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Only thing I’m concerned about in this post is their mentioning of lowering tower damage. They already do so little damage to anyone that builds armor. Hopefully this doesn’t bring back the meta of dive and kill tower at 3-5 minutes on each side.
Only thing I’m concerned about in this post is their mentioning of lowering tower damage. They already do so little damage to anyone that builds armor. Hopefully this doesn’t bring back the meta of dive and kill tower at 3-5 minutes on each side.
Tower damage is being increased to help them remain relevant, not reduced
Other side-effects we're looking at include map elements (Baron and Turrets) doing less damage
Already felt like turrets tickled champions
This was a miscommunication. Baron and Turrets would do less damage if we didn't act. The patch will increase their damage dealt in order to keep their damage relevant.
PepoG
Hopefully they change Vayne. If they don't she might seriously be the best champion in the game. Durability doesn't matter if you die in 10 hits anyways
We are pretty close to 100% certain we will need to quickly nerf or buff a variety of champions, but there's a lot of uncertainty about exactly which champions and by how much. As a result we're already planning a 12.10b micropatch to address the most immediate balance outliers.
Its time, gimme the hot takes (or questions)
Hopefully they change Vayne. If they don't she might seriously be the best champion in the game. Durability doesn't matter if you die in 10 hits anyways
Vayne, Fiora, etc are all VERY known risks, we just didn't want to speculate by how much they gained power and pre-nerf (plus it's completely unfeasable to do that to all 150+ champs preship).
As an Ivern Main I am really curious, what will happen to summoned pets?
Daisy already feels like a wet paper towel instead of, well a rock?
Maybe we could use this to convince Riot to revert an old Daisy nerf;
V7.3
- REMOVED: Daisy no longer regenerates 3% maximum health per second while out of combat.
- Daisy's bonus resistances reduced to 15 / 40 / 90 from 20 / 60 / 120.
That is something I had not thought about and might be a good place to put power if those characters end up weak, thanks for the comment
Hot Takes:
1) Why not delay the changes to pre-season for a more systemic approach (runes, items, champ kits) rather than a universal increase in stats? This risks homogenization scaling, champion, and positional power profiles.
2) Jungle clears are already so easy and require no brain power. No plans to increase camp damage to off-set the increase in durability? Same question for minions.
Also you mention homogenization. We believe that base stat profiles actually help differentiate your decisions in our systems even more. Building resists when you have more HP means the EHP stands out more. Not focusing on damage when everyone is tankier means you feel the hits and consequences of your build.
Waffles or pancakes
Waffles obviously
Have you guys given any consideration to how this will affect the jungle role? The role remains powerful/relevant even after lots of xp/gold/camp spawn time nerfs because the amount of damage in the game makes ganks and dives huge threats, but if these become harder to pull off it seems like junglers will often end up with nothing to do and fall behind laners even further
Yeah we gave it decent thought.
A leading theory is that with more durability, junglers are actually more important because solo kills are rarer. We found in our tests that ganks were still very effective
I do not see any mention of per-champ adjustments. Will we see changes to % true damage champs, or are we not meant to get increased sustain against them?
We will see adjustments to any OP champs. We didn’t want to take guesses on how much to adjust champions pre ship
Yasuo will need compensation buffs
Maybe. His R passive is better now hehe
Are assassins going to see any class specific adjustments or playstyle compensation? These changes seem largely detrimental to the class identity (not arguing about it being healthy or not, just curious if we will see a shift of identity)
We are likely to buff/adjust pen items if they can’t still fill their niche. We want to avoid letting them assassinate with fighter items like the past
Do you think this will make the mages that build liandries feel much stronger? a champion like Malzahar or Zyra or Brand will seem much stronger since most of their damage is pokey + a burn that is % based.
Liandries is decently buffed in the short term yes
Out of curiosity, why was the decision to increase defenses rather than decrease offenses?
Way more direct path this way. If we took on decreasing damage there would be a ton of different angles to attack from, making it much harder to ship. I think that’s in the article
Why buff health instead of nerfing damage
Way more direct path this way. If we took on decreasing damage there would be a ton of different angles to attack from, making it much harder to ship. I think that’s in the article
Are you going to take this chance for sweeping change to do any standardization of Health/AR/MR Values across classes?
