[2023] [AMA] We’re the team behind League’s newest champion, Hwei, and welcome to our HweiMA!

The goal is to never replace a spell although tweaks to make things more usable, niche, or broad may happen as a result of low spell prioritization. It is expected that some spells may be used more or less moment to moment and game to game, but if something is universally underutilized or overutilized we'll act on that spell. You'll see this later today in buffs for WW - Pool of Reflection and EW - Gaze of the Abyss focused on reliability.

Hwei's kit does use the number 3 quite a lot intentionally, most specifically in the 3 x 3 composition of his spells (3 subjects with 3 spells each). This reflects Hwei's interest in the Rule of Thirds that governs composition. There's a secondary aspect to this related to lore, as 3 is just shy of 4.

Not too long compared to other champions! We started on Hwei around a year and half ago. Though having an art mage is a pitch that has been around a while. Every denewb (new employee training) we would get Rioters to pitch a champion. This is one that I hear the most. We also hosted a team pitch session in 2022 that had several pitches that eventually influenced Hwei. While I'm not opposed to Hwei supporting, he should be Mage carry as primary. We already have a higher complexity enchanter with Renata, so it is unlikely we will make another so soon.

We were excited about the potential of a paint mage because we can let Hwei paint abilities that can telegraph what he is about to do. Learning from Aphelios, we want to make sure the complexity burden is mostly on the person that decides to pick up Hwei. Thus, having the ability to make art of "something" really helps! While an opponent might not know exactly what a giant lightning bolt does, they can very quickly tell to get out of the way. The palette is another hint to what spellbook he has queued up.

I answered some of this in other posts, but can add some more color (haha) and if others want to jump in feel free! I think this version of Hwei did mostly take inspirations from the pitch session where three pitches stood out:

1. A Paint Mage by Truexy
2. A narrative pitch for a champion that is a bit more somber/not your average happy male lead
3. A goal pitch for a humanoid midlane male champion that isn’t blue/purple. I’m serious: Asol, Veigar, Ryze, Vel’Koz, Malzahar..what is going on?

We toyed with an idea that is a variation of this for Milio in the really early stages where he was a chef and collected ingredients to mix in his pot for spells. However, during Milio’s development, we wanted a more back to basics enchanter. Since our roadmap in 2020 and 2021 were on the high complexity side.

We did try other approaches, u/RiotEmizery can maybe speak to it.

Very early on I pitched the 1-3 1-3 concept of casting primarily as a concept of mixing a color with a shape (red circle, blue line, etc), there was even a version of 1-4 1-4 with multiple ultimates! We found the color concept was too restricting and not exciting enough, so we went with complete subjects and final paintings instead of just a paint stroke. We tried many, many times to create fluid casting while also preventing bad inputs from user error, but in the end the solution we came to was not to protect players from themselves and let their own skill govern how fast they can cast back to back.

We were very concerned about the "burden of knowledge" issue from the start and aimed to create simple spells with recognizable themes and strong tells for opponents. This both helps players use colloquial names like "Fireball" to call out spells they saw as well as understand usage based off theme alone. We also avoided making too many super novel spells to avoid this kind of confusion - imagine playing against Hwei your first time and he does 10 new things you can't even understand.

Mana costs are meant to relate to WE mana refund. For a new Hwei player, they might find his mana pool is severely punishing and limiting. But one of the aspects of mastering Hwei is knowing how to use your W cooldown wisely, spending it for damage and mana greedily, early and often but also recognizing when it's time to hold the cooldown for a defensive or movement cast. In testing we found Hwei was nearly ungankable when he didn't have a reason to use his W outside of WQ and WW; asking him to use WE helped give enemies opportunities to aggress on him.

As it turns out, number of abilities doesn't correlate to typos otherwise champions would have 0 abilities because I've nevr made a typo.

Hwei is intended to be midlane primarily, but viable as a support. We don't intend to purposefully support APC Hwei, but assuming that its winrate and playrate aren't negatively impacting midlane Hwei we won't act to remove it either.

Design and Research can maybe talk about the actual iterations...I for one am glad that his ult was not the earlier iteration hahahaha.... That grounding effect on an earlier one was really scary.
I think we toyed with the idea of 3 pretty early on.

