League of Legends Dev Tracker

Hwei's spells need to have a niche reason to cast one compared to the others, otherwise only the strongest output or most reliable output will matter every time the cooldown is used. That means there will be cases where a spell's niche comes up way more often in a short period or over the course of a game, or a spell's niche doesn't show up frequently or at all in a specific match. That's totally fine as long when that spell's niche appears players are using it and recognize it was the right choice.

When a spell isn't being used even for its niche case, there's a good chance that specific spell needs to be buffed. The opposite can also be true, with a specific spell being too strong and crowding out its competitors forcing them not to be used in favor of the "best spell". Funnily enough with all of the community feedback about EW being low priority for the E spells, for the longest time it was the highest priority E spell due to it having too much reliability. We seemed to ...

Champion’s team is pretty cross-disciplinary, meaning we have people in Art (Animation, Concept, 3D, VFX etc), Design, Engineering, Tech Art, Narrative etc. all working together. They usually work with their disciplines for support but also we have one person representing their discipline in the Core Pod (in this case, Hwei Pod). We tend to change up the pod folks champion to champion to get fresh ideas going and to give more opportunities for individuals to learn from each other.

We work pretty closely with partner teams, like GAT (Game Analysis Team), Insights (Research and Analytics) and SRT (Summoner’s Rift Team) to ensure balance and game health. As well as with teams like Localization, Voices (VO), Publishing, Marketing etc. There are tons of folks involved for a champion to take shape that are across countries, time zones and languages!

We will have an update on VGUs in the next update in the new year!
In terms of VGUs, lot of times when a player like a champion, they actually do not want any changes to the champion. We did a deeper dive into this through thousands of surveys. Most of the time, players want a champion that they "potentially" want to play changed more towards their taste.
Thus, with every rework, we do end up losing some of the mains of that champion which, in some cases like Skarner, we will it is okay to do so for the bigger potential.
Some of the oldest and crustiest champions are also some of the toughest to find a way to fit into modern roster in a way that has considerations for who they were (sometimes good and sometimes really big baggage). We do need to adhere to some basic rules (we cannot change Skarner to a humanoid). The skins count for update is also a considerable amount of work for Champion's team. We are a team that is traditionally very very good at creating new thi...

Currently we're happy with the choice of Torment spells being focused on their control outputs rather than their damage outputs. When their damage outputs vary, then you have to consider "This spell is the best for damage so when I maximize damage I should use this one." There's already a lot to think about when comboing, so simplifying it to "I need to hit multiple targets right now" or "I need to control this area" or "I need you to get off me" helps to clarify why one should be chosen over the others. With Hwei there's always a bit of a conflict between adding complexity for depth and keeping things simple to focus on execution perfection. This is an area we've chosen to lower complexity on in order to focus mastery on execution and use cases over damage optimization.

There's a lot of reasons to organize spell hotkey assignments that were considered.

One is familiarity, as you mentioned, making sure that buttons sit on champions of similar playstyles. For example, many champions have their line skillshot on Q, so we wanted Q to be his "line" spells. Some champions use W for shields, others use E for shields, so there wasn't a clear winner for that one other than enchanters preferring shields on E compared to mages.

That leads to the next consideration, which is mechanical feel. Generally you want to spam Q the most out of all of your abilities, so that was another reason to put his low cooldown damage spells on Q. It feels a little awkward to constantly spam Q + W or W + Q, so his wave clear and poke spells were put on Q and E so you can double tap or dance between them using your point and ring finger. Your middle finger is then used less frequently and with more intention, preventing too many "fat finger" inputs due to spamming...

MISSED OPPORTUNITY

What happens when you have fire and corn? :D

Did you see his emote ;D

Hwei was an interesting challenge for SFX— while we wanted to highlight his paint being the main source of his magic, we also aimed to create a unique sound palette per spellbook, which would represent his different sub-themes (Disaster / Serenity / Torment). Disaster has distorted synthetic layers, serenity tonal / melodic elements, and torment with the screamy and resonant spooky layers. There was a lot of back and forth between "too much goop" and "not wet enough." Additionally, we wanted to make sure his kit felt different sonically than other existing skin thematics with overlap (such as Inkshadow).

Honestly, in the first couple of iterations on Hwei I asked art: “Doesn’t he look a bit too…hungry?”

Art: “When you are an artist, you dive into your work and forget to eat.”

What can I say to that besides okay XD?

More seriously, we do usually decide on an age range we are targeting for the champion’s SR rift appearance. Early 30s is what we were aiming for.

Where were you when we started development?

Internally, we nicknamed Hwei's mage class as a "versatillery mage" as a bit of a joke that he doesn't fit neatly into any category. That said, he functions both as a control mage and an artillery mage, but his reliability as either is lower relative to his more focused mage competitors. We didn't want Hwei to be a "jack of all trades, master of none" and make his tools weaker than competitors so we decided to focus his weakness on reliability of hitting spells or controlling areas over raw outputs being much lower to compensate his versatility.

We go through a pretty rigorous vetting process in all languages we operate in, which sometimes means the space we have to work with is very narrow. We got back all kinds of ....er interesting meanings for some of the ideas we had TT^TT

Everyone asks why is Hwei, but no one ever asks how is Hwei

You know why.

(>^^)>(::)

Hwei is intended for all skill levels, not only for high level players. That said, getting good at Hwei likely means you're able to answer more problems in the game will help you climb.

A few places are intended to help new or low skill players, namely his spam spells (QQ, WW, EE) all being pretty good buttons. QQ is also the most generic damage spell on his kit and good for poking while not terrible for wave clear, EE being in a similar space. EW can also guarantee a QW hit, so if you aren't good at landing QW but your opponents don't position well then an EW can secure you kills. If there's one spell I think a new player who's scared of the champion's complexity should learn to use early, it's WE to manage your mana pool. Everything else comes with time.

Roadmap incoming in the dev update coming at the beginning of the new year.

Not sure what we can share just any clips of old stuff, but there was this amazing and horrible bug where QE and R didn't have the "One passive proc per cast" rule yet and would insta-kill anyone caught in them together. In these old VFX explorations, QE was a blizzard spell.

https://imgur.com/DNIbCGB