League of Legends Dev Tracker

Maybe but Galio also isn’t really a “kill your whole team” kind of champion like Brand, Fiddlesticks, etc.

Technically that exists with the MS on hit but that may not be enough.

Yeah that’s reasonable.

Idk that’s be up to the designers ultimately. I know they don’t like choices being choked out but they’re also ok with players finding new tools and feeling excited to use them.

For reference, Hail of Blades kinda breaks the expectations around Q cooldowns since it’s instantaneous. 6stacking LT still takes 5+ seconds of combat and only your 3rd or 4th Q really benefits from the CD change that much.

Personally that feels palatable on a combat design perspective. At that point it’s just about winrate and choice comparison.

I’d argue the resets are just built in. Like imagine instead of 40sec per target it was just 40sec resetting on takedown. It’d hit that fantasy but just be weaker at the job it already tries to do.

We have recently playtested with all damage from champions to champions reduced by 20%, and all healing and shielding reduced by 20%. Some findings:

• Late game fights and especially teamfight become more legible and engaging, with better structure.
• Tanks become very overpowered.
• Healing becomes much more powerful - even at -20% healing, each point of healing is much more valuable than on the live game.
• Burst mages (especially ones dependent on a single rotation - Lux is a prime example here) quickly become borderline useless and it isn't clear how to buff them without undoing the reduction in damage output.
• AD assassins migrate to pure glass cannon builds to remain above burst thresholds - ironically, if AD assassins are common in the meta, the game could feel even burstier as a result. I don't think we got any clear read on AP assassins.
• Lane phase yields mixed results; there are more lanes where nothing ever happens, but ...

We pushed it back a patch to allow us to respond to feedback. I don't believe we've made final calls on what mechanics, if any, will change as a result, though.

This is honestly the hardest thing about working on League - nobody is actually a League player, they're Kindred-Shyvana players and Kled-Pantheon players and Yasuo-Yone-Zed players and Tristana-Draven-Samira players, whatever their position preference and champion choice is.

This is a strength of the game and a big reason it has so much wide appeal, but it means that for any given player, they're running into unfair-feeling games routinely and then seeing Riot not do anything about, and it means we're always balancing one player's needs against another's. There are very few unequivocal wins for us to take and most decisions we make hurt the game for someone.

Just to be clear about what the actual boogeyman is: the state we want to avoid is games where the actions you take in the gameplay (both moment-to-moment and at a broader strategy level) don't really matter.

This can happen when burst damage is so high that the correct play becomes staying far away from enemy champions for extended periods of time, and that's why we're investigating it right now.

But it most easily happens when defense outpaces damage - hitting individual skills matters less to the outcome of a fight, so fights become more stat-check-y; because fights become more of a stat check, it's easier to know that you shouldn't fight for very extended periods of time; it's much easier to start a comeback by picking and killing a fed glass cannon who is running over a game than a fed tank or juggernaut in a tank meta.

I'm aware that I don't have to reassure this subreddit on this topic, but yes, it really is going to be a controversial topic with the larger playerbase.

I don't think Riot should change champions exclusively to make them more popular.

I agree with this statement. It's hard to get much nuance into a blog post with this many topics.

In the case of Ahri and Janna, we're working on them because we believe that players who they have previously resonated with aren't enjoying them as much anymore. The goal is make them feel fun and well-supported. We do expect that if we succeed with this work, they'll be more popular, but that's a secondary effect.

I do want to be careful talking about concepts like who champions ought to resonate with - there are a lot of confounding factors and in Janna's case survivor bias is a real concern - she has lost approximately 50% of her pick rate since we pushed her lane phase so hard towards repeatable point-and-click harass, which implies that a lot of people who previously enjoyed Janna were hurt by those changes, but certainly some (most?) of her current...

That sounds like a challenge.

FWIW the winrate difference for LT vs. Conqueror on Yasuo mid is 0.2%. For Yone mid it's a small but more meaningful 0.9%. Though in both cases, Fleet Footwork is +/- 0.1%, so we're pretty much just within variance and it's not like LT is completely warping these champions' power levels.

That said, the numbers shift more toward LT for top lane where auto attack trades are much freer but that's also the less popular role for both champions.

FWIW, the intent for Rocketbelt is that it's the single-target access item. It's meant to be the burstier "I'm going to get you" option. Its success on champion like Akali (who largely just get their one kill with E+R) speaks to this item doing reasonably well there. Obviously it also fits the "I just need target access at all" crowd, like Fiddlesticks, Singed, and Galio.

Night Harvester's goal is to be the long-duration teamfight reset item. It's why its damage is per-target and why its mythic passive is ability haste. It's meant to be the long-term one. As further evidence, Rocketbelt has a once-per-teamfight cooldown on its active and is never reliably going to hit more than one target. Thus I think flat pen would not make sense for Night Harvester's initial goal. If NH users are meant to eventually fight everyone, flat pen is not the stat for that. Haste does make more sense as an "I'll get to you eventually" piece.

Now that's not to say Night Harvester...

Thank you and I will pass it along!

FWIW Zed ultimate is also the "same amount" of true damage.

Both abilities only pass through resistances once. In Zed's case, I believe it stores all the damage pre-mitigation, then passes it through armor for the pop, and for Yone's case it passes it though post-mitigation, and so it's already gone through armor/mr for the pop.

TBH just to make players feel better about it, all abilities should probably work Zed's way because of posts like this. I'm legit not flaming you. It's just not really that intuitive. But they're functionally identical except for generating posts like this.

Imagine building LDR on Yasuo, though. Like I thought Yasuo players weren't very smart (trust me, I am one) but that's a whole new level of just giving up on rational thinking.

AFAIK Kraken Slayer's interaction here is intentional: it's meant to be functionally on-hit for melee champions and on-attack for ranged as a melee/ranged balancing lever.

Thanks so much! She's awesome and it's great to explore her inner world/imagination.

IMO Jorn is indelibly tied to Pentakill. I would love to see him continue as long as PK goes. Which is hopefully for a long while.