Unfortunately...or fortunately yes... it was a coincidence.

Hwei's name is a variation to Hui. We wanted to have some parallels to Jhin (Jin). Unfortunately, brain does funny things sometimes. Fortunately, it's an English thing and we operate in many many different languages.

he champion like Lillia and Ivern or looking at a broader audience?

In terms of the player base I was targeting:

1. Traditional Mid Mage Players - I think the last true mage was Syndra
2. A broader audience in terms of appeal - Originally what we had in mind was the average second male lead in anime. Usually, the trope has him be better in every way compared to the protagonist aside from the fact something in his tragic past holds him back (there were soooo many of these)With us releasing a limited number of champions per year, we are less likely to release true niche champions like Ivern. Mostly because I want every player to have a champion that they are excited about just around the corner. While not every champion will be for everyone, the more niche we go, the less likely we can cover all the players around the world in a given 2-3 year period.

After careful review of this pitch the team gas agreed that Hwei will be getting more nerfs instead

We played around a lot with the numbers 3 and 4, having between 9-16 spells in different versions of his kit. I knew early on that giving him a similar obsession to Jhin would be a nice parallel, and that the Rule of Thirds from the art world would make sense for a painter to have a preference for.

I cannot speak for the skins team on who gets skins etc. But very early on we wanted to make sure we are not putting the Skins team in a rough spot. We reviewed with them on what is difficult to do versus not. I’m hoping this is a practice that we will continue with all champs because I want my champ babies to get all of the cool skins they can :D

Answered the scrapped spells question in another reply!

Was it hard to make 10 spells gel into a single kit? Absolutely, it was an insane challenge. Every spell needs to be thematically obvious individually, thematically cohesive for its subject, mechanically cohesive for its subject, have a niche use case making it clear when to use it, have reasons not to use it, and on top of that Hwei is still a mage that can't have just any mechanic he wants. Additionally because he does comboing no spell should be a targeted spell - he needs to cast on the ground or cast a missile. This was why early on I pushed for the "Cast at Max Range" option to be added, which I hope will be improved in quality over time as well.

My fav was the one where he becomes bald every time he walks into a bush.

Hehehehe
>w>

Not sure what we can share just any clips of old stuff, but there was this amazing and horrible bug where QE and R didn't have the "One passive proc per cast" rule yet and would insta-kill anyone caught in them together. In these old VFX explorations, QE was a blizzard spell.

https://imgur.com/DNIbCGB

Roadmap incoming in the dev update coming at the beginning of the new year.

Hwei is intended for all skill levels, not only for high level players. That said, getting good at Hwei likely means you're able to answer more problems in the game will help you climb.

A few places are intended to help new or low skill players, namely his spam spells (QQ, WW, EE) all being pretty good buttons. QQ is also the most generic damage spell on his kit and good for poking while not terrible for wave clear, EE being in a similar space. EW can also guarantee a QW hit, so if you aren't good at landing QW but your opponents don't position well then an EW can secure you kills. If there's one spell I think a new player who's scared of the champion's complexity should learn to use early, it's WE to manage your mana pool. Everything else comes with time.

(>^^)>(::)

You know why.

Everyone asks why is Hwei, but no one ever asks how is Hwei

We go through a pretty rigorous vetting process in all languages we operate in, which sometimes means the space we have to work with is very narrow. We got back all kinds of ....er interesting meanings for some of the ideas we had TT^TT

Internally, we nicknamed Hwei's mage class as a "versatillery mage" as a bit of a joke that he doesn't fit neatly into any category. That said, he functions both as a control mage and an artillery mage, but his reliability as either is lower relative to his more focused mage competitors. We didn't want Hwei to be a "jack of all trades, master of none" and make his tools weaker than competitors so we decided to focus his weakness on reliability of hitting spells or controlling areas over raw outputs being much lower to compensate his versatility.

Where were you when we started development?

Honestly, in the first couple of iterations on Hwei I asked art: “Doesn’t he look a bit too…hungry?”

Art: “When you are an artist, you dive into your work and forget to eat.”

What can I say to that besides okay XD?

More seriously, we do usually decide on an age range we are targeting for the champion’s SR rift appearance. Early 30s is what we were aiming for.

