[2019] We're the Rioters that reworked Mordekaiser. Ask us anything!

Infernal

Almost certainly less. It's actually incredible how many bugs the old Morde had. I was told at one point he was responsible for 80% of our live bugs, and I don't think they were exaggerating.

So as long as this one is 79% of our live bugs or less, I will consider it a success on the bug-squashing front.

Certainly. We conjured up the idea of him going to the death realm with his ult very early in development, and in the early stages, the ghost was virtually a "must have." So that output lived in a number of places while we iterated and tested. Sometimes, we'd have a version where if you killed someone in the death realm, you got their ghost. And that ghost output went from being a fully controllable pet to being something that followed you and just auto-attacked to something that would just be there visually giving you stats (similar to what we have now, minus the visuals).

The coolest/craziest version we tried was a passive version where any time he killed an enemy champion, their ghost would fall in line behind him and attack his target when he attacked - and he could have more than one, meaning he could ultimately enslave the entire enemy team if he was popping off.

That was really cool thematically but had a couple of major issues, the two foremost ones being: 1) to make those ghosts meaningfully powerful, he would have to lose a lot of power from his other abilities to make room, which then means he's less satisfying to play until he gets a kill and has a ghost, and 2) it would've taken a ton of development resources to make that look and feel good, and we got to a point where it was either: chase ghost improvements, or work on making the death realm a reality. We felt that pouring everything we had into the death realm was going to be better for the Morde experience.

Justin landed on this one pretty early on actually.

gotem

Juggernauts are usually more powerful in lower skill games, we don't think Mordekaiser will be very different in that respect.

Thanks so much!

A lot of the problems with the Fiora version weren't balance. Some of it was that the game stopped and everyone had to watch this 1v1 (Which was pretty disruptive). Also, Fiora is the "Grand Dullest", so she would win almost every single 1v1 possible.

Mordekaiser was a VERY complex champion, and one of the goals was to make him more approachable while trying to keep the feelings/essence of him in-tact.

Morde's new W is increased based on the damage he deals, so the number of targets nearby can for sure increase the output of the spell.

I still think there is a lot of skill expression in the new Morde, it will just take some time for players to discover.

I don't often.

We actually had some AD ratios in testing for awhile (Thanks to /u/MaliciousMetal 's suggestion). This actually ended up limiting his item options significantly. Gunblade was 100% required and you couldn't really customize your build outside of standard juggernaut stuff. It removed a lot of what was cool about being AP.

First one for sure.

We treated MordeR as closely as we could to a suppression effect.

A few I can still remember (it's been a while!):

Passives:
-Every kill/assist enslaves the enemy's ghost, forcing them to serve Mordekaiser for a duration and assist him in attacking his target. He could have up to all 5
-His basic attack speed was exceptionally slow, but auto-attacking enemies would grant a stack that significantly increased his attack speed. The metaphor here was his mace was a living weapon, and that attacking enemies allowed it to create an ethereal chain and become more of a flail than just a mace, thereby giving him that attack speed and additional range

Q:
-Early testing was done around what it might be like to have contextual changes to his Q shape. We messed around with things like: when you press Q, he starts marching forward in a straight line, then when you re-press Q, the location of your mouse relative to his facing would give a different swing. Something like:

Forward - if the mouse is in front of him, he slams his hammer down forward.
Either side - if the mouse is to his left or his right, he sweeps it from front to back in that respective direction, knocking things forward and a bit sideways
Behind - He either heaves his mace backwards, dealing significant damage behind him, or he just does a larger swing that deals damage behind him as the mace goes from behind to in front. Longer cast time than the forward Q, higher damage

W:
-This was the last ability to get locked, so there were a lot, but they were all focused around defensive outputs. We tried things like: he becomes his wraith form and is untargetable but can't attack. He gains armor/MR based on nearby enemies and becomes immune to slows.

E:
-My favorite ability we tested here was: he shot a circular missile forward that moved very slowly and opened a rift to the death realm. It would deal damage to enemies it passed over and put them into the death realm temporarily while they were in it, making them unable to interact with people outside (just like the R rules). Morde could also walk with it to be inside the death realm as long as he moved with it, making him untargetable while he approached enemies

R:
-This was basically always the death realm from the beginning of the rework, but we tried a lot of versions. The first version we did was:-Morde targets an enemy and a circle appears around them and Morde. After X seconds, everyone inside those circles is pulled into the death realm and all of those folks inside can fight.
-That ended up being too difficult to actually get into a lot of times, so we changed it to: after X seconds, clickable objects (like Thresh lanterns) are left where Morde and his target were when they went into the death realm, and anyone can click on those to join the fight in the death realm.
-All of those multi-person versions just became a chaotic mess that wasn't very fun to participate in, so we gravitated towards the 1v1. Then we tried a lot of different cast paradigms, like shooting a longer-range skillshot (like Urgot R) that would take the first enemy hit, to a version where Morde's spirit exits his armor and slowly floats towards the target and the first enemy his spirit touches goes into the spirit realm, etc.

Oh yes, you are correct. We removed all of Morde's old scripts :)

<3

Justin always talked about how he wanted to tell a story in-game about the world Mordekaiser is building. So the Death Realm ult was there right from the beginning, but we refined the specifics a lot over time.

I did hear it from you.

The initial version of the death realm featured that. Turrets stayed in the "real" world and couldn't target you. It was way too powerful, though, and it meant that a Mordekaiser that was ahead was virtually guaranteed to stay ahead because their lane opponent couldn't even use their turret as defense

We wanted the ultimate to still be a moment of power for Morde. He has to 1v1 someone who DOES have a combat ultimate, so we need to even the odds a little bit. It's also a great thematic win for when he takes your soul.

