Also any plans for Ludens proc not removing Banshee spellshield?
It is so annoying that the only counterplay is not simply: "dodge stuff", but "stay 300 units away from anything that gets hit"
So i agree tbh but there's a lot of consistency violated if we did that. Would have to be a larger scope change but maybe?
Question thkugh, are hydra items such as tiamat, ravenous or titanic sipposed to work on ranged champs or will that be changed?
We want to see if that interaction is OK in league, restrictions are lame if they're not necessary
Are Anivia and Cassio on the watchlist?
They will be a couple of hundred mana down at 1 item, and at two items either several hundred mana down or a few hundred hp. And they lose Seraphs active, which is clutch for survival.
Also Anivia does not like Gale/Prowler terraincrossing feature.
Idk if you saw but Cassio already has some compensation buffs. Aniv is on the watchlist but haven't seen if she's weak yet.
Read moreHey Phlox, I'd like to mention one thing that I think is worth considering re: new mage itemization.
When playing some champions like Xerath, building Luden's virtually always leaves the casters with ~10 HP if you're building normally. Even if you prioritize AP first and heavily delay boots, the minion hp keeps scaling alongside your damage and leaving it just outside your threshold until you get fed.
It ends up making it feel really, really bad to play just in general...unless you build Liandry's.
The problem is that, while it does help differentiate the two. It feels bad that Luden's damage proc applies to the melees instead of the casters, when you were already going to use extra abilities to kill the melees, but didn't have more for the casters.
For example: Xerath Q hitting the full wave but proc'ing Luden's on the melees and leaving the casters at 10 hp each. It feels really, really bad, and makes Luden's feel almost like a troll item compar...
Could see that, it'd be an interesting change. Fwiw its also possible we buff ziggs/xerath if theyre struggling a lot in the new world
Sick analysis, glad to see people picking the system apart more deeply even before it hits live servers.
Read moreI appreciate the response but I definitely disagree on most of those points. Galeforce seems like easily the worst mythic in the game. A 90 Second CD lucian Dash with 100-300 damage that requires you to dash at a target to even get the damage pales in comparison to a 45 second CD AOE slow/root.
Essence Reaver seems great on spell slingers, But Jhins Q CD is 5 seconds at max. A full build Jhin at level 18 has maybe 500 bonus AD, So 30/40% bonus AD is... ok. ~200 damage at absolute full build and full items.
Even Kraken slayer's AD ratio is decent enough that it's not always bad on him.
Like all of these things when looked at in a vacuum are fine, sure. But by comparison to all of the Marksmen that are getting AS on more items, which is only 25% as effective on jhin, and who will proc Krakaken slayer 3 times for every one time Jhin can, its bad. Jhin will fall significantly far behind in damage. Storm Razor lost AD, LDR lost AD. IE ...
I'll look into the point about the stack fall-off time, you make a good point. Maybe we can adjust to be closer to old Rageblade's 5 seconds.
Nice writeup my dude, am hoping people continue to dig into the new items and systems and explore what's changed and give feedback on it. Its really fun from my end to read all of this stuff [even the rage clickbait videos :^ )]
I thought Demonic Embrace got removed?
It's not in practice tool because of a layer manager issue :L
The first point might be true but you would be crazy to not rush a mythic item.
Most legendary items got nerfed compared to live while mythic are stronger than an average legendary item on live.
If you're playing a champion that has no good mythics to rush you wont simply rush something else, you'll instead just play another champ that can actually get a mythic first.
We assume most champions will want a mythic first because of efficiency and power of the active/passive but there will surely be times on specific champs you'll end up rushing like a botrk or demonic embrace or whatever instead because it synergizes with a kit or against an enemy champion
Can you comment on the the state of Jhin, and specifically is inability to effectively use the stacking aspect of some of these items? Kraken slayer attack stacks fall off so quickly Jhin can only EVER proc it on his 3rd or 4th shot. If he ever has to reload, the stacks completely fall off. It is completely unbuyable on him. Similarly, the new PD passive is practically impossible to use on him, as it requires 4 attacks and the stacks fall off before he finishes reloading. It seems like Jhin will likely be forced into Lethality with this item update.
While I agree with your two points, that neither of those two items synergize well, Jhin has many other items that are super synergistic with him.
Galeforce and Essence Reaver have very generous bAD ratios, which scale very well with Jhin's multiplicative bAD. Even Kraken slayer's AD ratio is decent enough that it's not always bad on him. Outside of that, he is still very happy with RFC, Stormrazor, the better scaling Runaan, BT, IE, and LDR. We think he has more than enough options in the marksman system.
