It's removed from tier 1 now? Why?
Tier 1 smite can't damage champions and doesn't slow pets.
Tier 2 and tier 3 smite (the two that can damage champions) should be unchanged against champions and mimic all the same rules against pets unless someone else shipped a change meant as a jungle nerf.
On lethality build, it might be stronger at rank 1 but falls of at rank 2. There's less incentive to build hp items, we go for build pure damage instead.
Having base armor/mr is functionally a multiplier on the HP ratio. The late game HP ratio is essentially higher than before.
I can understand the smite changes on pets, now it should become more a team effort.
But why removing the slow from the first smite upgrade? It doesn't impact the early game, it's just a f you to junglers. Are all main ADC at riot or what
Pretty sure that's a misquote in the patch notes or it's someone else's change. I didn't remove the slow from t2 smite.
I'd be curious about champs like Zeri/MF/Samira who have abilities that can crit. Zeri in particular has a way higher pickrate with Navori but she still has a decent amount of games with IE. IE has almost a 2% higher winrate(lolalytics).
IE is goated for Samira. Collector IE is a cracked build. Yeah the untargetability sometimes matters but she's so good at applying both of those items.
Zeri is also a good IE user, yeah. Players should typically buy it instead of Quickblades.
Ie now has the opposite problem though. There's like no champs that buy it bc it's extremely underwhelming in that it just provides stats
This is false. It’s BiS on Yasuo Yone Jinx Caitlyn Aphelios, and maybe a few others that I haven’t checked.
Maybe I should clarify, I know you do game design, I meant like I didn't get the impression that you are on the preseason team (which would be responsible for changes like changing how top interacts with the game). And if you are, that is not the purpose of this particular video and the Aatrox change. If that's not fair either, I can delete my comment because apparently I'm woefully uninformed.
Really just depends on the scope of the work. We absolutely can make large systemic changes on the Live pod.
Right, its not really Phreaks job. He is on balance changes, not game design stuff. Maybe he will do some preseason work in that vein but that is not the point of what he can do as far as balance changes are concerned over a short period.
Not really an accurate description of my job, tbh.
Phreak talks here about having top lane carries feel good in the late game... which honestly I don't care about.
I might be in the minority here, but I'm just interested in top lane feeling less horrible for the other 80 percent of the game. I think all top lane changes should be completely focused on fixing how a entire game can be UTTERLY lost for top lane in the span of 1 minute. Bad jg gank from a counter pick matchup into getting frozen for 20 minutes OR the other option getting heralded 5 plated and being at an absurd gold deficit.
I'm not interested in aatrox being able to delete champs in 1 combo. I want top lane to be punished less for 1st pick and I want less snowball, less freeze, less unfun bs.
P.S. f**k Aatrox
One of the tasks coming up (IDK if it's on my sprint or not, I wasn't in last week) is identifying what we want the shape of top lane to be in modern League of Legends.
Most players tend to really not like the results of pure split pushing and I think I agree with them. Feels like they single-handedly decide who wins. Compared to a fed ADC, you can usually one-shot the ADC with Rengar or something and at least more people are involved in the game. This is a very short summary, to be clear.
I have ideas. Regardless, there needs to be a holistic look. Top lane in particular probably needs to snowball less, at least in the early game. It probably needs to be less decided by jungle ganks. And we need to figure out what actions a top laner is meant to take after 10 or so minutes into the game. Again, there is a lot to look at here.
What's funny (and this isn't really targeted at you in particular), last time I made a video talking about how I'd like to see top la...
Read moreout of curiousity, while 17% on u.gg isn't exactly the highest among champs and I'm sure it might also just be a deceptive stat.
What if anything does the balance team do when a champ has too high a pick rate for whatever reason?
Like I know some champions are insanely popular even when not really that strong but I can only assume that still has an effect on the game perspective as a whole as it could make metas feel stale so what happens then?
Like Kai'sa for example who's winrate seems about average with other ADCs but who's pickrate is like 40~% according to u.gg
I think punishing a champion for being popular is a very silly approach.
Do you have any stats of the average kills per game in soloqueue, let's say diamond+? Not sure if this is something you guys keep track of (well, you probably do in some way, but I don't know if the stats are easily accessible for you) but it would be interesting to see.
Yes.
Worth noting that this is specially LCK games, not necessarily League of Legends as a whole. Historically the LCK has had incredibly low bloodiness, which was not remotely representative of the typical League game.
Is that so? I'm using lolalytics as a point of reference, which has him at 52-ish in silver and gold and on the upper side of 54 for platinum and diamond, going up with ranking. Last I remembered, lolalytics was called a reasonably close approximation of internal data by Rioters. Is there another public site you'd recommend as having more accurate data?
Lolalytics win rates are fake. Look in the top right corner. See where it says "Average Emerald+ Win Rate: 52.xx%"? Yeah, you have to subtract that. That's the baseline for any champion at that tier for that website.
The vast majority of "but look at the win rate!" posts make this mistake.
