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K'Sante Rework: A Overview of the Good and Bad Design Choices


Original Post — Direct link

Hello fellow Hunters and prey. As most of you probably know at this point, a K'Sante "rework" has hit PBE last week and there is a lot to talk about.

For what it's worth, this post isn't abount the balancing itself and i won't focus on numbers if i can avoid it.

Before going into detail, let's explain the idea behind K'Sante as an overview for people unfamiliar with him and get into the first point of this post:

Identity of K'Sante (Design/Live server)

K'Sante was created to fill the role of a "high skill tank" who can "take things into his own hand" and outplay opponents.

From a design perspective, this fantasy was executed exceptionally well imo. Initially, you experience the slower, more deliberate feel of a tank, but after using his Ultimate, which shatters his Ntofos, you really feel the effect of "shedding that weight".

His movements and fighting become faster and more fluid, enhancing the gameplay experience, creating a contrast that also manages to compliment the concept.

Obviously, this design doesn't sit well with a lot of people, which... fair. I'm not here to say that those opinions don't matter.

SoloQ WR and Proplay

I see a lot of people joke about how op.gg and other sites say he has a 47% (current patch) winrate and that he is a bad champion, but this isn't really the case.

The champion himself isn't complex and can easily picked up, but the full potential of K'Sante needs a lot of practice and experience. As a high skill champ, he needs dedication to be piloted properly. The wr you see on stat sites just shows the average and surprisingly, K'Sante has a decently high pickrate, but this doesnt entail everyone who plays him have the mastery the champion needs or wants. While he is in the 45-47% range for average player statistics, his winrate for those dedicated mains are closer to the 50-53% range.

Back in Patch 13.20, K'Sante got his first major adjustments with the simple goal: weaken his proplay.

K'Sante got high presence pretty fast because he was quite overtuned (little readability, W tap providing him too many options to open up counterplay, too much damage overall). How did they try to achieve that? Limit his options, add clarity in what he does, lower his bursty nature....and lower his Gold scalings in favour of Exp scalings while pumping a lot of stats into him and make his Tank part stronger while making All Out weaker?

The adjustments actually increased his proplay presence (pre 13.20 and post 13.20 ) because all the proplay favoured aspects got improved. Besides being the perfect champ for the lane swap meta, he also:

  • Is a incredibly safe draft option that could fit into any comp.

While his laning phase was weak, he was incredibly safe. Because of the exp scalings, the only option to really counter him was setting him behind early, but that wasn't possible. K'Sante's exp scalings were so good that just by *surving* your laning phase, you were guaranteed to outscale the enemy toplaner (there wasn't an actual bad matchup because you can get through every lane). You also played the (probably) best lane neutralizer in the game.

  • is hard to dive

While this fits into the category above, it is an actual important thing to put into focus.

  • provided the improved Warden part

Wardens as a class is stronger in coordinated fights than the chaotic nature of Soloq. A lot of the changes did benefit this part over his skirmisher aspect that is more SoloQ focused.

  • became a comfort pick

Something that happens frequently. Proplay played him for years and at this point they are familiar with what he does. We've seen this multiple times in the past with other champs in toplane, especially with Renekton.

When watching proplay, you quickly notice that K'Sante is present a lot, but he isn't really doing much. Sure, every now and then there are some amazing plays, but those don't happen as frequently. Most of the times he was sent to the enemy botlane and tried to soak experience. Thats all he needed to do to become relevant in the game.

Why he needs changes

Despite what you believe, they dont want to change him to get him out of proplay entirely. (initially)

(Phreak working on the next K'Sante adjustments, apologizing for his current state.)

The goals were to add readibility in what he does and define strenghts and weaknesses. They are fine with K'Sante being the (probably) best tank in proplay, but they dont want him to be the best frontline tank. For this context, the goals are totally fine. It doesn't even matter if K'Sante is the current proplay meta or not, because the second he gets removed, he is replaced by another champion until they implement fearless draft.

Some other things he talked about is adjusting his SoloQ and Proplay winrate. They want him to be high elo skewed again and mention how his W (the damage part) is a low elo skewed ability (and i talk about those changes later in this post). The biggest mistake in 13.20 was to force his design to be balanced around low elo vs proplay, a design goal that was doomed to fail by default and had to be fixed.

Lets talk about some of the PBE changes that help the champion

In case you havent seen them, here you can find a list and comparison to understand most things im going to talk about: WAKE UP HUNTERS, NEW K'SANTE UPDATE ON PBE

  • Forcing him to actively engage in lane

(Combination of passive damage increase, Q damage increase, lowering resist cap for Q cd, lowering auto attack range)

This change makes it harder for K'Sante to play the lane safe but also makes it easier to actually fight in lane. This allows oppertunity to either create a gold lead or fall behind in gold (not that it really matters).

While this is a good change, i think they missed the mark by decreasing his auto attack range by 25 and the passive procs autos not providing 25 range. Having 150 range in toplane as an now auto attack focused champion isn't a lot and having one of those options reverted would improve the feeling of his (now) intended gameplay drastically.

