League of Legends Dev Tracker

There are several champions that are strong with Horizon Focus. For example:

Ahri, Annie: Situational if you are snowballing and going for burst build.

Lux, Neeko, Lissandra, Syndra, Ori: Mages that can trigger either the Immobilize condition or the range condition easily.

Velkoz, Xerath, Ziggs, Zoe: Poke champs that can trigger the ranged condition easily.

Untested:

Seraphine: I think it's good on her due to E and R, but it might not be better than Mythic -> Rylais/Cosmic Drive -> Rylais/Cosmic Drive since she is very good with Ability Haste and the Rylais for E synergy.

Taliyah: I think this item is pretty underrated on Taliyah. It is quite easy for her to trigger the max range condition.

TF: If you are snowballing and don't want to go Zhonyas or RFC 3rd after Lich Bane, Horizon could be a good option.

I would be very skeptical of saying orianna builds are solved when it took 2 years for players to figure out that you could build a first item other than ludens echo on her.

Like I said earlier, there are some Burst oriented builds that include items such as Horizon Focus (that some players like chovy are starting to dabble with), so I would disagree that she only got one new item. I do think there's room for improvement in the balance state, but I don't agree that it's as bad as you make it out to be.

Do you have any evidence of this (orianna specifically) or is it just your personal experience? In pro and high Elo games we see a mix of ludens vs liandries and also a variety of second, third items. I also think some items on her are sleeper like cosmic drive and horizon focus.

You absolute madman

This would tilt me off the face of the Earth.

The interesting part about ADC is that it is the most high-elo skewed role, as "just surviving" and farming at high cs/min then consistently teamfighting is very difficult. The problem typically with the marksman role specifically is that if it feels "good" at low/middle elo, I personally expect pros (like perkz) to find it to be OP, as that is where their role is most important vs SoloQ. As an ADC main I always have to weigh the "I want agency!" vs "I know this role is much better than it feels".

oh for sure it could use a lot more development

It's bittersweet, on one hand it meant we didn't need to balance change her because she was performing really well somewhere, on the other hand it kept her from being above 50% like a lot of other champ releases. Luckily players didn't feel weak on her which is great.

Lots of things:

1. Luck, and lots of it. We have only around a dozen games playtested on champions on their final couple iterations, and it really doesn't compare to the millions we get quickly after release. Nailing a % winrate balance number with that small sample size is a lot of luck.

2. Making sure her super fun and high-agency strengths (ramping movespeed, true damage, triple damage W, infinite range E/R) come with big drawbacks (squishiness, low base MS, slow moving abilities so that the player feels like a god but the opponents know the counterplay and don't feel oppressed.

3. Sharp strength/weakness profile. Strong early clear speed if un-interrupted, but low damage and durability. Strong mid-game spike but falls-off lategame.

4. A LOT of comparing her stats/ability DPS/clear speeds to other champions in dev, as well as time spent optimizing her jungle clear in development. You'll see in her champion sp...

You're correct! he's the designer (creative gameplay mind and programmer/scripter) and I'm the game analyst that's responsible for launch balance, game health, counterplay, visual clarity, playtesting, etc.

Noice

This was my first full champion I worked on the pre-release balance for at Riot! At times she looked strong (pro meta pick) and at times she looked weak (early S11 preseason), but without any direct changes she equalized back towards the middle before we commit to any changes and that's awesome to see. We are hoping to make this the standard of precision but it's not easy, going to be applying my learnings to my next champion as well!

We have since pivotted from that messaging after doing some digging in the space during preseason work. Healing is a core and natural mechanic in League (and really in most games where units have health). Healing and play around it should be embraced and developed further rather than skirted away from. This includes easier to access GW (cheaper and more usable by most/all champs), in the same vein that you can buy armor to deal with physical damage - another core and natural mechanic in League.

In before next year this gets quoted as a "RIOT LIED TO US" when morello comes back from the great beyond to delete soraka we open our eyes to the truth of healing as the root of all evil

I started at riot just before we released the Riot Client. This brings back memories of a totally different phase of my life

According to: https://lolalytics.com/lol/tierlist/?lane=middle&tier=all

Yasuo Kat Zed Akali

She appears to be the 21st most popular champion this patch, unsurprising that it seems like you play against her often. 4th most popular midlaner.

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