Hwei was an interesting challenge for SFX— while we wanted to highlight his paint being the main source of his magic, we also aimed to create a unique sound palette per spellbook, which would represent his different sub-themes (Disaster / Serenity / Torment). Disaster has distorted synthetic layers, serenity tonal / melodic elements, and torment with the screamy and resonant spooky layers. There was a lot of back and forth between "too much goop" and "not wet enough." Additionally, we wanted to make sure his kit felt different sonically than other existing skin thematics with overlap (such as Inkshadow).

Did you see his emote ;D

What happens when you have fire and corn? :D

MISSED OPPORTUNITY

There's a lot of reasons to organize spell hotkey assignments that were considered.

One is familiarity, as you mentioned, making sure that buttons sit on champions of similar playstyles. For example, many champions have their line skillshot on Q, so we wanted Q to be his "line" spells. Some champions use W for shields, others use E for shields, so there wasn't a clear winner for that one other than enchanters preferring shields on E compared to mages.

That leads to the next consideration, which is mechanical feel. Generally you want to spam Q the most out of all of your abilities, so that was another reason to put his low cooldown damage spells on Q. It feels a little awkward to constantly spam Q + W or W + Q, so his wave clear and poke spells were put on Q and E so you can double tap or dance between them using your point and ring finger. Your middle finger is then used less frequently and with more intention, preventing too many "fat finger" inputs due to spamming two buttons next to each other. This also let the spells with more setup time live on W, namely QW and EW, so you had time to recover your hand position after awkward combos.

Next is shape consistency. QQ is a line cast, WQ is a line cast, and EQ is a line cast. QW is an area circle, WW is an area circle, and EW is an area circle. We tried to do the same for the QE, WE and EE spells but found the constraint too much to make useful and interesting spells and chose to let that be the wildcard slot. Shape consistency helps to ensure your last press in a spell sequence is predictable in targeting so you don't get confused on how position yourself due to a weird swap.

Then we have spam presses, namely QQ/WW/EE. We wanted QQ and EE to be the best generic spells for new players learning how to play Hwei, and both generally need to be used proactively to capitalize off enemy mistakes. Conversely, WW was chosen not just for the circle area shape but also to make reactive shielding a fast button press so you don't lose time when trying to block damage.

Finally, we have combo flows. WE -> EE -> QQ is a frequent combo to deal a ton of damage at mid range and because of the button layout prevents most bad inputs (W to start, spam E, then spam Q). Another example here is WQ -> QE -> EQ/EW for disengage which has each last button be the next button. We also have EW -> QW that has your fingers dance between the sides and centers.

Currently we're happy with the choice of Torment spells being focused on their control outputs rather than their damage outputs. When their damage outputs vary, then you have to consider "This spell is the best for damage so when I maximize damage I should use this one." There's already a lot to think about when comboing, so simplifying it to "I need to hit multiple targets right now" or "I need to control this area" or "I need you to get off me" helps to clarify why one should be chosen over the others. With Hwei there's always a bit of a conflict between adding complexity for depth and keeping things simple to focus on execution perfection. This is an area we've chosen to lower complexity on in order to focus mastery on execution and use cases over damage optimization.

Champion’s team is pretty cross-disciplinary, meaning we have people in Art (Animation, Concept, 3D, VFX etc), Design, Engineering, Tech Art, Narrative etc. all working together. They usually work with their disciplines for support but also we have one person representing their discipline in the Core Pod (in this case, Hwei Pod). We tend to change up the pod folks champion to champion to get fresh ideas going and to give more opportunities for individuals to learn from each other.

We work pretty closely with partner teams, like GAT (Game Analysis Team), Insights (Research and Analytics) and SRT (Summoner’s Rift Team) to ensure balance and game health. As well as with teams like Localization, Voices (VO), Publishing, Marketing etc. There are tons of folks involved for a champion to take shape that are across countries, time zones and languages!

Hwei's spells need to have a niche reason to cast one compared to the others, otherwise only the strongest output or most reliable output will matter every time the cooldown is used. That means there will be cases where a spell's niche comes up way more often in a short period or over the course of a game, or a spell's niche doesn't show up frequently or at all in a specific match. That's totally fine as long when that spell's niche appears players are using it and recognize it was the right choice.