The difference between two champions in the same class can be absolutely massive:e.g. Zac and Nunu are both AP primarily Jungle Tanks who's "tank" steroid ability is their healing, but Zac has 400 more base health than Nunu at level 18. (tldr please nerf zac)
Phreak made an interesting series of videos about Base Stats and the Physical Damage/Magic Damage durability skew of various champions a few years back and I rather like his idea of standardizing AR/MR base values and growths for different broad classes, for example:
Light Durability (adcs, enchanters artillery mages)
Medium Durability (melee fighters and battle mages)
Heavy Durability (tanks and juggernauts)
And then using base health vs health growth (the most visible and readable tank stat) as the balancing lever for whether someone is tanky early or tanky late.I know the most likely answer is: "No, we are not loser nerds" but I am curious because I am slightly obsessed, I like to play the game of looking at each new champ release and guessing which other champion they got their base stats template from.
Standardizing base stats really limits us in where else we can put durability. For example, lillia has near 0 Hp regen because of her passive healing. This isn’t possible if base stats are standardized
What are your thoughts on the viability of burst mages after this? AP values are at the lowest they have been in the history of league. With this update, void staff is getting a nerf on top of every champion gaining a ton of durability against magic burst.
The void staff adjustment should be net neutral ( or even slightly more buffed compared to live). With that said, burst mages are on our radar for post launch
How the hell is Soraka or Sona going to be balanced after this.
They are nerfed in the healing department
Hot take: Early-game durability is actually fine, and there's no need to increase base HP or resistances. But buffs to HP/Armor/MR per level is definitely welcomed. Most "uninteractive" one-shots don't happen until major damage powerspikes, such as level 6+ or after first completed item.
A goal of the changes was to reduce the effectiveness of all-ins from full HP that are slightly too viable in side lanes on live.
Will my tank karma thrive more in 12.10
Only yours. We'll be searching for player tags
Waffles are far better as a consumer however pancakes take a fraction of the time
The most rational answer I’ve ever seen to this.
- How is this going to affect champions like Ivern and Yorick with their ults?
- I didn't get a full sense of the answer by reading the Gameplay Thoughts so I wonder how this is impacting champions with shielding or shields? If you lower healing and up survivability is that an immediate buff to enchanters or tanks with Shields (Nautilus, Tahm Kench etc)?
- Partially to do with the above, but how would this then affect itemization for said enchanters with heal/shielding power, and does this also mean nerfing champions with healing abilities (Senna, Kayle, Nidalee, Sona, and so on)
This seems like a wide scope project that could potentially be even wider scope and unintentionally buff enchanters to the moon if they aren't addressed (this coming from a support that doesn't want tank supports and the like to be booted out because Shields become king again)
No effect currently on pets
Practically all in-kit heals/shields are nerfed in one way or another. That means all heal/shield abilities
Do you think tanks will be relatively nerfed by this as they gain much less % durability?
The math works out where they gain less % durability but more raw durability due to armor/mr multiplying on HP and vice versa. We found that flat durability was more valuable than % durability in a decent number of cases.
Any plans for Divine Sunderer? Aside from across the board buffs, the main reason tanks have trouble atm is Divine Sunderer. There are some really weird synergy cases with champions that "shouldn't" be using them, like Camille for example. All the reasoning behind a Camille commiting with her E > killing or failing goes out the window when she can go in and out while not getting punished for it because of DS and Death's Dance.
No "plans" for anything related to items/champions/etc that are stronger/weaker due to the changes. With that said, we will be monitoring closely on live and reacting to what happens. If we "planned" to nerf Sunderer for example, we would have just done it pre-ship like some of the other systems we did. We recognize some items/systems are more likely to need follow-up and we are watching to see how they move.
Any planned changes for corrupting potion? Bonus defensive stats early feels like a huge buff to corrupting potion which was already dominating pro midlane, since you get more effective hp from the healing to higher resistances and the bonus available mana seems stronger than just mana buffs to d ring.
No "plans" for anything related to items/champions/etc that are stronger/weaker due to the changes. With that said, we will be monitoring closely on live and reacting to what happens. If we "planned" to nerf Sunderer for example, we would have just done it pre-ship like some of the other systems we did. We recognize some items/systems are more likely to need follow-up and we are watching to see how they move.
