[2021] Patch 11.6 notes

Originally posted by Mixed_not_swirled

Can Riot just accept that Karthus will never be balanced in the jungle unless it returns to a low income role and kneecap his jungling potential already? This champ is eating nerf after nerf and is becoming more and more shit in lane.

That being said that nerfs section made me really f**king excited to play league tomorrow.

Originally posted by HardstuckPlasticV

What's up Phlox,

I was just wondering what the "lower bound" is for games played (below which data generally isn't being considered for balance). For example, Swain botlane has very high winrates with very low pickrates. Does he avoid nerfs because the # of games is too small to tell for sure?

If not, what other considerations are going into the decisions for balancing these very niche picks, and are they consistently applied? For example, if Karthus jungle is balanced (leaving just the low-pickrate mid and bot roles with high winrates), would he still be nerfed this patch? Would Zilean ever get nerfed because of the midlane winrate given his current pickrate?

Even if you can't answer this now, it might be a good topic for a future dev post.

Originally posted by [deleted]

With a 0.2% pick rate.

I wonder how many of those are skilled Karthus players, and comparing that with other more popular Champs, no way it would impact the win rate numbers, right?

Originally posted by Ascedance

I was going to go and verify.. but I couldn't find any statistics on Karthus mid because his playrate for midlane is so low that u.gg and the likes don't record it any more.

When the playrates are -that- low, is it not hard to get statistically significant information out of the 3 or so people per region that play Karthus mid?

Edit : you can still see Karthus mid's stats when you specifically go to his page and sort by mid, but his pickrate is so low he's no longer listed as a midlane champion when you sort by lane.

Originally posted by Witheroverlord

Is there a way to make Karthus more fun in lane ? it might also bring down the jungle play rates.

Originally posted by ThisIsSnake

Hi /u/RiotPhlox , could you give the mana less mage mythics the same treatment as Liandries/Ludens to make them more broadly usable for extended combat ?

Right now Riftmaker is the only one really for “made for” extended combat thanks to its sustain. The other two are squarely burst + move speed, so they skew to assassins.

Would love to see the introduction of an alternative to Riftmaker. Perhaps Changes to Night Harvester that benefits extended combat in some way like a reset mechanic after staying in the combat for 10 seconds.

Just really hoping for some alternative for longer combat duration beefy AP fighters battle mages and bruisers than just Riftmaker. Doesn’t have to necessarily be a sustain item either, just some reward for staying in combat for a long time.

As a middle ground between sustain and burst, what do you think of a reset mechanic on Night Harvester to promote longer duration combat?

• I.e. SMALL % health heal on harvest procs, heal increases in power after 8 seconds of combat (Passive: Reap),
• All enemy harvest orbs reset (respawn) if you remain in continual combat for 10/15 seconds of combat (Passive: Sow).
• Maybe the harvest stacks themselves would do less damage to compensate? Or lower base damage but higher AP Ratio?
• You 'reap' what you 'sow' :D

Goal: Keep the item where it is as a cool multi-kill themed AP Mythic, but promote its use by longer duration battle mages, fighters and bruisers with the heal + potential for harvest stack resets and heals if you go long in a fight.

Thanks!

Originally posted by xLawling

we both know it's a lie. last patch they said "waiting for stats bug ended" and on that same patch I got hit with the most huge waiting for stats streak ever. Like 3 games in a row

Originally posted by Djinn_in_Tonic

Out of curiosity, how much of that do you feel is due to Riftmaker's design, and how much do you think that might be due to the general lack of items like Riftmaker in the past causing champion design to skew away from spaces Riftmaker might appeal to?

Looking at AD vs. AP bruisers, most AP bruiser-types (Gragas, Rumble, Sylas, Diana, Cho'Gath, Swain) tend to end up favoring burstier builds or solid tank builds, and my opinion for a while has been that the inflexibility of AP as a stat (compared to AD, which can be better focused on a specific role due to the additional tuning levers it has) has kind of limited the ability to design AP bruisers who aren't encouraged to go heavily tank or heavily AP. I think this, in turn, limits the appeal of longer-duration sustain bruiser items, because there aren't enough characters that have the pattern innately to want to buy an item that enhances it. Riftmaker on its own is an item that enhances the pattern if you have it, but isn't sufficient to create that pattern on champions who don't play that way naturally.

Specifically, the issue I see is that if we give AP Bruisers high ratios (like Sylas), they easily end up as burst mages/assassins, but if we give them normal AP ratios then we end up risking that our bruiser items are picked up by mages and assassins who can end up tankier than desired, which limits the space available to build items for extended AP fighters. Since we don't have an equivalent of base AD or base attack speed, and we don't really have interacting mechanics like critical strike, it's far trickier to create those clean itemization lines that allow AD Bruisers to have dedicated items and -- in turn -- a good place to sit in the class system. This makes designing those characters as true AP fighters harder, and then means that items aimed at AP fighters struggle because there aren't many true AP fighters.

Thoughts?

Originally posted by Lost_My_

Hey u/RiotPhlox , could we get some insight on region transfers still being disabled? I understand it is difficult to give exact dates regarding these types of things but it would be nice to know just about anything at all besides the few support responses that have already been posted by other users in the past.

Originally posted by IceWeaselX

I'm just disappointed that u/PhreakRiot didn't sneak a "Happy St. Patchrick's Day" pun into the announcement. How often does patch day fall on March 17th?

Originally posted by ThisOneTimeAtLolCamp

Akali

E damage: 450 (+85% AD) (+120% AP)

Is that the highest damaging standard ability in the game?