We wanted the options to be as close to suppression as possible.

He's actually quite slow compared to the rest of the cast. No mobility spells, Q and R are 0.5 second cast times (Standard is instant to 0.25 seconds), E takes 0.75 seconds to resolve (DariusE, a very similar spell, takes significantly less time). His auto attacks also take 0.5 seconds baseline, which is pushing the boundary as some of the longest in the game.

It's intentional that he's relatively straightforward to play, so at least in the short term, it's unlikely we would add complexity to his kit to address balance concerns.

That straightforwardness might mean he's not particularly viable in high level play, but that's alright. Not every champ needs to be. I personally would argue not every champ should be. What pros need out of a champion is often very different than what a typical player wants out of a champion, and with how big our champion roster is, we should try to have options for everybody.

Edit: That said, he might get picked in pro-play - and that would be awesome! I'd be incredibly thrilled. Just stating that "pro viable" wasn't one of our high level goals.

I've been a League player since early alpha, and there was a decent stretch many years ago where I mostly played Morde. So, my biggest fear in doing this VGU (and I have this fear every VGU) was utterly ruining the champion for people who liked the old one. When I did Nunu, as an example, he had a couple of really iconic, good abilities (even by today's standards) so in a way, it made the rework a bit less stressful because from the beginning, I already knew what his Q and R were going to be. With Morde, he lacked anything that stood out as an iconic, great ability by today's standards, so we felt compelled to start from scratch on his kit - yet while trying to stay true to his essence/fantasy.

That's pretty stressful for me. You have to make a lot of assumptions, and even though we talked to Morde players, put in a lot of reps on live Morde to make sure we were feeling fresh on his current kit, there's always that risk of getting it totally wrong.

We were primarily looking to make sure that the ult wasn't a guaranteed long-duration banish. Without the ability to cleanse it, it makes the Morde player's choice around who to ult a lot less interesting. You basically would just build tanky and R the highest threat target and put them into a long time-out while your teams teamfight.

With the ability to get out of it, it motivates the Morde player to build offense so they are more than just a tanky CC bot, and to think more about who to ult, and why, and when.

For your first question: the high-level goal in VGU is to make the champion fulfill their promised fantasy and to better-serve the players that we believe should like the champion. So to also go into your second question, with Mordekaiser, you had this armored, mace-wielding character that was somewhat like a death knight, so you would expect players who want to play a character like that to enjoy him, but his kit's mechanics were such that he felt like this short to mid range mage, and not like what the fantasy should've been delviering.

So our goal was to keep aspects that were core and/or unique to him (examples: remain an AP juggernaut, find a way to retain "offense turns into defense," find a way to express death magic) but then craft a kit and experience that will delight players who want to play an armored, mace-wielding death knight type character.

Edit: And to tack on a bit more for your 2nd question, in this particular case, we don't want to make another character that is similar to Morde but better serves that fantasy or those players. It's just better to take him and rework him so he's still the one-true king of the death realm.

He would make a great addition to Morde's army of the dead

We called it the shadow realm, spirit realm, death realm, etc. The name was pretty nebulous internally during development.

I'm not a writer so this isn't the real rules or canon, but in my fantastical imagination, Mordekaiser's spirit is immortal and cannot be hurt, or killed. Ever.

It didn't impede development in any way, it was a pretty smooth process. Most of the kit direction was pretty locked when Endless hopped on so it was a easy transition. For Narrative Faux had his narrative personality and high level story already locked as well, so it was just a matter of writing the VO and color text based on that. For Art the high level concept was also already locked down by BravoRay so KindleJack mostly had to just work out all the details

I had played a ton of MH: World prior to taking on this project and was definitely inspired by the way using their big hammer felt, and the things you could do with it. Ditto for other 3rd person action games with heavy weapons that smash things - I was looking for a way to incorporate more of that into LoL, but in the end, it didn't pan out.

10% stat steal is quite a lot. Mid to late game it could be 4000+ gold worth of stats. And that's a swing. Meaning you have 8000+ more gold worth of stats than your target, even if they aren't in the Death Realm.

If you are looking for them, there are little spirits similar to the ones you see outside of the death realm that show you where champions outside are. They are color coded and shaped differently based on if they are enemies are allies.

You can buy a QSS, or play champions with CC removal to instantly leave the Death Realm any time it is cast on you.

And just for the record, this spell was in development for quite awhile before Mars launched ;)

Unfortunately it's not thematic, it's tech. Spectator can see all champions at all times, and so we can do something closer to what we actually wanted to do.

In game, Death Realm works a lot like losing vision of the champions. Long story short, it's VERY difficult for your client to know what animations the champions are playing. We knew it was still important to have an idea of where they were though, so we use the wisps to communicate that.

You'd be hard pressed to find games that don't normally make it past 15 min (Midgame).

And you steal a lot more than just AP. Like that HP you mentioned. Everything you steal is useful in the 1v1.

Turrets work in the real world and in the death realm. We decided that they should not be changed by the ult, so Morde's opponents can still use their turret to defend themselves

Because our tools are pretty powerful and relatively easy to work with, we tend not to keep these abilities lying around. When we build them during prototype phase, they're in a pretty rough state, but we want to build them out quickly so we can test them and see if we want to pursue that direction or try another.

So if someone wants to reuse an idea we've had, it's not particularly costly for them to just rebuild it to a prototype level in the future. It's also somewhat unlikely we use earlier spells exactly the same as they were on a previous kit, so they will have to make changes anyway and it's likely easier to just build it from scratch so it does exactly what you want.