  • Readability

Q cast speed has been reduced and the hitbox width got nerfed. This opens up the counterplay of side stepping them similar to yasuo or yone Q. If K'Sante can't hit it, he won't get his passive procs. W and E dash speed have also been nerfed again.

Similar to above, there is also room for adjustments. While RQ was way too fast once you got the cast time cap, now it just feels too slow. As a tank it is fine, but i would be happy to see a middle ground of this and live server K'Sante. (Talking about W/E later again).

  • Removing that "assassin" feeling

His passive got changed from being an increased ad scalings on autos to % max health based damage focused damage source. This is what All Out heavily relied on and should have happened a long time ago. His W also followed the same trend.

In my opinion, that change was needed. Maybe instead of just adding a % max health ratio scaling with resists, they could amplify the 20 base dmg + 1-2% max health damage passive by resists rather than adding a "deal x% max health dmg on autos, q, w and R" approach. While it introduces some flat damage again, it feels like they went overboard and K'Sante can't punish misspositioned squishies anymore, which his design is built around.

The bad things

  • Gold scalings

Focusing more on Gold scalings was one of the aspects they wanted to improve on to fix the problems caused by 13.20. The problem is, there isn't really a difference on PBE. Being ahead doesnt make you feel as strong while being behind doesn't feel week. It just feels like they shifted the existing gold scalings around and thats it.

R lost any gold scalings aspects, his RP gained some instead but it feels like less value. W changed from pretty noticeable to not enough. The Q cd cap got almost halved and compensated by slightly higher damage scalings.

  • Added frustration points

RQ Slow is back. They tried to add it in 13.20 but removed it later because it turned out.... it was pretty toxic. Their goal was to remove K'Sante's reliance on Iceborn Gauntlet, but this isn't really the solution.

While it helps provide the sticking power K'Sante want's during All Out, IBG also provides the ability to set up and guarantee to hit his other abilities.

During All Out, his E cooldown also gets reduced by 50%. His only real dash that also has a massive shield attached to it becomes a spam tool. While they lowered the range (which is fine) and lowered the dash speed to the point it feels kinda bad to use, he will stick to his opponents like a mosquito unless they have a dash or disengage tool in their kit.

Keep in mind that the Jak'Sho bug still exists on PBE (the resists granted by the passive arent reduced by all out, inflating his tankyness). This is further excelerated by defensive item effects and double the amount of E shielding makes him still feel like a tank. This interaction alone breaks the concept of what All Out is supposed to do and is balanced around. For some reason, it hasn't been fixed since Jak'Sho was added to the game despite being able to tell Riot employees about it multiple times over the years. I once got an oppertunity to give a list of bugfixes to phreak directly, which fixed this interaction for 1 patch, but for some reason it returned the patch after again anyways.

  • Removal of his "fluidity" and contrast between tank and warden

This is a sad change. They removed the Tank forms partial auto resets on Q and E and the full auto resets during All Out. His dash speeds stay the same. They essentially made a massive contrast in gameplay feeling to a very identical feeling less damage vs more damage situation.

  • Making All Out an Attack Speed steroid

This is a really confusing change. They added atk speed with patch 13.20 on a purely auto reset based kit and the attack speed wasn't even used effectively. K'Sante wants to reposition between Q+passive procs and they almost doubled the amount on PBE. It also created the issue where the bonus attack speed + full auto reset made his Q+AA combo so fast that you cant even follow it.

Watching the patch rundown made clear why this is happening. They want all out to feel similar like Master Yi?

There are a lot of issues with this concept and K'Sante's kit. K'Sante as a champion is designed to weave auto attack inbetween abilities, rewarding you for hitting those Q's, but if you miss, you dont get your passive procs and lose all your damage. Going from that to an inbuilt budget Botrk is a drastic change.

He also spends 0.4s (at Q cap) in his Q animation (every roughly 1.3seconds) and 0.4-1s in the W channel. This means, most of the times, K'Sante is spending the majority of his time unable to auto attack in the first place. While his Q also applies this passive, Q is still a skillshot you could miss, but at the same time you are forced to use Q to set your W up with a Q3 as his entire gameplay loop, which means we are again at a point where the Attack Speed isn't even utilized properly. It's just miss managed power budget and poorly implemented.

  • W - Path Maker getting the "sett treatment", locked into 1 direction and unreliable

"Sett treatment" refers to the fact that a massive amount of power is put into his W ability. On current PBE, you deal up to 1000 damage on a fully charged W...and 1000 BONUS TRUE DAMAGE. Btw, this is a max health damage scaling that also benefits from his max health damage on his new passive. I've even seen 3-4k damage numbers against baron nashor by this single ability (good luck outsmiting the toplaner).

Due to this massive amount of damage, it is clear that they want to create the loop of hitting Q3 -> guarantee W, but this pretty much invalidates the attackspeed and onhit we get even further.

On top of that, the ability also feels unreliable, which is the biggest concern. A lot of negativity is within this change. K'Sante players want it to be reliable with a clear idenitity, but thats missing. We don't want to use it for defense if we cant utilize the offense. We can't utilize the damage reduction if we have to stun the enemy to maybe hit it. Throwing a lot of damage into an ability mainly loved for the reliability and repositioning capability is what actually hurts it and makes most K'Sante players angry.

