thanks for reading!

Originally posted by Savant_PSU

Thanks for the response. Don’t take the title too harshly, I may have made it a bit more clickbaity than needed.

Glad to hear about the knockback increase. Interesting to see how things have changed, I always remembered how Orianna’s ult would pull champs a flat distance from their original location, sometimes throwing enemies in the center to further from the ball than they were originally. Anything that makes it clearly feel like a knockback rather than a knockup is fine by me. Do you know if that increase to 500 units will ship to PBE so we can test it out?

Edit: Apparently the increase mentioned above is already on PBE, but isn’t large enough the be noticeable. Still major problems with this.

I’m a little disappointed about losing blob generation while fighting a single champ or while hitting non-champs, since that was one of the major gripes after the rework was not being useful enough outside of teamfights or with the rest of his team. That said, I’ll have to recheck to see if subsequent bounces drop blobs if you hit a new champion and trigger a knockup, since I don’t think I checked for that. As long as knockups from bounces after the first also generate some blobs, this could work, but I’d really hope that some other changes can be made that specifically address his inability to fight 1v1 after 6.

If you do decide to go this route, “one blob per champion that gets knocked up” is something that makes logical sense, and a really succinct and clear way of putting it if you want some wording to put in the ability description.

The way I tested the blob drop direction was to go into PBE, drop a dummy, cast W (which sends the blobs towards the enemy), and then cast ult, and compare the drop placement. I’ll recheck later.

Losing the Zhonyas interaction makes me sad since typically non-channeled abilities like his ult wont be cancelled, and there are many champs with similar interactions, but the fact that you’re keeping an eye on bruiser and AP Zac more than makes up for it.

I’ll try to get a video of the animation bug. I was able to reproduce it on the practice tool by spamming flash during the ult, but maybe it’s only reproducible if you flash multiple times during the same ult (which obviously doesn’t affect gameplay unless Zac gets Zoe’s W sometime in the future).

I’ll try to get a video of the animation bug. I was able to reproduce it on the practice tool by spamming flash during the ult, but maybe it’s only reproducible if you flash multiple times during the

Knockback should be in there already, I added it sometime last week I think? And I made a mistake, its 400 units, which is still an increase in 100 units from what was on PBE initially, and still larger than the AoE size of the ult itself by 100.
Putting it in the description makes a bunch of sense, since it's like that for the E too. I'll probably do that, but it wont make it until 9.12.
If you do find the repro for the anim, let me know!

Thanks for writing back!

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