AzuBK

E speed is not nerfed. It had a strange paradigm previously where dashing to allies added his movement speed to the base speed, but the free-target dash did not. Now his movement speed is always added. PBE scraping probably didn't pick up that change. New E speed is slightly slower before boots 1, slightly faster on boots 1, and faster on upgraded boots.

Auto-resets are extremely elite-player-skewed in a way that's not very interactive, but as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I think you are all correct about the Q changes and have returned that reset. I am truthfully on the fence about the E reset, as dash resets certainly feel very good but are also a lot of early-game power.

I think that the some amount of Q cast time increase is important for reducing K'Sante's reliability. The exact magnitude is up for debate, and I'll be keeping an eye on it as a possible avenue for buffs if we think we've achieved the goals once this ships.

Mentioned this elsewhere, but I think you (and many others) are right about the Q reset. I'm adding that one back. Answered most of these other ones elsewhere in this thread, but thank you for the thoughtful comment.

• Generally bringing him to a normal auto range, so he is neither advantaged nor disadvantaged by default against most other toplaners. A range advantage of 50 constitutes a meaningful advantage where you can often hit enemies without retaliation, and it didn't seem correct for him to have that advantage over 125 range champions, especially given the cooldown and range profile of his Q in lane.
• Yes, but it didn't play well in practice.
• W is the clearest point of counterplay on the kit, after changes to make it less reliable. It also makes him more skirmisher-shaped—it's important that using W as purely a movement tool is a very meaningful sacrifice.

No, it's totally fine. I didn't mean to make you feel bad about it, lol, and I know very well what it can feel like to be on the other side of dev communications. Even though we're devs, we're still players of other games—just with some experience on both sides of that curtain. A bit unrelated, but I often feel pretty keenly that communicating on Reddit about League in particular is something that makes devs feel that they're in-touch more than something that makes players feel like devs are in-touch, because so much of our audience plays in countries that don't use Reddit/speak English. Feels like there's an opportunity to improve something here, but it's very far from my area of expertise.

This is a tough space to navigate, especially in a PvP game, because we often just have different priorities and different takes from players on what is likely to work or what has to be done. I really wish it were possible to successfully balance or design a game by simply listening to ...

I did consider passive R speed vs. RQ slow, but opted for RQ since that requires an active skill-check (hitting Q) and I tried to maintain or add as many of those as seemed reasonable given his status as a skill-oriented champion.

I think the cone is a clever suggestion that partially addresses the costs that this spell imposes on the rest of the kit. It's higher reliability than I would prefer on the champion, but does require some level of commitment to a general direction, and brings back the ability to "play" with the spell's input a bit. I probably shouldn't say this because it's often taken as a promise (which I unfortunately cannot make), but I'll be thinking about it as a possible angle if we feel we've succeeded with room to spare on the broader game health design goals but K'Sante's play-feel is under the bar.

Yes, certainly. The AA range is mostly meaningful in lane, where he has enough of a range advantage to take low-variance, difficult-to-punish trades with Q + Grasp. The compensation for that is not attack speed, it's increased laning power through higher damage. This fits the overall rework's theme of asking K'Sante players to make committal decisions and reap the rewards or consequences—you'll should generally be better at fighting if you play well, and worse if you play poorly.

Overall, winning fights later in the game should require more skill on average—basic attacking will not get you to a win, even though it might get you closer than before. Currently, landing Q and W is pretty much a given due to their speed and reliability, respectively. After this set of changes, his Q and W are now much less guaranteed to hit with, and both are important to succeeding at his combat pattern since they contribute quite a lot of damage now. This means that if you play well and hit ev...

I haven't been on the League team the past couple years, wasn't aware of the Jak'Sho bug. I had to dig around after reading your post to make sure this wasn't intentional behavior—I've now fixed it, thanks for the heads up.

If you feel like this is a PR response, that's fair. More than a meaningless "deal with it" statement, I've tried to share the full reasoning behind a bunch of the changes. I appreciate players' passion for their champions, and I try reflect that passion back by getting into the weeds about design in a Reddit comment first thing Monday morning. I think it's more the case that we disagree on some of the elements we're discussing. This feedback is useful for understanding which pieces of the character you all care most about and where we should consider pulling back if these changes land with room to spare on the overall design goals.

(Post 2/2)

Shorter explanation around the design goals regarding some of the points of contention:

• You're on the money when it comes to the lane buffs, he should be able to fight but also be asked to fight. The previous range profile allowed him to opt out of lane interaction when played at a high level.
• RQ slow is back because the spell is now more missable and he had difficulty sticking to his targets in R due to the cast time changes. If he is hitting Qs, he should generally be able to stick.
• E changes are part of the class shift—a longer cooldown, longer-range dash means that medium-range champs are not able to hit him without being within his effective range. This profile makes him a deadly teamfighter with a lot of passive pressure. A shorter cooldown, shorter-range dash is more typically skirmisher-shaped, built for footsies and more extended chases.
• W missing a monster cap was a bug, this is fixed.
• Gold scalings are...