There could've been a lot more create approaches that make it feel more reliable for K'Sante player, still have counterplay aspects and also work around the issues the Damage Reduction caused in the past. A good example would be able to aim in a cone similar to Zac and/or have the dmg reduction only work from the front like Pantheon E (the animation even fits).

  • Lack of design goals

Because of all those disconnected changes, K'Sante's keystone options feel very bad. He isn't using grasp as well anymore, Aftershock doesnt provide the W burst benefit with the massively lowered resist scalings, Conqueror makes no sense because he lost all AD scalings or AD All Out granted (why even) and for the same reason, majority of other runes that scale with ad are pointless. The best option at this point seems like spellbook because it's the default keystone option if nothing else fits. Maybe (and hopefully) this isn't the case, but it defenitely feels that way.

Conclusion

The whole update feels like a "don't do it properly, do it quick" situation. It doesn't feel like the gameplay feeling and what makes K'Sante to K'Sante was the main focus here while adding changes he wouldnt even need if they understood. Keep in mind that the update was announced 4 months ago just to show us those random feeling changes that also repeat the same things that have failed so far.

I was quite excited when Phreak announced the rework, the goals and that he works on them. He knows what he did since 13.20 didn't fix or benefit the champion, making me think he was able to gather a base understanding of our champion, but apperantly someone else did it instead without keeping those goals in mind. The changes feel like trying to fit him more into low elo rather than respecting that hes a elite play catered design without keeping the high skill part of the champion intact.

In his patch rundown he praises the new designer for being a very intelligent guy and the context he provides for those changes feel like he doesn't care anymore followed by "just deal with it" and at that point i was at a loss.

All Out becoming a spellcaster who's also forced into an on-hit playstyle without properly utilizing the Attack Speed provided just seems off.

This disconnection with the playerbase is something that also happens too frequently. Last time i checked skarner mains, they weren't happy about his current state or what the rework did (less flexible builds), announcing the Aphelios changes (they pulled back) and a lot of other things in the past, Ryze is a prime example and Asol got "removed" in favour of completely a new design that didn't benefit his playerbase.

Though this post is lengthy, I’m curious to hear your thoughts. Do you think the changes to K’Sante are moving in the right direction or make sense for his current identity/kit? While some may hold biased opinions because K’Sante isn’t popular to play against, I’d love to see objective takes on this matter.

I'm also sure that i didn't expend on some points as much as i I'd like to (i suck at making those big posts), so feel free to ask for clarification.

Anyways, i'll just leave you with an imagine of me stacking E's on my adc dummy for 2minutes that they can keep for the next few teamfights (we love bugs).

https://preview.redd.it/wmpfqar8g6pd1.png?width=212&format=png&auto=webp&s=922cc70934c5d8ded787b15f27bacdde0cfb954c

External link →
2 months ago - /u/AzuBK - Direct link

Hi, I'm the designer on this rework, as well as the original designer on K'Sante (I established his identity and core themes/mechanics before leaving for R&D for a while). I appreciate this thoughtful post and wanted to give it a thoughtful, transparent response with more context on the design goals. I'll say up-front that a lot of this rework is focused on fairness—even though League champions should each have their unfair properties that players can deploy against each other, the end result has to have sufficient counterplay and weaknesses. I'm of the belief that K'Sante, when mastered and played by players who full leverage all his options, falls outside the bounds of fairness in both his current and launch versions. My goal is to provide a fair champion that is also fun and rewarding to play. With this in mind, I want to acknowledge that some changes made under this initial premise are pretty much guaranteed to be painful for players who love the champion and what he currently offers. We don't make these changes lightly, and I tried to mitigate this as best I could by carving out a clearer identity for K'Sante within which players can express their skill and excel even further.

K'Sante absolutely was and still is meant to be a high-skill tank. One of the goals behind Q and W changes is to make K'Sante's skill-tests involve his opponents more by making them missable or dependent on fight conditions. For high skill-cap champions, I believe it's important to have sufficient points of skill testing interaction with your opponents, versus the solitaire skill testing that emerges from making a champion who is fast with complex mechanics but little counterplay once those mechanics are mastered. Right now, Q becomes too fast and W is far too reliable to fulfill that condition. An immense amount of K'Sante's power is also in the reliability and flexibility of the W, in particular—e.g. pressing it in the front of a teamfight both threatens engage (or sometimes death, if followed with R) while also allowing him to opt out and dash away from the enemy team, making a huge amount of space with trivial levels of commitment or risk.

One of the other core conceits of K'Sante was that he should have high levels of flexibility by changing classes. The price he was meant to pay for this was that his two classes should be Skirmisher and Warden, which are very far apart when it comes to the situations in which they are useful. Skilled, shrewd use of his kit was how you could effectively transition between them (this is why he launches people over walls with his R to isolate them). The version of K'Sante that actually shipped and exists today is much closer to Vanguard/Diver than Skirmisher/Warden. His ability to threaten engages in tank form and to chase down & burst out the backline in teamfights are closely aligned with each other in terms of output, making him a very effective teamfighter with a pretty linear pattern (while also still having the flexibility to play as a Warden with E/W). This rework pushes K'Sante's tank and fighter forms further apart from each other. His base form engage is worse, while his peel and counter-engage remains excellent. His fighter form is much worse in teamfights, but more effective in 1v1 or small-scale fights, especially when it comes to killing high-health targets (he is a monster hunter, after all).