That being said, I'm sure he also likes a couple of the Lethality items, there's nothing saying you can't use a combination of them to adapt to what the game needs :)
Sure, makes sense, I like the idea of more level restrictions like blue orb at lvl 9 adding a cool item that just wouldnt work at lvl 1 like sweeper can.
Ty for the answers, this kind of stuff is sort of my dream job so its great to learn more from rioters :)
Feel free to add me on league my dude, can chat time to time if you have questions about the industry etc
Yeah considering league has a patch every 2 weeks which other games could only dream of it still seems like a lot to manage. Hey like I said the past few seasons have been really varied(quantity of viable champs) and fun(learning new game mechanics) for me so I appreciate the work youre doing.
Can I ask your thoughts on specifically the new warding item that lets you hold more control wards/place 4 normal+ 2 control. How is that ever going to be balanced in soloq and pro play considering the warding jg item was removed as it was too strong in pro, but this seems even better(Gotta say I am only talking theory and havnt had a chance to use it/see it in pro of course).
So our assumption is the restriction around having to place lots of wards means its bound pretty tightly to the support role (I don't know what the current tuning of that restriction is).
When its not an early game purchase and also restricted to one role it hopefully shouldn't have the problems of warding smite or similar, but its definitely one of the more risky items out there.
Hey, In the post about reducing Crit chance and damage it was said that Marksmen would get compensation in base stats. Is there any news on when/how that is planned to happen? With the change to 20% crit and needing 5 crit items to hit 100% crit, it is now practically never viable to build defensive items, Since non of the crit items actually provide real damage resistance (made even worse by this nerf to shieldbow). Added to the fact that all legendries across the game are losing stats.
Sorry I'm sadly not super up to date on the marksman stuff
Adaptive items would be interesting
Definitely could be interesting, maybe next preseason? :^ )
Sure, makes a lot of sense when that is the case, I can imagine how annoying samira is to work on at the moment or not work on as the case may be.
One problem I have is that Riot literally enforce the meta, like ashe senna at this worlds caused by various changes over summer, but we never seem to hear from the balance team to learn their goals. Like if there is a lethality meta, did they mean to case that or did it just happen becuase they tried to fix a tank rune? Would be great to get more gameplay thoughts/ask riots specifically from the balance team about how they want the game to be, otherwise we can only assume that stuff like that is a mistake.
There are some articles we put out about stuff like the oracle (balance framework) and all that jazz. I suspect some of this might be we're not as clear as we'd like with patch notes etc.
There's also just changes that we can't anticipate for pro play, pros can sleep on picks for long periods of time (see cait) and then when buffed they play those picks like crazy, even after the buff is reverted. That means as much as we might like our changes to work exactly as desired, sometimes there are factors totally out of our control.
So you're telling me there's no chance of a BF Sword upgrade suddenly granting me AP instead?
Never say never ;)
True, but historically riot has never has stuff worked out by the end of preseason. Whether its new dragons being slightly off -> cloud soul change, or changes that make champions too strong e.g the year Leblanc+a few others needed a nerf all the way through feb(cant remember year sorry).
This is potentially the biggest change the game has ever seen that affects balance, and while the balance team have been improving a lot, I would be very impressed if they had it even close to balanced by S11. I would expect more of an akali treatment where items are being tweaked and mechanics removed throughout the year.
We'll definitely be tweaking stuff throughout the year, but i do think we'll be able to get the game to a decent state pretty quickly.
One of the problems with trying to instantly solve balance like this is actually that it just takes time for players to adapt. We might see Akali is at a 39% winrate but secretly she has a sleeper op build that nobody knows at a 52% winrate. It's gonna take a lot of learning from both sides here
Right cool. I’m trying to use EVERY channel available to relay feedback. I am a bit worried tbh. Especially when it comes to changes that have dumbed down the game per say. I don’t think I will be able to participate in pre-season this year, as I am not keen on playing one shot URF.
Best of luck 🤞🏻 and have a good weekend boss.
I'd suggest giving it a shot my dude, might play out differently than you'd expect
Do you think this overhaul will increase or decrease build diversity?
I suspect it varies champ to champ tbh. Most champs I'd imagine are better off than live but there are certainly some champs who might hardbind in the new system or have extremely high diversity on live relative to the average and lose out because of change.
I wonder how long riot have been already balancing the items and how long until they are in a normal state. The past couple years has been some of the best balance in terms of champ diversity(decresing recently since summer). It feels like a nightmare for their team thrown at them by the game designers
There's no way the first few patches aren't gonna be at least a little bit of a fiesta, but that's what preseason is for!
devtrackers.gg