League of Legends Dev Tracker

I called out that for some players this is a core thing, and it seems like you're one of them! One observation I might make is that it's pretty important for us to not generalize a single group of people's experiences to all people. League is played by many many millions of people and there are few single obvious elements that connect them all.

So if you say it's important to you, I believe and support that.
If you say "players..." you begin to lose me.

But dw, we gotchu

This Faker guy is having a hell of a year.

Good luck to Tony!

It depends on the severity and if the item is just an outlier, but that's generally the idea! This is often why certain champs have "Damage Resistance" or "Damage Immunity" instead of bonus health/shielding/healing baked into their kits. If you don't want a champion to like building durable, don't give them raw health pool because those scale together.

Yes! That's correct. Sometimes we do consider systems though, when we don't want a champion to access certain systems because it would normally be optimal for them and create degenerative or uninteresting play. This was done for example with Pyke to ensure that he stays an assassin and doesn't just build bruiser items and become "Thresh with more damage and mobility". It keeps that cutthroat, high risk high reward, in-and-out gameplay that he was built around present regardless of system changes. Usually this stuff is done after defining the kit and finding that a system is damaging their unique play.

This goes into system design versus mechanics design.

Champion gameplay design is focused on mechanics - what does the character do? A champion should have self contained cohesive mechanics first and foremost, usually ones that compliment themselves or shore up a weakness contextually thus requiring skill.

Systems design like items and runes are focused on choice and problem solving. They look at the things champions can do and give them exciting ways to improve their mechanical output or shore up key weaknesses at the expense of other opportunities.

What this means is when making a champion with a DoT mechanic like Brand, you may say "He will be good with on-damage applications in the system" as a consequence of the design, but you do not add a DoT simply because "I want this champion to be good with on-damage applications in the system." Someday that system may change in a way that doesn't support your champion, and if that happens suddenly your champion d...

Hwei's SFX are a blend of synthesized elements and samples that we recorded in Riot's Foley room. Most of the liquid goop elements you hear are actually recorded from a gluggle jug (the fish shaped jug that make gurgling noises when you pour water out), which was then processed multiple times to give it a unique magical feeling. We also recorded several different "splats" using liquids of various viscosity (you can hear these in the AAs and tails of abilities). I then took all those recordings and re-processed them multiple times using a large array of VST plugins, which gave a wide range of content to work with. When doing this exploration and creating processing chains, there really isn't any rhyme or reason— it's mostly experimentation and iterating based off of what I'm feeling / whatever emotion is evoked based on what I hear. My main goal was to define Hwei's paint / ink magic, as well as give each spellbook a unique sub-identity to differentiate them.

For the synthes...

This is more of a balance question than a gameplay design question. Our goal was to balance him for 13.24 items because that's the system he would launch in. That was difficult because 14.1 items are different and what we primarily tested on.

When 14.1 drops, many items and champions will need changes because the overall game state will change so much. Hwei might be included in those.

This'll be gone in 14.1 :)

If more adjustments are necessary we will make them; we don't want to over-adjust prior to the 14.1 item system and map changes.

That said, we also want to preserve his weakness to being aggressed without retaliation options ready and properly aimed. That's not to say he will never receive buffs to lower his weakness in these areas, but we also don't want to shave off his weaknesses so much that he offers no opportunities for opponents.

Well never say never. But next couple of years I don't think we will actively try.

In general we do not design champions for specific items as items could change at any time in the future. In Hwei's case we did have a goal of giving him versatility in itemization, but that should extend to any mage item system not just the current or new ones. All of that said, he was primarily tested in the new item system prior to launch and that did make balance tuning very challenging for his release patch.

Oh gosh! This is a big one. Instead of going through every single one, because there were lots of hands and each had a profound impact to his development, I just want to say the Hwei pod and partners really came together to make this possible. It was really ambitious and the team really KILLED IT! Hwei to go.

We experimented with many different versions of spell queuing and cast times trying to be sensitive of both Hwei's mechanical fluidity and opponent reaction times to someone that could be casting many different things. In the end we found that blocking spell queuing hurt fluidity far too much and made Hwei less exciting to master. We decided to just turn off all kinds of special input blocking and let players fix their own inputs when overpressing rather than providing a system to help prevent players from hurting themselves but getting in the way of players who are pushing him to his limits. It was a real challenge to solve this problem, but in the end Hwei offers skilled players wanting to main him a path to mastery and skill expression and we felt the answer was to give those players the freedom to flourish.

Maybe u/orkidian can chime in here. With names we go through a very rigorous process to make sure that they don't mean something bad in one of the languages we operate in (there is so many of them). We generally start out with a pretty large list that gets filtered down very quickly. With Hwei, we wanted a name to have as many layers as Hwei himself. u/orkidian did so much work on the hidden meanings and cool name interactions with Jhin. So yes ....alot of it was very intentional. Some of my personal fav meanings to Hwei (Hui) were: To draw, grey, ashes, to destroy, brilliant/dazzling or even combined with Jhin's name to mean: To burn brightl...

I don't want to be the one to tell you, but as one of the producers of Catching Up it's probably gonna be on the shelf for awhile...

I do think content offerings will stay more in that lane though and the envelope will keep getting pushed but it's hard to justify a MarkZ driven show without MarkZ.

(Mark is great and I'm stoked for him btw, he just can't do everything at once try as he might)

I pitched this for start of VCT this year and it never went too far, maybe this is a good year for a repitch.

I have been summoned.

Just for you Spideraxe!

Base Stats:

• [BUFF] Base Health :: 550 >>> 580
• [BUFF] Base Mana :: 445 >>> 480
• [BUFF] Base Movement Speed :: 325 >>> 330

WW:

• [BUFF] Shields arrive instantly instead of on cast finish
• [BUFF] Shields :: 90/110/130/150/170 >>> 100/125/150/175/200

EW:

• [BUFF] Setup Delay :: 0.7s >>> 0.65s
• [BUFF] Fire Delay :: 0.35s >>> 0.3s
• [BUFF] Chase Range :: 500 >>> 600
• [BUFF] Linger Duration :: 1.35-3s based on travel distance >>> 3s