PhreakRiot

PhreakRiot



28 Jul

Comment

Originally posted by WoonStruck

I agree its small.

I just remember being incredibly disappointed a few years ago by the Rioter who said it would be cool if Horizon Focus amplified Vel'Koz true damage, and it clearly being approved since items, which didn't amplify true damage before, now amplify true damage.

I was simply wondering where broad stances on something like that landed now.

Pre-rework Swain E used to multiply true damage on purpose so that it multiplied him running Ignite. It was designer intent of "this works the way I feel like it should" benefitting the player being more important than rules consistency.

To be clear, consistency is never the most important rule. It's nice to have when there aren't more important priorities. It helps the game be learnable and is a positive, just not the most important design consideration.

Comment

Originally posted by WoonStruck

If someone were to identify said rules, where do you think they would land on true damage interactions?

More specifically, the fact that items can now arbitrarily amplify true damage with % damage increase, but items with % damage reductions cannot likewise reduce true damage.

Would it be best to remove itemized % increases to true damage, or allow itemized % reductions to affect true damage? All logic points to the former.

That seems like a huge conceptual design flaw. I can't imagine there's consistent logic in allowing one and not the other.

Any time items multiply true damage it is almost always an implementation oversight. However, the actual implications of that oversight are incredibly small.

Comment

Originally posted by TetBoyzzz

Yeah, I get that. This was more to do with the language used and the way some information is presented.

I went into detail about the minion champs as an example of how many responses someone might have to a statement like "Smite should not do full damage to players minions". I don't think I made that clear enough though so that's on me.

One of the big reasons statements like "this should xxxxx" or "xxxxx is never correct" are super off putting for me is that it sounds a lot like the balance whiners (for lack of a better term) that just complain about everything they lose to. A lot of the poorly informed player base with no knowledge on game balance will often say stuff like "xxxxx champion shouldn't be able to do that" or something similar.

I completely get not being able to discuss every change in detail (especially when you make patch rundowns that do exactly that already), but I think you can't throw out statements like "this interaction shouldn'...

I don't think that's a reasonable ask, TBH.

I can explain the thought process behind the decision. No one even has to do that but I choose to. I don't have to explain the thought process behind the thought process. It honestly can go on endlessly and each step has diminishing returns.

Smite is changed because I (we) think it's wrong for junglers to be uniquely good against summoners. Explaining why I think that logic holds at a role level versus a champion level is not something I'm interested in writing out eight comments deep onto a reddit thread. I'm sorry if that disappoints you but all of this is on my free time and I can spend it how I want. I know the tone here comes off pretty aggressive (and tbh I'm pretty tired right now so that's probably just on me) but the core truth is still accurate.

Comment

Originally posted by MachoMelon11

Makes me wonder if they'll ever add deep water to Summoners rift

River around top lane gonna get mysteriously deep in 13.15

(Kappa)


27 Jul

Comment

Originally posted by WoonStruck

Did you guys make cleaver and stuff work vs pets, since you said you want pets to have the same interactions as champions?

You should probably do a sweep of all champion-only effects and make them affect champions AND pets if you want the interactions to match up.

That's a decent idea for something to put on our backlog. For example, Syndra W maybe shouldn't work on them.

It's not the most pressing and urgent task but probably a pretty reasonable one for us to identify all the rules we want to use.

Comment

Originally posted by Lysandren

No one is arguing that pen shouldn't work against pets. I'm just pointing out that it rings false to claim that she will be stronger after lvl 14, when you had not considered that the enemy team can build to ignore resistances, but they can't build to ignore hp.

Personally, I hate playing into Yorick, so feel free to leave her squishy. :)

I said the HP ratio is functionally higher. That tends to be true.

Comment

Originally posted by ADeadMansName

If that is the case, just remove smite from being used on pets all together to prevent misclicks there. You could also remove smite from minions except canons and super minions, because you never smite a melee/caster minion.

And you could even remove smite from minions all together, because it is an old interaction and mostly used to defend against baron buffed minions or super minions. It would lower the influence of junglers in a way that most players don't really care about.

One last question: Is the summoned RH a pet or a monster? And is the intention to keep smite working on it or not?

IIRC Rift Herald is still a monster.