Regarding W direction-lock, since I think this is rightfully where a lot of the negative feeling comes from.... I think this is bound to be the most contentious part of the changes. I hear you about wanting both the offense and defense at the same time from this spell. I think it's correct that in cases where it's used well, when you predict enemy actions or otherwise outplay them, you should absolutely get good offensive value. I don't think that this strong offensive value is permitted to be as reliable as it is while also offering this level of defensive capability. Our options were to reduce reliability or reduce output—in the spirit of a skill-oriented champion, we chose to reduce reliability so that finding windows to get optimal use still brings rewards. At its core, this change represents the bulk of the identity shift mentioned in the previous paragraph. K'Sante is moving further towards defense in his tank form to distinguish it from his fighter form, so he's losing reliable offense & threat. We don't expect K'Sante players to be happy with this specific change. Having that level of flexibility and control of a fight is a lot of fun, and getting to move W during the cast is just an enjoyable toy to play with. I regret that this was the best way we found to deliver on the design goals, but do believe in the value of this change.

(Post 1/2)

2 months ago - /u/AzuBK - Direct link

Originally posted by AzuBK

Hi, I'm the designer on this rework, as well as the original designer on K'Sante (I established his identity and core themes/mechanics before leaving for R&D for a while). I appreciate this thoughtful post and wanted to give it a thoughtful, transparent response with more context on the design goals. I'll say up-front that a lot of this rework is focused on fairness—even though League champions should each have their unfair properties that players can deploy against each other, the end result has to have sufficient counterplay and weaknesses. I'm of the belief that K'Sante, when mastered and played by players who full leverage all his options, falls outside the bounds of fairness in both his current and launch versions. My goal is to provide a fair champion that is also fun and rewarding to play. With this in mind, I want to acknowledge that some changes made under this initial premise are pretty much guaranteed to be painful for players who love the champion and what he currently offers. We don't make these changes lightly, and I tried to mitigate this as best I could by carving out a clearer identity for K'Sante within which players can express their skill and excel even further.

K'Sante absolutely was and still is meant to be a high-skill tank. One of the goals behind Q and W changes is to make K'Sante's skill-tests involve his opponents more by making them missable or dependent on fight conditions. For high skill-cap champions, I believe it's important to have sufficient points of skill testing interaction with your opponents, versus the solitaire skill testing that emerges from making a champion who is fast with complex mechanics but little counterplay once those mechanics are mastered. Right now, Q becomes too fast and W is far too reliable to fulfill that condition. An immense amount of K'Sante's power is also in the reliability and flexibility of the W, in particular—e.g. pressing it in the front of a teamfight both threatens engage (or sometimes death, if followed with R) while also allowing him to opt out and dash away from the enemy team, making a huge amount of space with trivial levels of commitment or risk.

One of the other core conceits of K'Sante was that he should have high levels of flexibility by changing classes. The price he was meant to pay for this was that his two classes should be Skirmisher and Warden, which are very far apart when it comes to the situations in which they are useful. Skilled, shrewd use of his kit was how you could effectively transition between them (this is why he launches people over walls with his R to isolate them). The version of K'Sante that actually shipped and exists today is much closer to Vanguard/Diver than Skirmisher/Warden. His ability to threaten engages in tank form and to chase down & burst out the backline in teamfights are closely aligned with each other in terms of output, making him a very effective teamfighter with a pretty linear pattern (while also still having the flexibility to play as a Warden with E/W). This rework pushes K'Sante's tank and fighter forms further apart from each other. His base form engage is worse, while his peel and counter-engage remains excellent. His fighter form is much worse in teamfights, but more effective in 1v1 or small-scale fights, especially when it comes to killing high-health targets (he is a monster hunter, after all).

Regarding W direction-lock, since I think this is rightfully where a lot of the negative feeling comes from.... I think this is bound to be the most contentious part of the changes. I hear you about wanting both the offense and defense at the same time from this spell. I think it's correct that in cases where it's used well, when you predict enemy actions or otherwise outplay them, you should absolutely get good offensive value. I don't think that this strong offensive value is permitted to be as reliable as it is while also offering this level of defensive capability. Our options were to reduce reliability or reduce output—in the spirit of a skill-oriented champion, we chose to reduce reliability so that finding windows to get optimal use still brings rewards. At its core, this change represents the bulk of the identity shift mentioned in the previous paragraph. K'Sante is moving further towards defense in his tank form to distinguish it from his fighter form, so he's losing reliable offense & threat. We don't expect K'Sante players to be happy with this specific change. Having that level of flexibility and control of a fight is a lot of fun, and getting to move W during the cast is just an enjoyable toy to play with. I regret that this was the best way we found to deliver on the design goals, but do believe in the value of this change.