When a spell isn't being used even for its niche case, there's a good chance that specific spell needs to be buffed. The opposite can also be true, with a specific spell being too strong and crowding out its competitors forcing them not to be used in favor of the "best spell". Funnily enough with all of the community feedback about EW being low priority for the E spells, for the longest time it was the highest priority E spell due to it having too much reliability. We seemed to have overnerfed its reliability during internal balancing, and will be making it more reliable in today's hotfix buffs.

Just for you Spideraxe!

Base Stats:

• [BUFF] Base Health :: 550 >>> 580
• [BUFF] Base Mana :: 445 >>> 480
• [BUFF] Base Movement Speed :: 325 >>> 330

WW:

• [BUFF] Shields arrive instantly instead of on cast finish
• [BUFF] Shields :: 90/110/130/150/170 >>> 100/125/150/175/200

EW:

• [BUFF] Setup Delay :: 0.7s >>> 0.65s
• [BUFF] Fire Delay :: 0.35s >>> 0.3s
• [BUFF] Chase Range :: 500 >>> 600
• [BUFF] Linger Duration :: 1.35-3s based on travel distance >>> 3s

Maybe u/orkidian can chime in here. With names we go through a very rigorous process to make sure that they don't mean something bad in one of the languages we operate in (there is so many of them). We generally start out with a pretty large list that gets filtered down very quickly. With Hwei, we wanted a name to have as many layers as Hwei himself. u/orkidian did so much work on the hidden meanings and cool name interactions with Jhin. So yes ....alot of it was very intentional. Some of my personal fav meanings to Hwei (Hui) were: To draw, grey, ashes, to destroy, brilliant/dazzling or even combined with Jhin's name to mean: To burn brightly and leave only ashes.

We experimented with many different versions of spell queuing and cast times trying to be sensitive of both Hwei's mechanical fluidity and opponent reaction times to someone that could be casting many different things. In the end we found that blocking spell queuing hurt fluidity far too much and made Hwei less exciting to master. We decided to just turn off all kinds of special input blocking and let players fix their own inputs when overpressing rather than providing a system to help prevent players from hurting themselves but getting in the way of players who are pushing him to his limits. It was a real challenge to solve this problem, but in the end Hwei offers skilled players wanting to main him a path to mastery and skill expression and we felt the answer was to give those players the freedom to flourish.

Oh gosh! This is a big one. Instead of going through every single one, because there were lots of hands and each had a profound impact to his development, I just want to say the Hwei pod and partners really came together to make this possible. It was really ambitious and the team really KILLED IT! Hwei to go.

In general we do not design champions for specific items as items could change at any time in the future. In Hwei's case we did have a goal of giving him versatility in itemization, but that should extend to any mage item system not just the current or new ones. All of that said, he was primarily tested in the new item system prior to launch and that did make balance tuning very challenging for his release patch.

Well never say never. But next couple of years I don't think we will actively try.

If more adjustments are necessary we will make them; we don't want to over-adjust prior to the 14.1 item system and map changes.

That said, we also want to preserve his weakness to being aggressed without retaliation options ready and properly aimed. That's not to say he will never receive buffs to lower his weakness in these areas, but we also don't want to shave off his weaknesses so much that he offers no opportunities for opponents.

This is more of a balance question than a gameplay design question. Our goal was to balance him for 13.24 items because that's the system he would launch in. That was difficult because 14.1 items are different and what we primarily tested on.

When 14.1 drops, many items and champions will need changes because the overall game state will change so much. Hwei might be included in those.

Hwei's SFX are a blend of synthesized elements and samples that we recorded in Riot's Foley room. Most of the liquid goop elements you hear are actually recorded from a gluggle jug (the fish shaped jug that make gurgling noises when you pour water out), which was then processed multiple times to give it a unique magical feeling. We also recorded several different "splats" using liquids of various viscosity (you can hear these in the AAs and tails of abilities). I then took all those recordings and re-processed them multiple times using a large array of VST plugins, which gave a wide range of content to work with. When doing this exploration and creating processing chains, there really isn't any rhyme or reason— it's mostly experimentation and iterating based off of what I'm feeling / whatever emotion is evoked based on what I hear. My main goal was to define Hwei's paint / ink magic, as well as give each spellbook a unique sub-identity to differentiate them.

