Hey Phreak ; I'm noticing how most of the other buffs are not straight up damage buffs except this one (and syndra). Has there been a "directive" to avoid damage buffs ?
Nothing really obvious and direct. We're generally aware that the game is more lethal than we'd like. There are some systemic things in the works, some systemic things that are farther out, and some small direction in short-term changes.
The Samira/Quinn/Akshan changes from a couple patches ago are an example of that last one.
I'm not sure anyone can with a straight face claim a "jungle clear speed nerf" matters when at the earliest it could take effect is level 8, for -5 damage.
By the time Lee Sin has E maxed, he is level 13 and has enough AD that -20 damage is irrelevant to clearing (as if a level 13 jungler cares about clear speed...). But more realistically Lee is maxing E last, so this nerf means at level 14 Lee Sin is now missing a whole 5 damage on his clears, while casually throwing out 700+ damage Q nukes to monsters.
Or calling the W change a 'nerf'. It's massively better until level 13, where Lee Sin now gets -1% omnivamp. The early game jungler getting a whopping +5% omnivamp levels 2-7 far outstrips the 'nerf' of level 13 Lee healing 20 less health per 2k damage dealt.
Most Lee Sin jungles max W 2nd.
For ~75% of Lee Sin players this is a 5 damage nerf at level 14.
But isnt Lee being buffed specifically for pro play? I can't see how he fits into these categories.
Lee Sin is like 48% everywhere.
Win rate is not power (not exactly anyway, they're obviously correlated) but also his teammates are the ones on the receiving end of that 48% win rate and they've been receiving that for several months. He could stand to be buffed even just for his teammates' sakes.
Season 2, was in junior year of high school I believe. Great times
I still don’t get why they don’t implement it like Xayahs passive. Make the focused target a guaranteed hit.
We had this discussion.
One of the designers literally started quoting Twitch lines.
Long story short we elected to give him some level of unreliability (you can Flash for example) but in the average case he will hit.
hi mr obama,
challenge gems above rank masters is bugged. anyone grandmaster or challenger will only display the master gem in lobby. i been a challenger for a long time and it only shows master gem! however in game loading screen it does show the correct gem. it just doesnt match the gem in lobby.
Looking into it.
Can you give some more context on the decision to add Azir?
The risk that he'll be #1 by a lot. Technically Taliyah and Trist had higher presence than him in LEC postseason and though Trist was nerfed (plus several systems changes should impact her), Taliyah was not. But ultimately, it's a very light touch that will absolutely retain Azir in the meta but makes him less likely to be #1. Ideally we have no 100% presence champions. We don't think Trist or Taliyah will be that and this change is to stave off the likelihood that Azir will be either.
With his shield being this much of a one point wonder I would expect jgl lee to also do E second
Eh, currently jungle Lee is like +2% win rate on W 2nd. It'll get closer, sure, but I expect W to still be better.
The flat shield still scales substantially.
Disappointed you guys didn't go with 44/144/244. Power levels be damned, I'm here to meme and RP my champ.
I wanted to raise the trap count to 4 and was told no
ofc jhin ult buff because everytime i get hit by jhin ult i think to myself "boy, this ult really does no damage" /s
I mean he's the only marksman where you can realistically dodge all of his damage and not just because he missed. It's allowed to be strong IMO.
nice galio buffs literally not solving any of his problems in the current meta
ive come to detest those proplay micropatches because they seem like such a cope for riot to balance nothing, good luck with worlds viewership when worlds meta will be a copypaste of boring ass playoffs that nobody watched
In general, we're not trying to specifically pro skew these changes. For the vast majority of them, there are one of three driving principles:
Moving forward, we'd like to do pro balance less often than we did this year.
However, I think 14/15 of the most present champions have been changed since the last time any league played on a given patch. Kai'Sa, Tristana, Azir, Renekton, Rell, etc. etc. etc. If you think nothing's changed since playoffs (which BTW was 13.13 for LPL lol), you just don't have a very good memory.
They really said "f**k Rek'Sai mains, we don't want her in Worlds." This is gonna feel f**king rough
Rek'Sai has been completely ceilinged by elite MMR solo queue, sadly. And then we buffed her best first item.
Every time, I've tried to compensate changes for other skill brackets or nerf things that disproportionately hit super high level play. There's also a longform change list (similar to Rumble and Azir, which were both very successful changes IMO) floating around that if I have time for, I'd like to trial. However, I can't guarantee that this will be the highest priority in the near future.
The third Lee Sin line isn't mentioned here, but is currently minus 0-20 damage off of E.
Top/Mid Lee max E 2nd. Jungle Lee maxes E last.
