[2023] Peculiar K'Sante PBE update: Selecting "Hexflash" as a rune will now auto-swap to "Magical Footwear"

Hi, I developed this. I've also just submitted an actual fix for the Hexflash bug, so we'll see if it comes back clean from QA.

Let me give some context on why this rune replacement was in: This bug is not a trivial fix. K'Sante W disables his other abilities and any Summoner Spells that are dashes/teleports. This disables Flash, Teleport, and even Hexflash. Hexflash is grayed out when you are channeling W. It's also disabled while you're actively dashing. I put debug logic onto the very first step of the Hexflash spell, and that debug does not fire. Hexflash does not cast or even begin casting if you press D/F while channeling W. And yet it cancels K'Sante W. This is not "simply" rescripting the logic of Hexflash (it doesn't cast) and it's not a trivial amount of work on K'Sante W (it already properly locks out spells). This bug is a meaningful amount of power and it is also very low impact (the rune has about a 1% pick rate, even in higher MMRs).

Obviously disabling a rune is an incredibly inelegant fix. It's not the correct one long-term, for sure. It's also trivial to change and impacts fewer than 1% of K'Sante players. Those who do run it are doing it to abuse a bug. So if we can't come up with a real solve to the bug, we should at least protect against it. I think if we were unable to find a fix, shipping this rune replacement would be 100% the correct decision. If the fix required substantial resources (e.g. a week from a software engineer to re-code how channels work) it wouldn't be worth it against other things those people could develop. Certainly wouldn't be worth leaving the bug on Live as such a fundamental change as re-coding channels went through QA and code review.

Anyways, there are a bunch of other champions with rune replacements also going into this patch. Samira will have Aftershock and Glacial unlocked (since her passive can have hard CC) and Yuumi will have Glacial replaced, since she doesn't have any hard CC herself. If anyone has any other odd rune replacements, LMK!

The buff is removed on death intentionally. The internal tagging allows it to persist, it's told to disable the bouncing behavior and to remove the buff within its scripting, which reads as design intent to me. Maybe it shouldn't, but the current scripting is very much intentional.

People got better at him.

Well I couldn't get Hexflash to not not-cast itself, so I instead added logic to just unwind the the spell and have you start really channeling Hexflash. You still lose the mana cost and CD from starting your W (because you did that) but now you just transition into Hexflashing instead of starting your W dash. TBH I really didn't get the root cause but this is better than disabling the rune. I still have no idea why Hexflash is not castable but yet tries to start casting anyway. No other spell works like this.

Aftershock was replaced in 13.22! Wasn't noted in the patch notes (will be noted in .23 alongside Glacial). Thanks for the report :)