Hi, I'm the designer on this rework, as well as the original designer on K'Sante (I established his identity and core themes/mechanics before leaving for R&D for a while). I appreciate this thoughtful post and wanted to give it a thoughtful, transparent response with more context on the design goals. I'll say up-front that a lot of this rework is focused on fairness—even though League champions should each have their unfair properties that players can deploy against each other, the end result has to have sufficient counterplay and weaknesses. I'm of the belief that K'Sante, when mastered and played by players who full leverage all his options, falls outside the bounds of fairness in both his current and launch versions. My goal is to provide a fair champion that is also fun and rewarding to play. With this in mind, I want to acknowledge that some changes made under this initial premise are pretty much guaranteed to be painful for players who love the champion and what he currently ...

I’m very glad to hear this resonated with you. I know it won’t hit for everybody, but that’s why we need different takes on different types of characters, and I’ve been acutely feeling the lack of this one for a long time as well. I also wish I had more like this in the games I played growing up—kids deserve better.

Hi all, Ahri's upcoming changes are on the PBE now for testing. The goal of the changes is to lean into Ahri's unique mobility+pick niche and give her more agency to carry fights and games, at the cost of lane safety and a small amount of damage. The changes also include a modernization pass on her mana costs and W spell. Looking for bugs as well as feedback on the direction. Full changelist can be found here.

Helpful:

• Bugs (duh)
• Directional feedback, e.g. "I don't like that we're trading X for Y" or "I'm particularly looking forward to or enjoying Z"

Somewhat helpful:

• Comments on overall balance, though we'll also be quickly following up if she's over- or underpowered.

Thank you!

Renekton was locked out for longer than the animation indicated. The lockout and animation time are not the same thing, and now they should line up better.

Sure. Skill expression is a high value in our game, but there are still good and bad versions of it (or better and worse, at least). This wasn't some clever expressive animation-cancel that enabled interesting gameplay, it was an effect that punished players for certain input sequences without good feedback on what was happening. Many players believed that Renekton empowered W stunned him for longer than the base effect, because that's what the animation indicates.

If we aren't critical of the types of skill expression in the game and optimize for maximum skill expression blindly, we eventually end up with lots of cases that are needlessly difficult, obtuse, and punishing, rather than designed skill expression that feels appropriately rewarding.

I literally pitched it as "nothin personnel: the item" when brainstorming assassin mythic active items. Its in-dev temp name was Coldsteel Sai.

Yep, this is correct. Before 11.18, if you used empowered W on Renekton and didn't input a movement command between the 0.525s and 0.75s period, he would remain locked out until 0.75s passed (including e.g. basic attacks). This is now 0.525s for both regular and empowered W. We recognize that this was something that could be bypassed consistently by skilled Renekton players (or accidentally by anyone), so we standardized it as always 0.525s. The "before" clip in this video shows a player bypassing the 0.75s lockout by inputting a movement command.

Also, as an aside, we recognize that we overswung on Renekton here. I'm looking into buffs for him right now, and I'm sorry for the inconvenience caused by Renekton being too weak in the meantime, and generally that Renekton is weaker in non-pro play as a result of pro balance this season. Hopefully we can take larger steps to resolve this more permanently in the future.

I'm not disappointed, just mad.

It's still early in the patch, but our data has him as 53.8% in average play (silver-ish) and 50.6% in skilled play (plat-diamond). If this holds—fingers crossed—it means the 4.5% winrate discrepancy last patch has been reduced to barely 3%. Getting it to 0% was never the plan, because I have no idea how we would manage that while still keeping Amumu Amumu. MMR skew can be quite hard to achieve while also respecting the existing playerbase by not making dramatic changes to the things they enjoy. I'm also hoping that, winrate aside, the increased early-game power is a sufficient qualitative improvement to his usefulness that players further up the ladder will be notably happier to see an Amumu on their team than previously.

This does mean he's toeing the line for a nerf based on his average winrate, which is fine. The change was uncertain enough that there was always high change that small followup tuning would be needed.

The notion behind this sort of work is to find solid improvements that players will appreciate, and to do it on a cadence that allows us to deliver them with greater frequency. Some champions definitely need reworks, and we aren't canceling reworks, but these mini-updates exist in the space between full VGU and shifting numbers around, with the hope of making real, honest attempts at solving the sorts of problems that can't be solved with just numbers and generally enhance champions that we feel could use it.

I don't expect Amumu to suddenly dominate Challenger play, but, if we can reduce his 5% winrate skew to 3% after it all shakes out, and help Amumu players feel like they can take their champion higher up the ladder and Diamond players to not feel like their teammate is griefing them by picking Amumu, that's a big win.

We believe Ekko mid is in a healthy spot and doesn't need buffs. We aren't trying to get more people to play him in the jungle, we just also don't want the role more people choose to play him in to be notably weaker because he's ceilinged by his mid power-level.