(Post 1/2)

(Post 2/2)

Shorter explanation around the design goals regarding some of the points of contention:

  • You're on the money when it comes to the lane buffs, he should be able to fight but also be asked to fight. The previous range profile allowed him to opt out of lane interaction when played at a high level.
  • RQ slow is back because the spell is now more missable and he had difficulty sticking to his targets in R due to the cast time changes. If he is hitting Qs, he should generally be able to stick.
  • E changes are part of the class shift—a longer cooldown, longer-range dash means that medium-range champs are not able to hit him without being within his effective range. This profile makes him a deadly teamfighter with a lot of passive pressure. A shorter cooldown, shorter-range dash is more typically skirmisher-shaped, built for footsies and more extended chases.
  • W missing a monster cap was a bug, this is fixed.
  • Gold scalings aren't meant to be meaningfully different.
  • Q3 -> W is a way to confirm W sometimes, but in practice this is often not feasible. W is primarly meant to be used on its own. This is one of the reasons the partial charge is now available again. Full charge W can be used without Q3 in response to attacks by other champions that lock them in place (think Aatrox Q3) or in order to section off space and reduce enemy options (Warden-shaped output).
  • The current R bakes all of his power into his passive attack. New R distributes this across his kit because all of his actions should carry weight and have reasonable reward when he is in this form—previously his basic attacks and Qs basically tickled enemies, especially the juggernauts and tanks that he was meant to be empowered to shred while in R. Hitting a Q should have good, immediate feedback, and basic attacks should also be valuable. High attack speed (once his basic attacks matter) is also one way to help differentiate the forms in terms of feel and make him stronger against the big, lumbering champs he's meant to be especially potent against.
  • R AD was much more effective against squishy champions because he didn't have good ways to turn that AD into target-agnostic threat of the sort that a skirmisher generally needs to really excel in the 1v1. This change is part of fitting his damage profile to his class—each of his actions should feel like they're a lot punchier in R form against all targets.

When testing internally, we found that the first game or two was pretty rough as it's a big set of changes, and then it started to click and players began finding success and having a more consistently good time as they understood what he was now better at vs. worse at.

Thanks again for the thorough post. I can't promise I'll be around to respond too much, since I have a bunch of other work to do, but I'll come back through and read at least. I try to stay off social media generally for the ol' mental, but consider it an obligation to understand how players are feeling about changes I'm shipping to their champions. I hope that as many players as possible continue to enjoy K'Sante, and that he can thrive while being a more sustainable and fair member of the League cast.

2 months ago - /u/AzuBK - Direct link

Originally posted by Nalardemon

Thanks for taking your time on the response. I understand some of your point but there are still some things i want to address:

  • No mention of the jaksho bug? (sorry about pestering you about that bug specifically)

Given that this bug pretty much inflated all out drastically (across other bugs that do so), an update like this should be the moment where a fix could be worked on or am i wrong?

 I hear you about wanting both the offense and defense at the same time from this spell. (W)

I maybe didn't word it the same way i meant it to sound, but given that it's now a key dmg ability, there is more confusion about the ability. What most players want is that reliability it provides and not having to transform your whole gameplay pattern around hitting it or you dont achieve anything. We would even be happier if it wasn't that massive nuke and bring it closer to the defensive/repositioning tool it used to be.

The current R bakes all of his power into his passive attack. New R distributes this across his kit because all of his actions should carry weight and have reasonable reward when he is in this form—previously his basic attacks and Qs basically tickled enemies, especially the juggernauts and tanks that he was meant to be empowered to shred while in R. Hitting a Q should have good, immediate feedback, and basic attacks should also be valuable. High attack speed (once his basic attacks matter) is also one way to help differentiate the forms in terms of feel and make him stronger against the big, lumbering champs he's meant to be especially potent against.

I wouldn't say that current R doesn't fullfill the fantasy of his actions having more weight. Hitting Q rewarded you with a passive proc, which already feels very satisfying when you get to proc it. His basic attacks "tickling" isn't really different to the on-hit effect when you auto attack, its closer to just compensating it in a different way thats only beneficial against tanky targets.

As i mentioned in the post, the gameplay loop between hitting and rotating Q with passive procs and finding the moments W or E provide the most value is what the champion is build around and makes him so enteresting and enjoyable. I can see the reason that his Q also had to be slower since a Q + AA combo was pretty much happening in an instant (partially because the attack speed boosted the speed of it), but it just feels too slow and clunky that way.

If anything, i feel like this approach hurts the fantasy of the champion more then it would benefit it or is "one way to help differentiate the forms in terms of feel". Pressing All Out is the "pay-off" when playing K'Sante. Getting this feeling of "what if the tank stops being a tank" like it currently does is already a really good way to have all out feel more impactful overall, but that isn't the case for the current PBE version. It's just the same old but more damage.

Having his Tank form fit more into the warden concept you talked about is fine, it would also differenciate the feeling between base and all out form further, but it really doesn't do that.

R AD was much more effective against squishy champions because he didn't have good ways to turn that AD into target-agnostic threat of the sort that a skirmisher generally needs to really excel in the 1v1. This change is part of fitting his damage profile to his class—each of his actions should feel like they're a lot punchier in R form against all targets.

to add to the above, the "punchier" feeling against all targets in R is missing. At all stages of the game it feels like i just tickle squishy targets.

