devtrackers.gg
Can you please tell balance team to not buff him since he is fine and people are just now realizing he’s ok?
After careful review of this pitch the team gas agreed that Hwei will be getting more nerfs instead
Can you please tell balance team to not buff him since he is fine and people are just now realizing he’s ok?
After careful review of this pitch the team gas agreed that Hwei will be getting more nerfs instead
Did you have a particular playerbase in mind when you designed Hwei? Since he not only has a very particular playstyle but also seems to be a rather fragile character he obviously is a 10/10 on every level for a female artist like myself.
Were you aiming for him to become a rather niche champion like Lillia and Ivern or looking at a broader audience?
Thanks for making an appealing vulnerable male character :)
he champion like Lillia and Ivern or looking at a broader audience?
In terms of the player base I was targeting:
What do you think about Hwei‘s inofficial nickname Huawei. Everyone I know calls him that
Hwei's name is a variation to Hui. We wanted to have some parallels to Jhin (Jin). Unfortunately, brain does funny things sometimes. Fortunately, it's an English thing and we operate in many many different languages.
Is it a coincidence that Hwei's name sounds like the old Mordekaiser Brazil memes from S3/4?
Unfortunately...or fortunately yes... it was a coincidence.
How did Hwei’s design change from when he was originally conceived to now? Were there any major changes that were found necessary after some testing, such as decreasing the amount of spells he has, or was his original design similar to his current state? Additionally, was he conceived around the idea of 3, or did that come about when developing his background with Jhin?
Design and Research can maybe talk about the actual iterations...I for one am glad that his ult was not the earlier iteration hahahaha.... That grounding effect on an earlier one was really scary.
I think we toyed with the idea of 3 pretty early on.
Do you have any plans to make Hwei viable as an APC bot carry like Swain, Karthus, Ziggs and Seraphine? I don't play mid lane, but I love the character and his gameplay. Currently however, it is difficult to play him bot as he tends to get bullied by anyone pretty much. I don't mind lowering his scaling to compensate for some early game buffs.
Hwei is intended to be midlane primarily, but viable as a support. We don't intend to purposefully support APC Hwei, but assuming that its winrate and playrate aren't negatively impacting midlane Hwei we won't act to remove it either.
For Emizery, can you share any cool scrapped Hwei spells tested in development and was it hard to make 10 different spells gel into a single kit
For any art folks, what were the art goals with Hwei and how did you guys determine his color palette, since Ionia doesnt really have any unifying colors among champs
For Riru, with Hwei having 10 different spells, shall I look for 10x more typos when he shows up in the patch notes
As it turns out, number of abilities doesn't correlate to typos otherwise champions would have 0 abilities because I've nevr made a typo.
Was Hwei problematic with a lower mana cost, I feel like at the moment he cost too much but that might make up as a intentional weakness for him, I was wondering.
Great champ design and feel, he feels so well to play and very smooth. Thanks Riot.
Mana costs are meant to relate to WE mana refund. For a new Hwei player, they might find his mana pool is severely punishing and limiting. But one of the aspects of mastering Hwei is knowing how to use your W cooldown wisely, spending it for damage and mana greedily, early and often but also recognizing when it's time to hold the cooldown for a defensive or movement cast. In testing we found Hwei was nearly ungankable when he didn't have a reason to use his W outside of WQ and WW; asking him to use WE helped give enemies opportunities to aggress on him.
I'm curious if you can share a little bit of the (design) approach that lead to Hwei in the first place:
I know a "Paint Mage" has been floating about in development for a long time. Was this prototype what eventually became Hwei or did Hwei just take up their theme after being thought up as "hey lets make a control mage with spell options for days"?
How did you land with the "cast an ability 1-3 then cast an ability 1-3 again" cast paradigm? Did you try any other approaches to make the champion "feel" good when casting, did you try any that failed (and why)?
How did you decide to conceptually avoid the "burden of knowledge" anti-pattern that a kit with over twice the usual number of spells might fall into?
Very early on I pitched the 1-3 1-3 concept of casting primarily as a concept of mixing a color with a shape (red circle, blue line, etc), there was even a version of 1-4 1-4 with multiple ultimates! We found the color concept was too restricting and not exciting enough, so we went with complete subjects and final paintings instead of just a paint stroke. We tried many, many times to create fluid casting while also preventing bad inputs from user error, but in the end the solution we came to was not to protect players from themselves and let their own skill govern how fast they can cast back to back.
We were very concerned about the "burden of knowledge" issue from the start and aimed to create simple spells with recognizable themes and strong tells for opponents. This both helps players use colloquial names like "Fireball" to call out spells they saw as well as understand usage based off theme alone. We also avoided making too many super novel spells to avoid this kind of ...
Read moreI'm curious if you can share a little bit of the (design) approach that lead to Hwei in the first place:
I know a "Paint Mage" has been floating about in development for a long time. Was this prototype what eventually became Hwei or did Hwei just take up their theme after being thought up as "hey lets make a control mage with spell options for days"?
How did you land with the "cast an ability 1-3 then cast an ability 1-3 again" cast paradigm? Did you try any other approaches to make the champion "feel" good when casting, did you try any that failed (and why)?
How did you decide to conceptually avoid the "burden of knowledge" anti-pattern that a kit with over twice the usual number of spells might fall into?
