September Update 2024 | Dev Snapshot - LoR

Nope, we mean 4 brand new to LOR entirely, not just Path.

Edit for clarity since I'm seeing other convos where people are mis-reading this: These will all be Path-exclusive champions.

A roadmap is a good idea, but while we have a strong sense of roughly which champs we want during certain periods, a lot of things change rapidly and we often have to juggle things - so any roadmap we released would quickly get outdated. Anything more than a quarter out gets subject to the realities of live ops.

The cap extensions are coming up real fast - in fact, they were intended for this release, but life happened and they were pushed back.

There are a lot of reasons but the biggest one is balance.

PvP design used to take 18 months for 5 champs, with an entire initiative behind it. We got that down to 12 months for 3 champs. Now, we are designing a new champ in less than 3 months with a smaller team.

A huge amount of that time and bandwidth was for balance in Standard. We see the worst outcomes for PvP in imbalanced formats. So we don’t want to release a new champ that’s not been balanced for PvP. And it takes a long time, because you’re not just balancing one card. You’re balancing the entire format (remember Azirelia?). And we don’t have the bandwidth to balance an entire format while also making our champs as fun as possible for our focus, which is Path of champions.

This is all great feedback - we were just talking yesterday about the possibility of gold reliquaries on the pass. Old rewards are a good idea too - we will need to find a suitable way to cover the situation when someone already owns those rewards, we don't want someone to avoid buying a pass because they already own some of the rewards, and there may be people who would rather have the wild fragments instead of the PvP reward.

I will say we are investigating methods where you can play against friends or in other "free play" modes with all cards, including path cards. We'll update you if these explorations prove successful.