Gold scalings aren't meant to be meaningfully different.

this is kinda sad to hear imo, given that it was one of the new design goals. It doesnt feel rewarding to play well and get a lead or punishing if you play poorly and fall behind. No matter how i do, i feel like im at the mercy of what my kit is supposed to achieve at a specific point in the game. Little risk or reward on a champion thats about "improving on the wrong decisions you make". Those are factors that make high skill champions rewarding after all.

Overall (and hopefully you dont take it the wrong way, i dont mean it in an offensive way), but this response also feels more like a "PR response". It doesn't really give me the feeling that you really understand the concerns about the changes the K'Sante community has and take them as valuable feedback, but more so giving your reasoning in a "deal with it" way. The way it's also written confirms that this version is gonna be shipped in this unintuitive design which is quite sad.

I haven't been on the League team the past couple years, wasn't aware of the Jak'Sho bug. I had to dig around after reading your post to make sure this wasn't intentional behavior—I've now fixed it, thanks for the heads up.

If you feel like this is a PR response, that's fair. More than a meaningless "deal with it" statement, I've tried to share the full reasoning behind a bunch of the changes. I appreciate players' passion for their champions, and I try reflect that passion back by getting into the weeds about design in a Reddit comment first thing Monday morning. I think it's more the case that we disagree on some of the elements we're discussing. This feedback is useful for understanding which pieces of the character you all care most about and where we should consider pulling back if these changes land with room to spare on the overall design goals.

2 months ago - /u/AzuBK - Direct link

Originally posted by HostiiTostii

Hi! Thanks for the detailed explanation. Reading this, I don't like the changes but I trust in the team to make him fun as well as more fair. Could you give more explanation to why you reduced and removed his AA range/passive AA range? I don't understand that part, because K'sante is a slow ms tank he needs the extra bit of range after a successful ability hit to get the damage out, especially in all-out. If the increased attack speed in R was the compensation, I will think this is wrong. This will make him more auto-attack based, which removes a lot of skill.

Before, you HAD to hit an ability to do damage. With the rework, this remained but it was a little more forgiving to just auto attack. How I see the upcoming changes; it will make K'sante want to auto attack way more while less focussing on abilities. W will not be reliable and only a bait spell, and Q will deal more damage but is so slow it won't be worth it to keep using it off-cd on a fast moving target. E+IBG auto will be the way to go. I feel like this will frustrate a lot of the playerbase, because this will make K'sante all-out either very weak and only strong against tanks, or make him an annoying perma-slower that will auto attack you to death.

Yes, certainly. The AA range is mostly meaningful in lane, where he has enough of a range advantage to take low-variance, difficult-to-punish trades with Q + Grasp. The compensation for that is not attack speed, it's increased laning power through higher damage. This fits the overall rework's theme of asking K'Sante players to make committal decisions and reap the rewards or consequences—you'll should generally be better at fighting if you play well, and worse if you play poorly.

Overall, winning fights later in the game should require more skill on average—basic attacking will not get you to a win, even though it might get you closer than before. Currently, landing Q and W is pretty much a given due to their speed and reliability, respectively. After this set of changes, his Q and W are now much less guaranteed to hit with, and both are important to succeeding at his combat pattern since they contribute quite a lot of damage now. This means that if you play well and hit everything, you should be stronger, and if you miss, you should be weaker, which the attack speed helps modulate a bit. Attack speed is also meant to be skewed against fighting high-health targets like juggernauts and tanks while in R form, since you'll have high uptime against them, in addition to helping him feel generally faster and snappier compared to tank form.

The game analysis team has tested a lot of 1v1s against more mobile skirmishers and this allocation of damage has produced mostly tense fights where skill clearly determined the outcome, which I think is actually a meaningful departure from the Live state of K'Sante, which is often much closer to a stat-check due to the reliability of his tools.

2 months ago - /u/AzuBK - Direct link

Originally posted by CalmTurnover7649

Hi, thank you for your taking your time and explain idea behing those changes. I must ask tho, I think the OP suggested a pretty fair change of W being in cone like zac E which gives him a bit more flexibility and actual ability to hit enemies. As a Ksante player and main myself you guessed right Im not happy with the change. But by having W in cone makes it still either only defensive tool or offensive just with slight option to choose direction in certain degree. What is your opinion about this suggestion ? And again thanks for your time to actually comment on this.

I think the cone is a clever suggestion that partially addresses the costs that this spell imposes on the rest of the kit. It's higher reliability than I would prefer on the champion, but does require some level of commitment to a general direction, and brings back the ability to "play" with the spell's input a bit. I probably shouldn't say this because it's often taken as a promise (which I unfortunately cannot make), but I'll be thinking about it as a possible angle if we feel we've succeeded with room to spare on the broader game health design goals but K'Sante's play-feel is under the bar.

2 months ago - /u/AzuBK - Direct link

Originally posted by LobsterNovel

Thanks for the response, but I feel like removing the extra range from E dash, making his Q as slow to as his tank form really just makes the two forms extremely similar, the only difference will be the damage/AS speed, W not stunning and a slight bit of E dash speed.