For the synthesized elements, usually I'll start with a patch that evokes a certain feeling or mood, and then process from there. For the disaster book, I relied on processing with distortion and delay plugins to give the feeling of power and destruction. For serenity, I recorded many different pads (just me riffing on a MIDI keyboard), trying to play progressions that felt more "out there" and ethereal. Terror was mostly human screams, metallic resonances, and anything that elicited a "spooky" feeling. The E-W warning SFX (when the trap is alert and about to activate) is actually a sample of a creaky door hinge that was processed with FX! All of the different book specific sounds were then layered in with the liquid stuff, and thus, Hwei's SFX were born!

If you haven't seen it, we actually have a Youtube series called "League Frequencies," which goes over many of the different techniques that we use for creating SFX (also covers VO, Music techniques, etc). For anyone interested in sound design, I definitely recommend giving it a watch!

This goes into system design versus mechanics design.

Champion gameplay design is focused on mechanics - what does the character do? A champion should have self contained cohesive mechanics first and foremost, usually ones that compliment themselves or shore up a weakness contextually thus requiring skill.

Systems design like items and runes are focused on choice and problem solving. They look at the things champions can do and give them exciting ways to improve their mechanical output or shore up key weaknesses at the expense of other opportunities.

What this means is when making a champion with a DoT mechanic like Brand, you may say "He will be good with on-damage applications in the system" as a consequence of the design, but you do not add a DoT simply because "I want this champion to be good with on-damage applications in the system." Someday that system may change in a way that doesn't support your champion, and if that happens suddenly your champion doesn't have a satisfying kit that's self reliant and fluid to execute.

So, with Hwei one of the goals was to make him versatile. Item versatility was a neat "If we can" goal because it reflects his kit's versatility, but would be dropped if we found it impossible to create while still giving him a satisfying kit. We never once added a DoT to make him more versatile with items, but we did do things like extend DoT durations or add/change individual spell AP scalings to ensure that different stats could be valuable as items change over time.

Yes! That's correct. Sometimes we do consider systems though, when we don't want a champion to access certain systems because it would normally be optimal for them and create degenerative or uninteresting play. This was done for example with Pyke to ensure that he stays an assassin and doesn't just build bruiser items and become "Thresh with more damage and mobility". It keeps that cutthroat, high risk high reward, in-and-out gameplay that he was built around present regardless of system changes. Usually this stuff is done after defining the kit and finding that a system is damaging their unique play.

It depends on the severity and if the item is just an outlier, but that's generally the idea! This is often why certain champs have "Damage Resistance" or "Damage Immunity" instead of bonus health/shielding/healing baked into their kits. If you don't want a champion to like building durable, don't give them raw health pool because those scale together.

It's only a tooltip bug. Going directly to the WW tooltip (opening the book first) shows the right values, and casting it gives the buffed values.

Hey Spideraxe, right now we're observing Hwei's performance and cautious about making drastic changes before 14.1 introduces so many changes to the map and item system.

We have seen his overall winrate steadily grow at a slow rate and an intense mastery curve showing almost linear correlation between games played and winrate growth (normally we see a taper off of winrate growth over ~20 games; we're actually working on a special internal data report to get even more information).

That said, players are still learning him right now and it's a bit unfair to his allies if most Hwei players are feeding into assassins. The armor buff coming in 14.1 seeks to lower his and allies frustration with sharp matchups without creating much thrash in terms of output power.

Normally, champions have a winrate curve you can see starts its steepest and tapers off (you gain more winrate games 1-5 than games 10-15 playing the same champion).

Hwei's winrate doesn't taper off in the first 20 games. His first 1-3 games are abyssmally low winrate and then you just keep winning more the more you play. From the data slice we usually use (first 20 games) it looks like you just linearly get better game over game indefinitely. That's why we've requested a special data report.

That seems to be an implication from our reports but is unconfirmed, hence asking for a more detailed report.

It would confirm that he is the champion with the most games required on average to hit a steady state of winrate when playing more games.

That doesn't mean he requires the most skill, but probably implies he takes the most games to understand and access his optimizations. The distinction is that Hwei tends to be optimized more from decision making than from raw input precision (though he still does have input precision requirements).