League of Legends Dev Tracker

i'll settle for blue buff

If you're playing with a Rioter, always camp their lane.

Every game significant action is processed on the game server. The game server runs game logic at 30 fps. And it batches some visual updates to send back to clients together, including stats and health updates. In addition, there's a small client side delay to updating health bars (perf reasons).

You can get an effective 1 to 3 server frame delay from just that (0.033s to 0.100s). In addition to regular connection latency for each part to receive the packet. In addition to client processing. Some things can just send whenever and don't deal with batching. E.g. Smite particle will have at most a 1 server frame delay.

If you hit Smite at the same time, it'll get processed with the same game server frame. And in the order the packets were received. Failing smite contests are still on you (/ your latency)

Yeah because unlike what you feel it actually measures who wins the game. How dare you let any evidence contradict your very scientific intuition.

Maybe but Galio also isn’t really a “kill your whole team” kind of champion like Brand, Fiddlesticks, etc.

Technically that exists with the MS on hit but that may not be enough.

Yeah that’s reasonable.

Idk that’s be up to the designers ultimately. I know they don’t like choices being choked out but they’re also ok with players finding new tools and feeling excited to use them.

For reference, Hail of Blades kinda breaks the expectations around Q cooldowns since it’s instantaneous. 6stacking LT still takes 5+ seconds of combat and only your 3rd or 4th Q really benefits from the CD change that much.

Personally that feels palatable on a combat design perspective. At that point it’s just about winrate and choice comparison.

I’d argue the resets are just built in. Like imagine instead of 40sec per target it was just 40sec resetting on takedown. It’d hit that fantasy but just be weaker at the job it already tries to do.

We have recently playtested with all damage from champions to champions reduced by 20%, and all healing and shielding reduced by 20%. Some findings:

• Late game fights and especially teamfight become more legible and engaging, with better structure.
• Tanks become very overpowered.
• Healing becomes much more powerful - even at -20% healing, each point of healing is much more valuable than on the live game.
• Burst mages (especially ones dependent on a single rotation - Lux is a prime example here) quickly become borderline useless and it isn't clear how to buff them without undoing the reduction in damage output.
• AD assassins migrate to pure glass cannon builds to remain above burst thresholds - ironically, if AD assassins are common in the meta, the game could feel even burstier as a result. I don't think we got any clear read on AP assassins.
• Lane phase yields mixed results; there are more lanes where nothing ever happens, but ...

We pushed it back a patch to allow us to respond to feedback. I don't believe we've made final calls on what mechanics, if any, will change as a result, though.

This is honestly the hardest thing about working on League - nobody is actually a League player, they're Kindred-Shyvana players and Kled-Pantheon players and Yasuo-Yone-Zed players and Tristana-Draven-Samira players, whatever their position preference and champion choice is.

This is a strength of the game and a big reason it has so much wide appeal, but it means that for any given player, they're running into unfair-feeling games routinely and then seeing Riot not do anything about, and it means we're always balancing one player's needs against another's. There are very few unequivocal wins for us to take and most decisions we make hurt the game for someone.

Just to be clear about what the actual boogeyman is: the state we want to avoid is games where the actions you take in the gameplay (both moment-to-moment and at a broader strategy level) don't really matter.

This can happen when burst damage is so high that the correct play becomes staying far away from enemy champions for extended periods of time, and that's why we're investigating it right now.

But it most easily happens when defense outpaces damage - hitting individual skills matters less to the outcome of a fight, so fights become more stat-check-y; because fights become more of a stat check, it's easier to know that you shouldn't fight for very extended periods of time; it's much easier to start a comeback by picking and killing a fed glass cannon who is running over a game than a fed tank or juggernaut in a tank meta.

I'm aware that I don't have to reassure this subreddit on this topic, but yes, it really is going to be a controversial topic with the larger playerbase.

I don't think Riot should change champions exclusively to make them more popular.

I agree with this statement. It's hard to get much nuance into a blog post with this many topics.

In the case of Ahri and Janna, we're working on them because we believe that players who they have previously resonated with aren't enjoying them as much anymore. The goal is make them feel fun and well-supported. We do expect that if we succeed with this work, they'll be more popular, but that's a secondary effect.

I do want to be careful talking about concepts like who champions ought to resonate with - there are a lot of confounding factors and in Janna's case survivor bias is a real concern - she has lost approximately 50% of her pick rate since we pushed her lane phase so hard towards repeatable point-and-click harass, which implies that a lot of people who previously enjoyed Janna were hurt by those changes, but certainly some (most?) of her current...

That sounds like a challenge.