Jesus f**king christ, that Jhin R damage buff is way bigger than anything I expected for Jhin.
THAT'S SO MUCH f**kING DAMAGE
EDIT: I am going to add, if Worlds is indeed topside focused (whether its sololane or jungle, doesn't matter), Jhin skyrockets in terms of botlane powerpicks.
It has a Total AD ratio, the real difference in damage is ~14%
Read moreSo Riot has looked into that, but said "we won't do this."
From a 2017 Ask Riot:
Why doesn’t Riot queue negative players with negative players? What’s wrong with the “prisoners island” concept?
First, let’s define “prisoner’s island” designs for the folks who aren’t familiar. A prisoner’s island approach says that any players who cross the line into unsportsmanlike conduct should be separated from the broader playerbase and only matchmade together. At face value, it’s an emotionally satisfying fix that basically deports assholes to an island and theoretically makes everyone else’s games better as a result — but it runs counter to our value of reform.
Prisoner’s island design doesn’t work for League for two major reasons:
Reason One: We believe in a real shot at reform for unsportsmanlike players
...
Hey thanks :)
in the video, you said that there will always be a #1 champ and that you have to choose favorites and cited Rakan as an example for supports
Ideally who would you want the #1 to be for top lane? Aatrox? Renekton? K'Sante?
With this split's pro play as an example, top lane doesn't end up having a clear winner as often, since the lane frequently has sharp counters. For example, a top laner rarely cracked 75% presence, while jungle/mid/bot/supp all usually had 2+.
In general, a lane with a dedicated income stream should probably default to playing champions who care about that income stream. Either that means making every tank care a lot about gold (we probably shouldn't to a large degree) or they're mages/fighters/assassins. Though I do think each lane should have viable low-agency / weakside options.
I'm pretty comfortable with Jax being one of the highest presence top laners this year. He's likely to be #1 at Worlds. I think that's fine. Probably not for multiple years running, though.
Read moreI genuinely think it’s completely fine to have some pro play oriented, super high skill champions that are always bad for low elo. I don’t think that in a game with 150+ heroes, every single one needs to be easily accessible to all players. Even if it would be more fair mathematically for these heroes to have an accessible value floor, it would still feel incredibly unbalanced if 20 games on Annie and 20 games on Azir had an equal power level. I think it would deeply invalidate almost every other champion’s purpose if you could just easily pick up and play these pro play heroes, but they also had a way higher skill cap. I also think that it can makes the game less interesting if you tune these kits down to basic levels. They still need to not let pro meta get stale and imo just let them have shit winrates in low elo.
I guess in some sense it depends what you want to watch in pro play. The flashy kits are very entertaining and seeing the skill cap and the big pop off moment...
The only time I have a "problem" so to speak with pro-bound champions is when they profess that they're broadly approachable.
Azir is clearly a high skill cap champion. His pick rate is directly influenced by his pro presence. Meanwhile, Garen is the kind of champion that really shouldn't be in pro jail. He's meant to be an intro champion.
I think Jinx falls into the Garen camp and Aphelios falls into the Azir camp, to provide a few more examples. Really this is more of a sliding scale, but directionally this is where my thinking is.
Ultimately this means signing ourselves up for constantly tuning Azir, Aphelios, K'Sante, and similar champions who are going to be viable in pro or not at all. They're aspirational and difficult. That means the average player will fail on them. That's fine. But if they aren't even pro viable, then no one gets to have fun and there's no more aspiration.
Personally I'm comfortable with Azir, K'Sante, etc. having a permane...
Read moreWhere are the KSante proplay nerfs?? -300g on Randuins is like a gigabuff to him. Im so sick of watching this champ the whole f**king year he's still here. Now he's gonna be in worlds which will make Toplane stale AGAIN. Why are they delaying changes till after worlds? Literally squeezing out more money out of this champ dude smh this balance team are frauds.
50% pro presence for 3 straight patches. Randuin's got buffed but so did Goredrinker, Stridebreaker, Shojin, and Armguard, plus some champions who innately play well into him, like Gwen. Only top laner nerfed is Renekton.
No reason to think he'll suddenly 1.5x his presence without direct buffs.
When you upgrade the tokens from 6 to 7 after a game, the challenge tier can't update until you've played a game.
I just pinged someone about this. Glad there's an understood work around, but dinging 7 on mastery should update the associated challenge.
is -5ms really a small nerf though?
Last time we did it was this year to Nidalee and it was a bit under 1%. Of course, Nidalee has Pounce, so she cares about her base MS a bit less than other champions.
But about 1% off is fine here.
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