I answered some of this in other posts, but can add some more color (haha) and if others want to jump in feel free! I think this version of Hwei did mostly take inspirations from the pitch session where three pitches stood out:
We toyed with an idea that is a variation of this for Milio in the really early stages where he was a chef and collected ingredients to mix in his pot for spells. However, during Milio’s development, we wanted a more back to basics enchanter. Since our roadmap in 2020 and 2021 were on the high complexity side.
We did try other approaches, ...
Read moreAside from colour, what clarity integrations were made to make the characters abilities readable? Surely having over ten abilities that are just 'magic paint' would be challenging.
We were excited about the potential of a paint mage because we can let Hwei paint abilities that can telegraph what he is about to do. Learning from Aphelios, we want to make sure the complexity burden is mostly on the person that decides to pick up Hwei. Thus, having the ability to make art of "something" really helps! While an opponent might not know exactly what a giant lightning bolt does, they can very quickly tell to get out of the way. The palette is another hint to what spellbook he has queued up.
How long has he been in development? Because it was mentioned that three different Routers worked on him. If it happens as Seraphine, that she is played more on support and APC, would you allow it or would you make the changes needed for him to be a midlaner? Hwei can be support, and there are no high skill support champions, maybe Pyke, will you design a high complexity support (enchanter, for instance)?
Not too long compared to other champions! We started on Hwei around a year and half ago. Though having an art mage is a pitch that has been around a while. Every denewb (new employee training) we would get Rioters to pitch a champion. This is one that I hear the most. We also hosted a team pitch session in 2022 that had several pitches that eventually influenced Hwei. While I'm not opposed to Hwei supporting, he should be Mage carry as primary. We already have a higher complexity enchanter with Renata, so it is unlikely we will make another so soon.
Does Hwei’s kit revolve around the number 3, similar to how Jhin revolves around 4. To me it the number seems to occur a lot not only in his kit but in the lore as well ie (3 teachers.) Was this done on purpose and if so can you explain is their a deeper meaning to it?
Hwei's kit does use the number 3 quite a lot intentionally, most specifically in the 3 x 3 composition of his spells (3 subjects with 3 spells each). This reflects Hwei's interest in the Rule of Thirds t...
Read moreGiven the unique nature of Hwei's kit, with a total of 9 spells that perform simple effects, would you ever consider buffing him by replacing a spell that proved to be underwhelming with a different spell? Or even the othet way around if he's too strong? Or do you think number adjustments should be enough to balance him properly.
The goal is to never replace a spell although tweaks to make things more usable, niche, or broad may happen as a result of low spell prioritization. It is expected that some spells may be used more or less moment to moment and game to game, but if something is universally underutilized or overutilized we'll act on that spell. You'll see this later today in buffs for WW - Pool of Reflection and EW - Gaze of the Abyss focused on reliability.
Hello Redditors and aspiring Hwei mains!
We’re some of the dev team members that brought you League’s most recent champion, Hwei, and we’re here to answer your questions! Hwei’s been leaving his mark on the Rift for about a week now, so we figured this would be a good time to say hi and see if you have any burning questions you’re looking to ask.
This AMA will run from 10am-12pm PT, but a few Rioters will likely stick around to keep answering questions afterwards.
Rioters joining the AMA will include:
Riot_Riru (Community Manager) | RiotEmizery (Game Design) | orkidian (Narrative Writer) | NeoLexical (Team Lead) | ProfRincewind (VO Producer) | RiotComrade (Researcher) | Etlios (QA Engineer) | Riot_Wubs (Sound Design)
Let’s kick it off!!
EDIT: And we're at time! Thank you so much to everyone that dropped by and asked questions about our broody painter boy, Hwei. A few of us will be staying around to keep answering questions, but unti...
Read more External link →The problem isn't where human resources are spent, its where monetary resources are spent.
Riot is paying people to work on these things, and not paying enough people to work on gameplay, the client, the engine, etc.
And Riot already has far more funding than 99.999% of games will ever get, while doing less than many. Saying they need to nickel and time everyone even more for the game to stop its tailspin isn't really helpful.
Riot has had the money to make improvements that needed to happen 7+ years ago for nearly a decade. Its silly to think money at this point is the reason why things don't happen.
Its intentional that the game isn't actively improving anymore because it makes money whether it does or not.
(Speaking from honest personal view because I’m not the expert on this) The problem with being one of the largest, also mean you are one of the most expensive to just run. It’s not often people gets to see behind the scene costs. I worked on Client, Skins and Champs side previously and it does surprise me where hidden costs are 🤔 Not all regions are equal in terms of profit vs cost.
Hey Lexi can you possibly be more evil in your vids, i liked how reav3 tormented players for months in his dev blogs
Unfortunately the next one was filmed already. I’m not more evil but my hair was out of control. I woke up with really terrible hair day hahahahahaha
ty for the answer! Last question: Will Skarner come before the marksman since Riot meddler says Skarner will come fairly early next year
He will not be before the marksman! We are still finishing off his skins! End of year gets tough for moving significant needle on production.
One thing that would make me care about passes again is if I knew I wasn't paying the same amount for less content each time, do you have any plans to address this moving forward?
ya
Thanks, Probama
Thanks, completely random stranger I have never met before.
How's the kid btw?