PhreakRiot

Most Lee Sin jungles max W 2nd.

For ~75% of Lee Sin players this is a 5 damage nerf at level 14.

Lee Sin is like 48% everywhere.

Win rate is not power (not exactly anyway, they're obviously correlated) but also his teammates are the ones on the receiving end of that 48% win rate and they've been receiving that for several months. He could stand to be buffed even just for his teammates' sakes.

We had this discussion.

One of the designers literally started quoting Twitch lines.

Long story short we elected to give him some level of unreliability (you can Flash for example) but in the average case he will hit.

The risk that he'll be #1 by a lot. Technically Taliyah and Trist had higher presence than him in LEC postseason and though Trist was nerfed (plus several systems changes should impact her), Taliyah was not. But ultimately, it's a very light touch that will absolutely retain Azir in the meta but makes him less likely to be #1. Ideally we have no 100% presence champions. We don't think Trist or Taliyah will be that and this change is to stave off the likelihood that Azir will be either.

Eh, currently jungle Lee is like +2% win rate on W 2nd. It'll get closer, sure, but I expect W to still be better.

The flat shield still scales substantially.

I wanted to raise the trap count to 4 and was told no

I mean he's the only marksman where you can realistically dodge all of his damage and not just because he missed. It's allowed to be strong IMO.

In general, we're not trying to specifically pro skew these changes. For the vast majority of them, there are one of three driving principles:

1. This champion is kinda just bad. We should buff them. We're aware that Worlds will be happening this patch.
2. This champion is kinda good already. We should do something that's attention-grabbing but not actually that huge since they're already kinda good.
3. This champions has been ultra-present in pro play and we think they'll remain a top-5 champion in that scene. Let's give pros some room to explore.

Moving forward, we'd like to do pro balance less often than we did this year.

However, I think 14/15 of the most present champions have been changed since the last time any league played on a given patch. Kai'Sa, Tristana, Azir, Renekton, Rell, etc. etc. etc. If you think nothing's changed since playoffs (which BTW was 13.13 for LPL lol), you just don't have a very good memory.

Rek'Sai has been completely ceilinged by elite MMR solo queue, sadly. And then we buffed her best first item.

Every time, I've tried to compensate changes for other skill brackets or nerf things that disproportionately hit super high level play. There's also a longform change list (similar to Rumble and Azir, which were both very successful changes IMO) floating around that if I have time for, I'd like to trial. However, I can't guarantee that this will be the highest priority in the near future.

The third Lee Sin line isn't mentioned here, but is currently minus 0-20 damage off of E.

Top/Mid Lee max E 2nd. Jungle Lee maxes E last.

It has a Total AD ratio, the real difference in damage is ~14%

With this split's pro play as an example, top lane doesn't end up having a clear winner as often, since the lane frequently has sharp counters. For example, a top laner rarely cracked 75% presence, while jungle/mid/bot/supp all usually had 2+.

In general, a lane with a dedicated income stream should probably default to playing champions who care about that income stream. Either that means making every tank care a lot about gold (we probably shouldn't to a large degree) or they're mages/fighters/assassins. Though I do think each lane should have viable low-agency / weakside options.

I'm pretty comfortable with Jax being one of the highest presence top laners this year. He's likely to be #1 at Worlds. I think that's fine. Probably not for multiple years running, though.

The only time I have a "problem" so to speak with pro-bound champions is when they profess that they're broadly approachable.

Azir is clearly a high skill cap champion. His pick rate is directly influenced by his pro presence. Meanwhile, Garen is the kind of champion that really shouldn't be in pro jail. He's meant to be an intro champion.

I think Jinx falls into the Garen camp and Aphelios falls into the Azir camp, to provide a few more examples. Really this is more of a sliding scale, but directionally this is where my thinking is.

Ultimately this means signing ourselves up for constantly tuning Azir, Aphelios, K'Sante, and similar champions who are going to be viable in pro or not at all. They're aspirational and difficult. That means the average player will fail on them. That's fine. But if they aren't even pro viable, then no one gets to have fun and there's no more aspiration.

Personally I'm comfortable with Azir, K'Sante, etc. having a permane...

50% pro presence for 3 straight patches. Randuin's got buffed but so did Goredrinker, Stridebreaker, Shojin, and Armguard, plus some champions who innately play well into him, like Gwen. Only top laner nerfed is Renekton.

No reason to think he'll suddenly 1.5x his presence without direct buffs.

Last time we did it was this year to Nidalee and it was a bit under 1%. Of course, Nidalee has Pounce, so she cares about her base MS a bit less than other champions.

But about 1% off is fine here.

Not quite. I said Azir is one of the more interesting mids for pro play and I'd rather Azir be #1 than Tristana or many other mages.

I did not give a target presence or that I want him to be the most played. Just that there's a sliding scale and he's one of the better fits.

Wasn't my suggestion!

Why are you getting downvoted, lmao. You're right.

Love Reddit.

I still fail to comprehend Reddit's obsession with crit scaling. LeBlanc was good with Shiv because it had an AP ratio. The minion AP ratio got removed. The champion AP ratio got nerfed.

Reddit keeps saying, "Just make it scale off of crit!" but every single tuning lever that matters can be adjusted by:

1. Base value
2. AP ratio
3. Item base stats

What problem are you trying to solve by asking for it to crit? This thing needs to be more powerful late game? That's just level scaling with extra steps. This item needs to be bad on mages? It gives AD/AS/Crit and zero conventional mage stats. Which mage wants that?

Again, the only exclusion here is LeBlanc. And then I point back to the AP ratio that's been nerfed thrice.

So seriously, in all honesty, exactly what outcome are you hoping for with crit scaling?

For reference, it takes 81 ability haste to hit the old CDR cap of 45%, which could be reached with two items and a mastery, or one item with a combination of runes and masteries.

I don't believe it's possible to get 81 ability haste in any combination of 2 items + runes.

Secondarily, I'll say that Haste is actually a good stat to provide to some classes. Many fighters, for example, functionally want ability haste like auto-attackers want attack speed. And letting them have significant amounts of ability haste is better for the game than them either being forced to oneshot you, because all they can buy is AD, or just underperforming tanks, since tanks will perform that job better.