Do you have any concerns about some damage dealing oriented champions to start building too tanky? I REALLY don't want to go back to bruisers being built extremely tanky and replacing actual tanks.
Our impression is that this is very unlikely, but we will be monitoring to see if the meta shifts that way and would react.
I don't believe this addresses the problem correctly.
The complaint is that there is too much damage in the game. A very, very large percent of that damage comes from the runes and item proc's.
You address this by giving everyone more durability.
It feels super bad as some of my favorite champs to be forced to wait for my runes + items to be ready in order to combo someone, instead of playing the champion and their kit. While it does provide extra interaction, i feel the scale is tipped way too far.
By adding extra durability, and not addressing any item / rune damage, all you do is force people to trade on cycles with their runes / items, and make abilities themselves even more meaningless without them.
Cool items are fun thematically, but when every item is adding 50-200 damage on my abilities BEFORE stats for scaling, it really feels like it doesn't matter what ability I level first, as long as I know what items i have.
This criticism does not mean I'm not looking forward to how this shakes up the meta, and what new changes evolve in the game.
Our current assessment is that the proportion of in-kit damage to item/runes damage is not so far off that we'd target that for adjustments. We don't identify "in-kit power vs item system power" to be the leading problem with league in comparison to just overall time-to-kill.
I know all the armor/mr buffs are on a per level basis. Is there any consideration for giving all Champs just a flat base armor/mr? Like instead of the extra durability runes we get to slept from on our rune page could we not just give those to all Champs at lvl 1? +6 armor and +8 mr would help alot in the early game. Or would that make some champions in the jungle too safe?
The flat HP we are giving should cover the early-game case you're talking about. We considered flat durability stats but we found that we did not want to lower, say, the level 1 auto attack damage number significantly. If we gave bot laners 6 armor, that would run the risk of making early auto attacks really wimpy and not satisfying.
Why did you choose to do flat changes across the board as opposed to champ specific? Tanks already don't feel tanky and I don't think just giving them more health, armor, and mr are gonna fix that when the number of things that make stacking resistances meaningless are still there, even if they are getting nerfed slightly.
Also why is only Doran's Ring mana regen getting buffed? I feel like many tanks or other top lane champs could also use help with early mana regen without being forced into a suboptimal starting item.
Flat changes across the board are the easiest and "least biased" way to reduce damage in league. If we find afterwards that a class is being underserved, we can address their items/systems/champs specifically after.
Dorans ring is there because we found mana mages were the least likely to hit kill thresholds where champions have significantly more HP from level 1. It's possible tanks could use an adjustment to mana in the future if we find tanks follow the same trend.
100% uptime skirmishers are already broken in solo queue (read: every DD jungler, and jungle in general). this is a buff to all of them.
alternatively, burst mages (syndra, lux, zoe) won't be able to do what their kit is designed around. are you going to significantly lower their cooldowns?
I expect skirmishers to be stronger on release as well. We do anticipate a lot of the risks y'all do, and intend to follow-up quickly if it ends up being true.
For burst mages we will decide which ones need more damage (Zoe and Lux) vs more Rotations/cooldowns (Orianna Syndra) if they end up weak.
Question, if Pyke mid is gone this patch could pyke support get this nerf reverted?
V10.14
Stats
Magic resistance growth reduced to 1.25 from 1.5.
Armor growth reduced to 3.5 from 5.
That's unrelated to the above, but if he ends up weak we can buff support in a way that won't impact mid. I'm unfamiliar with how we would do that, it's not my area of expertise.
Pets, esp Daisy and Tibbers should get a similar durability buff, as they are going to be in fights longer.
Noted
Whats the plan for balancing bruisers vs assassins, especially bruisers like Lee Sin that are doing assassin-level damage anyway? Now that it seems bursting is weaker, isnt the gap between the 2 just gonna increase more?
The intention is that bruisers will not have assassin-level burst in this world and should benefit from sustained combat, especially in skirmishes.
Will the -10% healing change be enough to counteract the grevious nerfs and survivibilty buffs that make healers stronger? Or will they be getting a larger nerf then -10%?