I feel like it would feel right if his RQ didn't slow and instead he gained ms, since getting slowed is always annoying for the player getting hit by it.

I also feel without E dash over walls and shorter distance he'll struggle even more to stick to people, but that is a fair thing to remove, just feels like RQ slow won't compensate enough.

Without E dash over walls I feel like I'd just want to ult people in the open without any walls, I feel like it'd punish me for using my R over a wall, without being able to chase. Maybe allowing us to dash over a wall using a ward? But that might not be the best idea.

I did consider passive R speed vs. RQ slow, but opted for RQ since that requires an active skill-check (hitting Q) and I tried to maintain or add as many of those as seemed reasonable given his status as a skill-oriented champion.

2 months ago - /u/AzuBK - Direct link

Originally posted by Nalardemon

I haven't been on the League team the past couple years, wasn't aware of the Jak'Sho bug. I had to dig around after reading your post to make sure this wasn't intentional behavior—I've now fixed it, thanks for the heads up.

Fair, didn't consider you were on the game modes team while writing the comment, even though i was aware of it.

But now that you were aware of it (and hopefully you are finally our saviour regarding that pesky bug), was that something that made All out feel off during testing or how it would've contributed to balancing around it?

If you feel like this is a PR response, that's fair. More than a meaningless "deal with it" statement, I've tried to share the full reasoning behind a bunch of the changes.

Still thankfull for the insight. Obviously people would've loved it if we got those informations before the post in the first place, but thats also nothing i can really blame you for.

I just believe that engaging with the communities to get a base idea of what they love about the champ just gives a better general overview for those large scale changes, rather then being left in the dark. Even if not everything people expect to happen will happen as a result. Usually we just have to wait for phreaks patch rundown on those things and its pretty much a hit or miss with why things happen or how its phrased/presented to us.

 I appreciate players' passion for their champions, and I try reflect that passion back by getting into the weeds about design in a Reddit comment first thing Monday morning. I think it's more the case that we disagree on some of the elements we're discussing. This feedback is useful for understanding which pieces of the character you all care most about and where we should consider pulling back if these changes land with room to spare on the overall design goals.

Now i really feel like the way i phrased it was too harsh 😔. I hope i didn't ruin your monday morning that way, i just felt like i had to write how i felt about it. This wasn't meant in a way where i seem like i hold a grudge against you from now on. Still looking towards what you do in the future (especially regarding K'Sante's gameplay feeling 😂)

No, it's totally fine. I didn't mean to make you feel bad about it, lol, and I know very well what it can feel like to be on the other side of dev communications. Even though we're devs, we're still players of other games—just with some experience on both sides of that curtain. A bit unrelated, but I often feel pretty keenly that communicating on Reddit about League in particular is something that makes devs feel that they're in-touch more than something that makes players feel like devs are in-touch, because so much of our audience plays in countries that don't use Reddit/speak English. Feels like there's an opportunity to improve something here, but it's very far from my area of expertise.

This is a tough space to navigate, especially in a PvP game, because we often just have different priorities and different takes from players on what is likely to work or what has to be done. I really wish it were possible to successfully balance or design a game by simply listening to all player input and following it. At the end of the day, I'm going to mostly trust the experience I've gained over many years of balancing and changing League champs because that's the only sane way forward, but it's foolish to not read and consider players' suggestions and especially recognize the way players feel about different changes or different aspects of their favorite champs. Also, we will be wrong sometimes, and each time we ship something we have to hope that this isn't one of those times, because there WILL be players telling you that each and every change you make is wrong, even if your hit-rate is quite good.

For what it may be worth, the feedback I've read here today and over the last couple days has convinced me to remove the base attack speed buff in exchange for returning the Q reset. To be as transparent and "non-PR" as possible, since I appreciate your candor:

  • Most of these changes are going to ship because a changelist of this magnitude cannot be changed so close to our branch cut (even changing meaningful things last week would probably not have been permitted). That doesn't mean nothing will change in the following patches.
  • I should have asked to go to PBE a cycle early to get earlier feedback. I don't know if it would have yielded different results, but that's a misstep on my part.
  • I and the rest of the design team firmly believe that the W change is very likely to buy a lot of room on K'Sante to get him out of perma-pro priority and allow us to instead focus on what's best for the champ moving forward.
  • I expect that this version of K'Sante is actually harder to play well, but in a way that doesn't favor the type of picks and outputs that pro teams favor. One of the core goals was to make sure that skilled K'Sante players would have even more room to thrive. Right now, K'Sante is a mechanically and strategically overpowered champion when played at the highest level—you don't have to be better than your opponent to be advantaged, you just have to be very good in general. As a result, his actual power level has to be suppressed. My aim is to shift him more into a position where specifically outplaying your enemies is required in order to win. Hence, a focus on committal decisions with real consequences.
  • I think this type of massive changelist is very hard for players to read and fully grasp (it's also very hard for designers, honestly). IMO a lot of responses are misattributing the magnitude of some changes, which is normal. E.g. claiming he will be like Master Yi—I am certain that this is not the case and hitting abilities is still critical to his success, though I can see how someone reading the changes might think that it is.
  • I'm very open to feedback around ways to make K'Sante feel better to play. We're very unlikely to change the core of the list (W) unless it really proves to not work once it's out in the wild, but I think there's likely some massaging that can be done around timings, ranges, scalings, and other details of the kit as a whole which I'll be keeping an eye on.
  • Some people play K'Sante for reasons that match the things we think are unsustainable about the champion. These players might not like K'Sante as much anymore, and might even drop him. We don't do this flippantly, but understand that that's cold comfort to people who lose something they enjoy. There's not much more to be said about this, but I just wanted to acknowledge it.