Thank you for explaining. Your communication here has been astounding ever since you got into the balance team. I bet every one appreciates this, please please keep it up!
My pleasure. My challenge now is to have better emotional control and not let the frequent antagonism get to me.
It's interesting because despite Reddit claiming Aatrox is giga-busted, he was in 1 of 9 LCS playoff games this week and there isn't a single minor league on the patch that has him at 100% presence.
His winrate in solo queue is off the charts, though
It’s like 51-52% at every skill bracket. That is well within the charts.
How many times have we buffed damage as opposed to durability
The problem with this is that they don't question "how significantly have we buffed damage in any given instance versus durability, and how often?"
Nerfs are most often flat nerfs, or nerfs to base stats as opposed to scaling now, while buffs VERY often include buffs to scaling, especially in terms of CDs. Riot has given many significant scaling buffs over the years when champs aren't popular but aren't weak, and the overall impact typically goes unseen even when they become popular as most games don't reach 4-5 items.
Mid-late game fights are extremely obnoxious now as a result of this. This is why games are often nuclear arms races. Champs just scale too fast in general now combined with the global gold increases, power creep among items, and runes over the 13+ years league has been out.
This wasn’t a thorough analysis. It was simply, hey, in 15 minutes we can check a binary patch note. This was just an off-hand comment, don’t read too much into it.
We have much better ways of tracking the actual game impact. We have a report for how long each death takes, for example.
you're referring to viewer impact though, with things like measures of excitement, i would say
Yeah absolutely. However, a huge portion of the game is driven by pro play. I'm not talking about our changes in reaction, I'm talking about actual regular player behavior. Azir's play rate spiked when he got buffed in 13.11. It then spiked again (at a somewhat similar magnitude) because he got picked in pro. Like, the act of Faker picking him almost had as much impact as 2% win rate of buffs.
So when the pro play meta was Jinx vs. Aphelios every game and a snoozefest tank vs. tank in top lane, it's incredibly easy for players to say, "See? The game is just all about whichever bot lane wins, top is useless." And while certainly that is directionally accurate, the degree to which that's true isn't. But from what I've seen of playoffs so far, the carriability of each role seems a lot more fair. And I expect that to trickle down to other players.
Outside of that, pro is also a decent indication of the game overall. It's certainly not identical to the ...
Read more2:1 ratio of carries to non-carries in top in pro play
why?
Plenty of reasons. A few:
Tank vs. tank top lanes are generally low excitement and tends to actually pan out as just waiting around to fight around whichever bot lane wins. That said, tanks are good for League of Legends. They should be viable in many roles so that teams always have access to a strong tank in champ select across a variety of roles.
Wait, I’m sorry if I’m reading this wrong, but are you saying that Sion nerfs were planned for a perfectly balanced champ simply because you felt there were too many tanks top and the nerfs for the actual over preforming tank weren’t ready yet?
Because assuming I havent made a complete hash out of understanding your comment, that seems like a completely shit idea
Sion isn't perfectly balanced. When planning changes on 13.14 his win rate was well within reason for calling for a nerf in anywhere except the top ~1% of players. But that's discretionary. We don't balance the game purely by numbers, we are merely informed by them. We've stated that we'll nerf something if it reaches some threshold and we hold to that. The rest is our choice. For example, Kai'Sa only just barely qualifies as a data-driven nerf because she was 80% present in top leagues over 13.12 and 13.13. If she had 8% lower pro presence in 13.12 she wouldn't qualify. But even outside of that we'd have acted anyway.
Also, K'Sante hasn't qualified as a data-driven pro nerf since the 13.12 nerf. There's no data in any level of play that says he should be a nerf target. Nothing indicates he's "problematic" from a solo queue win rate, ban rate, or pro presence stance. This doesn't mean he shouldn't receive changes.
Phreak actually said that stats disprove this. According to one of his patch breakdowns, toplane having an advantage very early is a good indicator of which team will win, but if that advantage develops midgame or later then it actually has little impact on overall winrate. Instead, any of the other roles getting a lead in the midgame or later is a better indicator for overall winrate than top. So, unless you are absolutely dominant in toplane from the get-go, you probably are not going to be a 1v9 machine anymore, and everyone else having a lead is going to be more important than you.
To clarify:
You're overstating the gulf in late-game somewhat. There are some top laners that still express their late game leads as game victory better than even the most snowbally bot laners (Kayle and Tryndamere are the biggest standouts). You're correct that the overall trend does shift toward bot lane as games go later.
My belief is that every role should have both solid early snowball and late game carry options. Darius and Kayle don't need to have the same agency curves as one another. That likely means reigning in some things as well as buffing others.
Explanation is pretty simple:
Riot wants strong but not op carry toplaners at worlds. The fastest way to get balance to where you want it, is to overshoot, go back some amount and from there take smaller and smaller balance changes to push into desired direction.If riot buffs aatrox by a really small amount for 5 patches, he might not even be strong enough for worlds meta.
Let me shoot part of your claim down real quick:
devtrackers.gg