League of Legends Dev Tracker

To be clear, there are two distinct things going on:

An Udyr nerf, with a follow up that seems to be giving a real decline to Udyr pick/banrate, to the point where I expect with no further changes, he'd be sub-80, which tends to be the cutoff point. Still, he had another small nerf in 11.7. The round 2 nerf probably could have come in sooner, though.

And Hecarim, who did not cross pro play thresholds until the 11.6 nerf, which was a pretty substantial 0-20 damage off of Q. That is generally not what you'd consider a love tap on a low cooldown primary damage ability.

Champions that appear to do well against Hecarim: Ivern, Skarner, Dr. Mundo, Nunu, Volibear, Rek'Sai, Trundle, Jarvan. So, mostly champions who fill the role of beefy frontliners while likely being able to out-duel him.

Good against Udyr: Ivern, Lillia, Zac, Sejuani, Taliyah, Kindred, Mundo. So, champions who make it difficult for Udyr to get past them (CC from Ivern/Taliyah) or just kite exceptionally well (Lillia, Taliyah, Kindred).

<3

1-2 years ago Karma was perma pick/ban. This was after the Ardent Censer meta.

I agree I'd like a much healthier mix of tanks and enchanters. For whatever reasons, pros seem to just go 100-0 on one side of it. Even in the Ardent Censer year, we went up until Worlds with whatever champion just building Redemption with Censer just sitting there unpicked for the whole season.

No apologies needed. I worded my post poorly and you caught it. Thanks! :)

Right, yeah, pro-facing nerf. I'll fix the post.

Outside of Alistar and Rell, I'd argue that there's a lot of space in support when looking at the whole year. It's heavily engage tanks because of the first two and the next few who trail them, but Senna, TK, Seraphine, and Gragas occasionally built full AP make for some decent variety.

Mid is really just dominated by Orianna Azir Syndra Viktor Zoe TF, mostly the first three. I think Riot did a good job of getting Sylas into a playable spot and we saw some Lucian/Trist, which was also cool, but yeah I think the Orianna changes came too late.

To be clear about something, Riot cannot react to pro play the immediate patch before. Not only is there a minimum 8 day lag between a patch hitting live and pros playing on it, the number is greater than that because, let's be clear, a single bo3 between T1 and NS is not a good source of data.

So Riot is necessarily one full skipped patch behind pro play. There just isn't another way to do it. 11.7 can look at 11.5 pro play and 11.8 can look at 11.6 pro play... just not all of it, since those are playoff patches, but you at least get enough of a look.

Hecarim's most recent pro-facing nerf was 11.6, yes, meaning 11.8 could have had more pro-reactive nerfs. However, it's reasonable to conclude a large reason for his prevalence is from Chemtank, which also got nerfed in 11.7. For further reference, his win rates on non-Chemtank are pretty reasonable, leading to a fair conclusion that a Chemtank-focused nerf would be fair, combined with a lighter nerf on his E.

...

How exactly do you find nerfs to Phoenix Udyr's clear speed and Chemtank's movement speed "indirect"?

And those champions got nerfs every time they set off the solo queue flags. It's not like Riot was like, "Nah, let's just ignore the oracle data this time."

You don't really have to, though. Whether or not you're level 4, the team with lane priority is the one who's getting the crab. It's not unreasonable to do 5 camps and just take the other one instead.

And I can understand that, but let's be really specific about what happened:

Riot nerfed Udyr in the 11.5/6 playoff patch and Hecarim was only at 61% presence the last time Riot had a chance to react to pro play metrics for 11.6.

I really don't think Riot should get in the habit of roller coaster champion balance. It'll feel sh*tty for players and it'll feel sh*tty for pros just playing whack-a-mole with champion select.

"I think a third hit on Hecarim in 11.8 is warranted, but it's not like Riot didn't continually tap them down."

Literally in the post, bro.

FWIW, Hecarim and Udyr each received several nerfs in addition to Chemtank being nerfed.

I know Reddit likes to complain about "triple nerfing" something, but sometimes that doesn't do enough.

Hecarim's nerfs weren't in for the LCS playoffs, though he was still #1 pick/ban in the 11.6 playoffs regions.

Hecarim's second nerf, Udyr's third nerf, and Chemtank's nerf were all in 11.7, which were all put in after Riot reacted to the 11.5 second round of Udyr nerfs not lowering his priority enough.

I think a third hit on Hecarim in 11.8 is warranted, but it's not like Riot didn't continually tap them down.

Plus, let's not act like pros are good at reacting to changes on time. You say "months ago" as though people whose literal job it is to pick the strongest champions didn't fail to identify them.

11.2 had Chemtank's big buffs where it got much cheaper. Hecarim's presence: 28%. Udyr's was 74%

11.3, where Udyr was specifically nerfe...

Ty.

If there's one comment that makes me flinch every time I see it, it's this one. I can promise you that the League devs I interact with on a daily basis are some of the hardest working and dedicated devs I've ever had the pleasure to work with.

Sure, throw 100 years, spaghetti code, bugs etc at us, but our drive to make the game the best it can be for every player (we're players too) is always strong. Sometimes we just can't do all the things we'd love to do.

This should be fixed this patch. We caught the bug just slightly too late for last patch and I suppose it didn’t warrant a micro patch, so had to wait til this one.

This ones on me though, if I had pointed out the bug when I first noticed it (I work on gameplay not tech so I’m still improving at this), we could have avoided having it in last patch. I’ll be sure to keep a closer eye out on weird sh*t in our builds for future.

well said, but we acknowledge EOG is the most common complaint from players and we still want to see what we can do to make it better for as many players across the board

Thanks for the feedback!

We did do a number of things for EOG (End Of Game) second half of last year, and also some fixes early this year (see previous dev posts). Although it did fix some key issues, it is still not enough since EOG is still the most common complaint we see from players.

EOG involves multiple services and interacts with things outside the client (game engine, services, client foundation), and we have also heard from players weird bugs being reported when using discord (also on chromium) with the client. All these random things, plus a player's hardware, can result in strange behavior for some in EOG.

We are launching our next comms post next Friday, but a little preview is that we are going to initiate another investigation in EOG, map everything out, and figure out where we can continue to make improvements, and this will likely require other teams outside of client to make changes too.

Thanks

I think item diversity is very good.

Sure the Chemtank junglers are running over everything. That’s obviously an issue. But I just saw Renekton build three different first item builds in a single bo5 this weekend and then the next day he swapped his mythic midgame as the game state evolved.

Lillia and Nidalee regularly build three different mythics. Supportive tops have 2-3. And that’s not counting the 2nd and 3rd options. Marksmen have a ton of choices across ER, Collector, Hurricane, PD, Rageknife, and LDR third. There are further edge cases and that’s not counting the 5-6 different first items that get chosen.

Mages are a little lean except that they choose among 4-5 of the 6 mythics every game. Seraphs is a sometimes 2nd. Void is OP though.

People think their fighter options are limited. They are not. Gangplank regularly uses like four different builds though.