If we need to go harder/softer we will adjust. We took a general swing at as many champs as we could but didn't value exact precision on first attempt.
Did u guys forget to nerf deaths dance aswell?
Its one of the most busted items right now that also heals a alot, and considering fighters will be even harder to burst down in a team fight this item should defenitely be getting nerfed.
Also i feel like some lethality or atleast dirk should also be getting nerfed, the amounts of damage they bring to rotations early game is too high (dirk itself basically eclipses every other early game component item in the game at its cost).
Deaths dance is an anti-burst item, which should make it comparably weaker in a world with less burst. We did not pre-nerf deaths dance (I think?) because we can just nerf it right after if it's a problem still. Predicting every item in the game and spending time adjusting them just to likely have to adjust again is not an effective strategy.
How riven is allowed to be so broken for so long ???
That is not related to the durability update.
My hot take is that it was better to reduce damage than to increase durability. Let's just hope, in the future, damage doesn't need a buff, otherwise we will be back at square one, but with more damage than before.
Still, I'm excited for the changes.
In theory yes, but that is easier said than done.
I'm asking moreso for examples of what they want things to look like in the future. Like a hypothetical scenario and how it would play out in the present contrasted with how they want it to play out in the future.
Zed kills you because he lands 2-3 shurikens in his R combo, but does not kill you when he doesn't land any skillshots and just hits E+auto attack.
Hot take from a Kaisa and Vayne main. Kaisa will become trash tier unless you also buff her burst damage from level 1 since her range is so short that she can never take lots of little poke trades. You pair Kaisa with supports like Leona, Blitzcrank, Nautilus, Pyke. If Kaisa and her support land every key skill and don't get a kill she'll become worthless as a champion and by the way she usually gets her early kills by a single auto or hitting W for a passive proc.
Vayne on the other hand will become insanely broken given her interaction with the broken new version of Lethal Tempo. Silver bolts value is about to go through the roof since it's percent max health true damage.
Not adjusting both Kaisa and Vayne before this goes live is really stupid. I'll be OK I guess thanks to Vayne, but it's gonna be sad almost never playing Kaisa again.
I'm hoping data from the PBE will actually be considered and if players truly hate it this whole idea is scrapped BEFORE HITTING LIVE unlike the disaster that was the chemtech drake and chemtech map.
You should allow your personal bias to take a back seat for a moment.
We intend to micropatch immediately based off data for any champion that is significantly outside of balanced bands. That means that Kai'Sa (or vayne) will not remain weak/strong for too long. Balancing off PBE where X champion main (who is 1/10,000,000 of our players and likely only in the US) is giving subjective feedback about how their character feels is extremely unlikely to be more effective than balancing for the entire playerbase. As noted in the article, there are so many champions/systems that we know are going to be imbalanced and we are committing to remedying any rough patches immediately.
Will there be adjustments to account for the resource divide between mana based and manaless and energy champions the number of abilities needed per fight rises?
This is an area we are watching closely, and will adjust if needed
When you say you're going to reduce healing and shielding, do you mean those item changes or are we going to see individual value nerfs on skills?
Both
Have you guys thought about where this puts tanks? Sustain increases make duellists even happier into tanks and the flat increases do less for tanks
Yes we have tested tanks and found them to still be very effective (if not more effective)
What will be done with champs that regen missing or max health? Seems like Garen will come out big on these changes. On the flip side, top laners with no built in sustain will feel very weak or Mana hungry.
I was on pantheon yesterday against a pretty bad Fiora (never ripostes effectively), and i couldn't touch her despite being up 2k gold, and levels. She had hullbreaker and bork. I had yomuus, DS, and DD. I feel like this change will only exacerbate that GSP between champs with and without innate sustain.
We will adjust on a champ-by-champ basis post-ship
Less of a hot take/question and more of a general comment - please keep in mind the small number of (mostly older) burst champions who already have to use their whole kit in order to score a burst kill, which I agree is generally a healthy dynamic. Naturally I'm approaching this as a Fiddlesticks main, as Fiddle can aid in kills without his ult but isn't soloing anyone (beyond level 3) by walking up and using EQW on them.
