https://twitter.com/RiotPhreak/status/1705401994620592282
"We intend to include changes that address AD LeBlanc Top in 13.19. We playtested the first iteration this evening and it’s looking promising."
Riot saw that reddit thread and looked at pro scrims and said "yea we need to kill this before its to late and it ruins worlds."
I wonder what they are changing since it sounds like they are not touching Shiv
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Istg these were the changes people literally asked when we saw this shit lol
It's interesting; these kinds of things are the eventual results of power creep. Certainly, Shiv returning as a good first item is the straw that broke the camel's back and I did a rather poor job of getting the item into a fair state sooner. I spent much of summer just being like, "OK LB abuses Shiv, we have to keep tuning Shiv to make it not dominant on LeBlanc" despite LeBlanc being the only egregious user after like the first balance pass.
But actually LB has a bunch of small things that just slowly fell out of line. No individual change made this build appear but the end result is that she's just tuned kinda weird right now and scales with mage items worse than other mages do. So she just buys other items instead.
its good that you guys are no longer bound by "locked changes" and are able to be flexible and react swiftly to stuff like Briar's WR skyrocketing and this
The intent with Briar for this patch was to essentially micropatch 13.19 itself after getting more data. There's never enough info within a week to have a reliable feel for her actual mastery curve. We can only see win rate movement by day and infer from there. Keep in mind that for any mature champion, your first game can benefit from guides and even just seeing them play in your games. That can never be true for a new release. So we elected to craft changes into a micropatch instead of making a call on this last Monday.
Micropatching is still a drain on resources. It means that some piece of work doesn't get done because people have to be pulled to actually ship it live. There's an extra step beyond, "I edited these two files and hit submit." So we really don't want to make a habit of it. But if it's pressing enough or it's just the right call for the situation, then it's a tool that we have.
She has awful wave clear without shiv, won't lowering her AD make it even worse?
We're primarily hitting AD growth, so it will be unfeelable at level 1 and then be negligible for a while if she's mostly reliant on spells.
There isn't any single change that can literally only hit AD LeBlanc. It's just about reigning in collateral damage and trying to retain her overall power level on intended builds.
Should base dmg nerfs on abilities also be included? Or it wouldn't make a difference for this strat?
The more changes you include the harder it is to get it right.
Nerf Shiv (13.18 didn't nerf the wave clear enough)
Surely the 5th nerf to waveclear specifically will be enough
To be fair we started with buffing it twice.
That was wrong.
If leblanc never touched the item, would you have nerfed it over and over.
The goal was to get Kraken, Stormrazor, and Shiv to be roughly equally powerful. It's fine if one was more popular than another.
Kraken we hit pretty quickly. Shiv people considered underpowered but wasn't (after the first set of changes) and eventually people caught on. Stormrazor we slightly over-nerfed.
I wish we hadn't kept pushing the minion mod when initially tuning it on Live; it launched with more than enough minion damage and we should have just given it stats instead.
May I ask why haven't you/if you thought about going in a different direction of nerfing the item, meaning changing the scaling to let's say ad or crit. And more so if changing the amount of targets it strikes (could scale with lvl/something) so it wouldn't be that powerful early but still did its job lategame.
Don't get me wrong, I am a life time Mage player and I enjoyed building the first iterations of the shiv because it was fun but it was so not fun playing against it if you weren't too. That got me thinking if amount of targets+scaling shouldn't be a bit different.
I truly don't believe Shiv needs to scale with AD or Crit. It also already scales hits with level.
Giving it an AD/Crit ratio just brings us back to the item scaling, makes it especially hard to balance for Rengar or Yasuo/Yone, and just isn't needed.
Now if the argument is that Shiv just shouldn't be a first item (no Noonquiver, removing either AD or AS), then that's a worthy discussion. But that's not what anyone's thinking of when they ask for crit scaling.
Wait so technically this is its first nerf. In theory?
One of the patches just straight nerfed the AP ratio I think.
You just level up and Fast Forward until a new wave spawns that is your level
Minion health is not based on level it is based on game time.
I have a question with shiv, given how important the item is for Kaisas hybrid build (which should honestly remain her best build given how important it is to her fantasy), do you have any plans on how to ensure her hybrid build remains viable once shiv is more appropriate balance wise?
Even if Shiv disappeared tomorrow I think it's possible to retain hybrid through minor kit changes. As long as all three evolves are very powerful and each stat scales her strongly enough, you can make her want to buy all three core stats.
Do you think part of the issue is that Shiv has better base stats than kraken? 50v40 AD is a pretty big difference
Eh, Kraken's unique is stronger on average.
Gold efficiency is an overrated metric.
i think since patch 13.14 Shiv nerf it's became clear that the LB problem is not a Shiv AP ratio problem but LB herself since she is the only mage/assassin that builds the item because she can get away with a lot of things now she is building full-on AD so the "shiv AP ratio is the problem" was wrong since she is building 0 ap now
Yep, and if this build had popped up in 13.14, we would have addressed AD LeBlanc much sooner.
Why are you so dead set into roles you defined for champions? Every time something new and interesting comes out you force champions back into what you decided should be their role.
ALso why nerf LB so hard when stattik is the main reason for this strategy? LB already has issues farming under turret, now lowering her AD further, what we supposed to do? Have 5 cs 10 minutes in hard matchups?
If AD LeBlanc's gameplay didn't suck, we wouldn't have a problem with it.
But AD LeBlanc's gameplay is quite miserable.
Eh, Kraken's unique is stronger on average.
Do you have some way of measuring this? What makes you say that?
The fact that it's more popular and wins as many games despite -10 AD
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