League of Legends Dev Tracker

I think Assassins with huge damage buffs are unfun to play against, but they certainly aren't powerful without them. We did an analysis of the roster, comparing their ARAM win rate and what we believe the win rate would be without the mods by assigning win rate values to 1% of each mod and then back calculating. In ARAM, assassins had something like a 40% AVERAGE win rate if we didn't have any mods on. The goal here is to find ways of making playing them not garbage but not have to give them tools like "one QE kills half their team"

they do!

We fixed those, btw.

Didn't we remove chemdrake after like a month into the year? We only put things in the game we have confidence in, so we want to make sure they have a fair shot. But if something is clearly not working, we will pull it.

there's slight differences that are hard to notice, but if it falls to the left, it leaves a small gap by the brush so you can sneak through it. If it falls to the right, the lane is closed off on that side.

Intended to be in the next balance patch. If its super egregious we'll hot fix it after we get the data we need.

Ideally we don't, but I'm suspecting in the cases of trap champions (teemo + shaco) we might have to. I'm more interested in fixing these champs specifically then say, trying to rework the vision mechanic of the whole map for just two champions.

We want to see how the map changes affect those two and I expect we'll follow up with changes for them.

It comes down to "what is the experience we want people to have?" In these cases, we're using Win Rate as a stand in for 'how likely is someone playing this champion able to contribute to winning the game,' which is in itself a stand in for 'did you get to do your thing and have fun?' Because you don't master a champ in ARAM the same way you do in SR, we want to make sure that people who are put on Akali for the first time aren't going to have literal zero fun. The win rate can be low for first game (and it is), but ARAM is a mode that more values just pick up and play rather than sweaty 'just get good.'

A lot of the changes were made with supporting melee characters in mind. The main goal of this being that melees are generally dis-favored due to the properties of Howling Abyss. The brush is a cool tool that melees can use, and hopefully the increased ability to play make will power them up in a more understandable way such that we don't need to gigabuff assassin damage.

We only gave energy buffs to champions who were either:
1. heavily modded, with the intent of removing some of those mods later -or-
2. underpowered.

Shen was neither, so we left him out. It made sense on some level, as his team fight output is more tied to his CDs than his energy levels, and he has a much easier time keeping energy up in 5v5s.

Trying to make champ by champ changes is fairly unsustainable, which is why we use this balance buff method. The good news about Ashe is she only has two abilities that have CDs affected much by the nerf, and both are VERY powerful on ARAM. We could get more nuance if we needed it, but for now we're still doing the science on figuring out what these new mods will be like

It's very possible (not easy), but it could be done. My issue is that I don't think the damage caused by the item is the big problem so much as stacking AH and slowing the enemy team every 2 seconds is. Mandate just enables you to do something while being super annoying and get a bunch of AH cheaper.

We tried it falling at various angles but unless it restricted player movement in this way the terrain just wasn't changing up the game. Most of the movement on howling abyss is towards or away from the Nexuses (Nexii?). Falling in the middle or at an angle didn't really create cool vision plays you could make.

We tried plants for quite awhile but they ended up not helping the vision game too much for a couple reasons:

• Plants were an objective that could be contested by the winning team. The plant positions had to be very specific where you could use them and the enemy couldn't take them, and if Teemo was shrooming up an area
• Plants were single use. Your ally wasting the plant felt REAL bad, especially if you know where a trap is that you want to remove and then they blow the plant on nothing
• Revealing the traps didn't do a whole lot. you still had to get there and kill it, which was fairly hard. We tried versions where the trap was either perma-revealed or destroyed, but it just negated what made traps interesting gameplay elements.

My guess is that once these new changes settle, we'll look at addressing trap champs like teemo and shaco directly rather than systemically changing the whole mode for just these two.

We could, but I don't actually think it solves the problem. In all cases Ashe maxes W and just fills the lane with slowing projectiles that make approaching a gigantic pain. We could change mandate so it did zero damage and people will still just spam W and be unassailable by melee classes. Actually targeting how often she can cast W I think has a better chance of doing the trick of reducing her reliance on W as opposed to auto attacks.

Also I think you underestimate how many people want to do weird stuff on ARAM. It's... wild in there.

if we removed it straight up the characters are just unplayable (some assassins have like a 30~% win rate without them. We're going to scale back how much we use the damage without it being super painful if you get stuck on any character.

there are two different directions the towers fall. The direction is chosen randomly and it's the same for each team. Either "up-ish" towards the brush or "down-ish" When it falls upwards, it leaves a small gap where you can go through it (so there are two approaches, one covered by brush), and when it falls downward it closes off that part completely.

At least play it first.

We've found its the opposite, actually. When you push past the terrain you have less room to run away and position that limits your options. We've paired these changes with an update to death timers to account for it when the game starts going long.

There was contention around that, but we considered it. The balance buff changes give you the idea of how this character plays differently from their SR counterpart, but doesn't really give you a great idea of the power of the character in ARAM. Seraphine would have giga nerfs in champ select that makes it look like you're just never supposed to play seraphine, when in actuality she's still a (more than) reasonable pick in ARAM.

To more directly answer the question: We don't have any plans to do so right now, but we're always reassessing things like this.