Fiddle's also susceptible to being collateral damage here, as he still derives a huge ratio of his total damage from high base damage values (and thus, penetration) rather than AP ratio damage, when compared to most other mages. This means flat buffs to health and MR cut against his current state more directly than other mages, and are likely to render him even more reliant on penetration or pseudo-penetration (Void Staff, Shadowflame, % damage amp...). But I agree, it will take a bit of time to see how it all shakes out and whether and power shifts are needed.
Regardless of how it impacts any one champion, thank you for shaking things up with this bold change!
We can make adjustments on a champ-by-champ basis to ensure each individual champion can still fulfill their fantasy
Are you guys going to be taking a look at Death's Dance as a result of these changes? Out of the list that was the one item I was expecting to see the most. Increasing durability and decreasing overall healing is great, but I feel like DD is just going to be even more oppressive than it already is right now. Maybe a decrease in its damage conversion by like 5%?
No planned changes but no items/systems are off the table for future adjustments.
Have you thought about how this will affect under-tower CSing? Or will the increased turret damage only affect damage to champions?
Only champions, thanks for the question
What exactly is the point of this given that the champions that suffer from these changes will eventually be buffed to alleviate their new weaknesses?
For example, everyone knows assassins will be hit hardest by this and will eventually be buffed, and those buffs will most likely contain extra damage somewhere, circumventing the extra durability and bringing us back to where we started off.
So what is the point exactly? A meta shake-up?
That information is in the article. We want assassins to still be able to fulfill their fantasy so long as you play well. Currently on live, Zed kills squishies without landing anything very consistently, for example. Or talon builds tank. We want to remedy these issues but maintain that assassins are threats when itemizing correctly and playing well.
Any reason why Dragons and Herald didn't receive changes like Baron did?
Really excited for the changes btw!
Dragon we could likely adjust too. Herald I believe just doesn't do enough damage to be threatening in most cases anyway.
Do you anticipate that these changes will necessitate a ton of champion balance adjustments throughout the following patches?
Yup, loads.
Will Elise get compensated at all?
I like the changes overall but can’t help but acknowledge Elise is going to be missing several legs this patch.
- void nerfed
- MR increased
- towers kill her laners faster when diving
- less healing
- more enemy HP
- the changes don’t benefit her like other champs cause she can’t take extended duels and her DPS was hard gutted.
- already struggling on live as a tower diving cheese pick with certain AD laners.
We will balance champions on a champion-by-champion basis.
I'm more interested in knowing if anything is going to be done about bruisers building things like death's dance and maw and becoming unkillable gods with assassin tier damage that take a team-wide effort to be handled. Increasing the durability is good, but bruisers are already insanely tanky, should we expect them to be even tankier? Cause if that's the case then it's going to feel terrible. Are they gonna get a clear direction and be forced to make sacrifices like every other class in the game does, or are they still going to be able to just get everything they could possibly want with a couple items without any concession whatsoever? The goredrinker->death's dance->maw combo for example covers absolutely every possible area and is so stupidly overpowered it completely warps the game around. Even assassins who build just DD and maw suddenly become bruisers while still retaining their massive damage.
Another thing that I'm concerned about is that poking is a pretty damn dead and buried playstyle with the awful sustain creep, which is one of the reasons why mages have disappeared from top lane years ago. A melee champion buys doran shield and takes second wind and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. You waste your entire mana bar on them and accomplish nothing. With champions being tankier and dealing less damage, isn't poking going to be become an even more insignificant playstyle in solo lanes?
As it stands, the balance between ranged and melee champions is terrible. You lose so much to have a little bit of extra range with significantly worse statuses overall, not to mention all the items and runes that are significantly weaker on ranged champions, while melees completely trivialize their supposed disadvantage with a few runes and/or very cheap items while getting to enjoy the higher stats and much better items. Is anything going to be done about it?
EDIT: Yeah, just saw vandiril's video with all the changes. Zero changes to Death's Dance and 0 changes to doran shield or second wind. Laughable and completely clueless list of changes. You guys just made bruisers who were already virtually immune to poke even more so.
They will not do assassin levels of damage when the target they are killing is more durable. If items are still OP after the durability update we can nerf them. Poke is something we are watching as well.