[2022] Patch 12.10 Durability Update - Preview of Upcoming Changes

Can we guess what the potential 60% winrate champs are. My bet's on Vayne

Excited for these changes. The team has been incredibly thoughtful and also has been testing this for some time internally. We definitely won’t get everything right out of the gates and as some here have pointed out, there will likely have to be adjustments afterwards for a few patches.

YEAH GUESSING IS COOL AND ALL BUT CAN YOU BUFF JINX?

I played 1 game of Jinx on these changes and she one shot the nexus at 15 minutes. I think she needs nerfs

If there’s anything that’s clearly an outlier you can trust that we’ll be monitoring and adjusting where we need to.

The team does a great job of trying to understand and predict all second and third order impacts from changes like this. That said we only have 200 years of experience, so we won’t get everything right. Trust we’ll correct where we need to.

One of the things we did that isn't part of the patch is we spent time aligning on what good looks like for various classes.

For Assassins specifically - I think it is very likely they will be less powerful and we need to buff them (though that'll be followup, not pre-buffs).

In general, we are comfortable with burst characters killing their targets very quickly - the problem we're solving right now is that many of them can do it while building bruiser items and getting too durable, or without needing to pass any key skill tests, and sometimes even without having to commit their full kit (we don't want Zed killing an ADC with just QWE+AA when they're on even gold), and that too many characters who have other strengths are also able to one-round a squishy champion without giving anything up.

If we need to buff Assassins just by win rate, we'd first check to make sure they can secure kills on squishy targets when they're building burst damage items (like Lethality items for AD assassins) and commit their whole kit, or when they're significantly ahead of the curve. If they can't do that, we'd most likely straight buff their damage - either individually, or in the item system (e.g. lethality), depending whether it's a few champions or the whole class.

If they can do that, we'd be looking other places to inject power. Some of our options include power curve, sustained output, utility, vision and map control elements, but it'll really depend which champions are impacted (we'd use different tactics for champions on the border between fighter and assassin like Pantheon or Nocturne than we'd use for a pure assassin like Zed, for example).

Imprecisely. We'll be using the best data we can get access to as well as our judgment but the reality is this game is too complicated to get perfect confidence in stuff like this, and some situations are going to look extreme enough that we feel we need to act when in retrospect it'll turn out we didn't have to, or even did the wrong thing.

For example, you mention a learning curve for assassins around their burst thresholds; there's also going to be a learning curve for ADCs around the appropriate safe distance for them to position at, and there'll be teams that lose games because their ADCs played too safe while the opponent's ADC judged it better. Will this be a larger effect than Assassin learning? It's hard to measure and we won't have perfect context.

It is going to take time for balance to settle back down - there's no way around it.

what does balance team think about the idea of balancing AD assassins through lethality scalings?

Open to it, haven't felt we needed it very often. Could be a useful tool if necessary after these changes if we're seeking new balance approaches.

Mixed signals. If I had to guess I'd expect them mostly to be similar or weaker, but very low confidence.

Basically they're worse at one-shotting you themselves, but most of them have a long range CC spell optimized for generating picks and picking an enemy when you have teammates around is still lethal; increased champion durability potentially gives them more chances to generate that pick.

The uncertainty is why we're not attempting any pre-balancing here.

<3

You’re right it’s probably an out of date figure. ;)

Appreciate the comment. Thanks for playing League. :)