AzuBK

So, I definitely sympathize with the health decrease. Ultimately I looked at it as: I have X amount of power to work with to make Anivia feel like a functional modern champion. Where do I put it?

If I had extra room left-over, or if she's still too weak after these buffs, I very well might consider some sort of base health or health per level, but it just didn't make the cut over any of the changes I thought were most important (and I had to decrease R damage somewhat to even make room for what's here).

I tested this in the first iteration of the changes (because responsiveness up was a core value). Playtest team felt it was pretty notably counterplay down and it generally felt cheap when she was able to pretty reliably CC you while she was CC'd, so I pulled the change.

Oh, I missed a line in the text version of the list. I can't check the exact numbers atm, but ult cost is also down a bit as well. It'll show up on PBE shortly, though.

Main focus is to make Anivia feel better to play in modern League without much change to her core identity or skill-tests. This is meant to be a large buff, because Anivia was hit by a large systemic nerf in 10.23. Also, the reason we didn't hotfix Anivia is because I already happened to be partway through an Anivia modernization pass when she dropped precipitously in the preseason patch, so I wanted to use that extra room to find more buffs with long-term value for the champion instead of hotfixing in generic power.

For those concerned that this is too large of a buff—if it's too much, we'll nerf her. I think a lot of these changes will make the character feel better to play without significantly eroding counterplay, though, which is the important part that will stick around when she's balanced.

This is fixed for live, along with Umbral and Youmuu's

You’re very welcome. And I like this game too. Thanks for keeping it positive in game :)

This is so great to read. League can be incredibly complicated, but it sounds like you're both finding your joy in it already! One thing I found helped some of my less experienced friends face the challenge was understanding that it's not just you—the game is designed to be hard enough that even very high level players can have pretty big gaps in their knowledge and skill. You don't need to know everything or be able to do everything to move on up to a harder difficulty or higher skill level, and everyone's struggling with at least some aspect of their play right alongside you.

Maybe more practically, I think making little plans and predicting what will happen can help a lot in the early days (and honestly, much past the early days as well). Like, "I think if I use all of my spells on that Lux right now, she will die," and if it works then you've gained the knowledge that you can kill her in that situation in the future. If it doesn't, you know she wasn't low enough health....

Done. Good luck with the project!

No problem! Eclipse was one of the final mythic items so it was coming in pretty hot with mechanical changes right before it hit PBE. The fact that it was in a heavily bugged state (that had variable output, at that—the bug meant that sometimes it did a lot more damage than it should and sometimes did much less) for a bit immediately after its last set of pre-PBE changes did not help power reads at all, either for us balancing it or for the player community trying to understand it. Like, one of the reasons it ended up that powerful is that this bug led us to believe, from playtests, that it was somehow weak despite its reasonable numbers on-paper, and so we buffed it pretty dramatically. I think it's much closer now, and we'll keep following up as necessary.

Possibly of note—Eclipse is meant to be an item that some fighters can buy. I see many players stating that it must be broken because e.g. Riven likes the item, but that's not a good litmus test because it's intended! N...

Not sure if we plan to follow up with some dev articles, but I know I'd be happy to write about some of the more interesting items if we do. In the case of the assassin mythics, the goal was to give them some items that aligned themselves strongly with an assassin's wants and the different sorts of games an assassin might find themselves in. Duskblade is meant a really good item in a game where there are several squishies, making the first kill of a fight much easier to get. Prowler's Claw is meant to be powerful if you estimate getting one incredibly strong burst is your best avenue to victory (for instance, if they have a single champion who is the lynchpin of their comp, and applying very heavy burst threat with greater target access allows you to kill them or pressure them out of fights). Eclipse is meant to offer an opt-out for when you evaluate early on that you win condition is to generally avoid teamfights and aim for the splitpush or take smaller skirmishes—this is why it'...

Both internal playtesting and number-crunching contribute a lot. We also listen to what players have concerns about, from plenty of channels including Reddit—but we don't just react blindly to player feedback, because while it can alert us to some valid problems it can also be pretty far off sometimes. We heard the issues raised around total percent penetration values, for instance, and took a second look, agreed, then iterated. Thanks for taking an interest!

This is correct.

Thank you! I appreciate it.

Thank you! I am alive, just buried in preseasons :)

Yes. We're picking up lots of bugs from r/LeaguePBE, and we have folks specifically looking there to gather feedback and disseminate it to the team. You'll just see responses here sometimes because this is a sub a lot of us are used to browsing when e.g. our game is building or what-have-you, and if we can hop in and provide an answer we'll do it.

This happened during a tuning pass and will be fixed, along with other items that have this issue!

You really have no idea who August is do you? He’s by far the most acclaimed designer, creating unique actionable ideas without the certainlyT touch of unbalancable, and by far the best champ designer at riot, jinx gnar jhin and many others are examples of top tier design and fantasy fulfillment beyond their years while maintaining peak balance.

Pardon me if I misunderstand. Yasuo and Yone are breaking the 100% crit cap, which is impossible for other champions not named Tryndamere (who is also implicated here). Crit from champions is intentionally included in Rageblade's calculation, just not above 100%. This could change, pending balance, but would be tooltipped accurately if so (like, "Critical Strike Chance from items").

Yep

Bingo. Critical strike chance is implicitly capped at 100%. This is not Yasuo/Yone- or Guinsoo's-specific.

Item power can be a bit tricky, data-wise, even without the critically low quality of PBE games confounding things. In this case, we're focusing first on clear outliers: the sort that can be identified without objective. Like, if you see a scenario in-game occur that is breaking down gameplay or clearly invalidating core League skill-tests, that's on the table for either tuning or mechanics work, whatever will resolve the issue. Or, if an item or build path or class isn't living up to its fantasy, that's also something we look for opportunities to resolve. In terms of things we can't get internally and need the PBE for, this is an opportunity for us to gather feedback from the community, including players who are just reading the items or are trying them themselves on the PBE, more than it is to gather objective gameplay data from PBE games.