Again, thanks for the feedback :)

2 months ago - /u/AzuBK - Direct link

Originally posted by ProfessionalQuit859

Thanks for taking time to reply. I do have some questions I hope can be answered:

-Why did K'Sante's base range get lowered if his passive procs won't have bonus range?

-Was a lockout of direction change slightly before min charge or after min charge considered?

Lastly... -Why the large quantity of damage focus on W, especially RW? (Sett's kit suffers from the same issue)

  • Generally bringing him to a normal auto range, so he is neither advantaged nor disadvantaged by default against most other toplaners. A range advantage of 50 constitutes a meaningful advantage where you can often hit enemies without retaliation, and it didn't seem correct for him to have that advantage over 125 range champions, especially given the cooldown and range profile of his Q in lane.
  • Yes, but it didn't play well in practice.
  • W is the clearest point of counterplay on the kit, after changes to make it less reliable. It also makes him more skirmisher-shaped—it's important that using W as purely a movement tool is a very meaningful sacrifice.
2 months ago - /u/AzuBK - Direct link

Originally posted by Straight_Review_6492

Thank you for the response! It gives me more hope that the frustrating parts about this changes get some iteration before launch.   

 Mainly i think the attackspeed steroid on R is a really missplaced powerbudget on ksante, since he has(or had) attack resets on Q and E.   

 I personally would prefer to not have that attackspeed steroid at all and get the Q and E resets again, so i actually need to hit my spells and use them in meaningful ways(probably outplaying, since Q is more difficult to hit now) than just chasing my target with short CD all out E and punching him to oblivion with autos. 

 If giving his E an auto is too much(simce the cd on allout is really short), at least giving his Q back a reset wouldnt be unreasonable, since the cast time is so long. 

  I also really like some changes that OP said, like giving his W a zac treatment, where he can only dash to the front of where he aimed his W(would give more clear counterplay while also not taking away ksante ability to hit his W against people who have dashes) or just doing pantheon treatment, making his damage reduction only apply to the front of ksante(although i feel this change would not really adress the problems you spoke about in your response)  

 Maybe both changes could be combined so you achieve what you spoke about while also not making the changes feel clunky to the existing ksante players.

 Overall i think the changes are a step in the right direction, they just need some iteration, mainly on W and that attackspeed steroid/auto resets, maybe bringing back the 25 range on Passive hit would be cool too but i dont know. 

 Would really apreciate your thoughts on this.

Mentioned this elsewhere, but I think you (and many others) are right about the Q reset. I'm adding that one back. Answered most of these other ones elsewhere in this thread, but thank you for the thoughtful comment.

2 months ago - /u/AzuBK - Direct link

Originally posted by JayceAatrox

You never explained a few things.

Why nerf E speed? It’s already low. PBE All Out E is literally the same range and speed as E on live. You have to understand how bad that feels.

I get the idea behind swapping All Out E range for lower cooldown and maybe it’s just because it’s so slow now but I think it should have slightly higher range than tank form. Maybe not 400 range but 250 -> 300 and speed 1000 -> 1300 sounds more fair I think.

Why remove the auto attack resets on Q and E? Removing these just makes the champion more clunky for zero benefit.

I like the R changes in theory, my favorite part about K'sante is going ham in R with weaved autos and Q's, but it's actually better on live than now, because K'sante's Q cast time is so high + no resets. It went from .17 to .35, literally double the cast time. I feel like the slow doesn't need to be the same in All Out as it is in base form.

How about 40% slow for .5 seconds and .25 second cast time in All Out?

I think those 3 changes, faster E in All Out, Q and E auto attack resets, and lower RQ cast time compensated with a slow nerf would add back a lot of fluidity without significantly changing his balance state.

E speed is not nerfed. It had a strange paradigm previously where dashing to allies added his movement speed to the base speed, but the free-target dash did not. Now his movement speed is always added. PBE scraping probably didn't pick up that change. New E speed is slightly slower before boots 1, slightly faster on boots 1, and faster on upgraded boots.

Auto-resets are extremely elite-player-skewed in a way that's not very interactive, but as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I think you are all correct about the Q changes and have returned that reset. I am truthfully on the fence about the E reset, as dash resets certainly feel very good but are also a lot of early-game power.

I think that the some amount of Q cast time increase is important for reducing K'Sante's reliability. The exact magnitude is up for debate, and I'll be keeping an eye on it as a possible avenue for buffs if we think we've achieved the goals once this ships.

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