I'm not against disabling pet targeting from Smite. It could be that you shouldn't even be able to smite lane minions (junglers taxing your cannon minion ring any bells?).

However, there are reasonable situations where smiting a pet is correct. At first glance, I'm generally in favor of lettings players decide that smiting a mini Heimer turret or Shaco box for 100 damage is correct for them to do. Saying you can smite small pets but not big ones is probably not a great change.

There are lots of permutations of this that are possible to implement. Saying "This is probably not the best choice but you can do it" is pretty inoffensive IMO.

Comment

Originally posted by TetBoyzzz

I'm a huge fan of the transparency that you and the Riot balance team have with the playerbase, but one thing that's always irked me was the use of words like "should" and "shouldn't" when talking about a competitive game.

The decisions made are completely based on the design choices of the person(s) in charge, which is fine (and unavoidable); but claiming that the decisions are made because that's how they should be comes across pretty poorly.

Smite should not do full damage nor intermediate damage to players’ minions

Why not? I'm guessing cause it's a one button way to cut down minion champions' damage that costs basically nothing and is limited to one player on each team - could be way off but that seems like the most likely thought process.

But then why shouldn't the minion player have to account for this? Knowing that a jungle gank is more effective on them since their damage (and therefore ability to...

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I understand your point but this is a short Reddit post, not defense of a dissertation.

I'm not going to fully explain every change in every detail. That's just not going to happen. That means you're not going to see some of the considerations. That's the best answer I can give you.


26 Jul

Comment

Originally posted by B3ER

Will the tooltip communicate that smite doesn't do full damage against pets? Because exhausting Soraka is a fine analogy up until the point where the summoner spell is consistent with the description given along all units it can target.

This game has too many things that are the way they are without anything that communicates it. Don't add more. And no, patch notes don't count. They only suffice as communication for the small percentage of players that bother reading them.

Yes, the tooltip is updated.

Comment

Originally posted by killtasticfever

You didn't really answer the question.

Why didn't you make them unsmiteable? smiting a pet for 100 dmg is a joke. Not to mention a ton of players don't thoroughly scan patch notes and will end up smiting them and being frustrated.

Because conceivably you have a reason to smite them. I'm defaulting to giving players the option. It's not literally always wrong.

Comment

Originally posted by Lysandren

Except by that point the enemy has pen items, so she's weaker still.

In fact most Flat pen mages are going to be doing true damage to the maiden anyway, because you can get so much flat pen so easily with just 3 items.

Then we can re-tune her if Maiden is actually too squishy. Pen should work against pets.

Comment

Originally posted by Regulargrr

I had a three Taric/Jax teams lobby. That poor 4th team.

We were Taric/Heimer. We got first.

Comment

Originally posted by RobDaGinger

Maiden HP changes just further incentivize lethality hit and run builds which are probably the most annoying ones to play against. Otherwise Maiden (and Yoricks whole power) is too susceptible to dying during extended fights.

Also he just feels horrible without Maiden and she has half the health late game so….yay.

Base Armor/MR is a multiplicative HP lever. Once she has 25 armor/mr (around level 14), the HP ratio is unchanged. Afterwards it's higher, meaning that in any late-game scenario she scales with Yorick HP harder than before. Overall the change is fairly negligible, though. The HP ratio is 66-90%, from 75%

Comment

Originally posted by Kordben

Hey. A bit off topic but how Azir look like within your database?

Is he getting closer to the nerf angle ? His presence in pro is ever increasing.

I love the champ and it's state and I'm worried we are going back to the dark middle age :D

My thoughts on pro balance, and Azir specifically:

  1. Azir at ~60% pro presence is completely reasonable for him. Either the mid lane meta is so healthy that 60% is the #1 pick, which is awesome, or he's like #2-4, which is fine.
  2. We should curate the pro meta. This means picking favorites and shifting the game into the best version of the game to view and to play. This means players in every role should be able to carry. This means tanks shouldn't be the default top lane role. Probably also means tanks shouldn't be the default jungle role. Azir is generally a very good champion for pro play. I'd very much like to keep him around in pro play nearly permanently.
  3. Staleness is weird. I don't have fully formed thoughts here. People tend to get bored when it's Vi/Wukong in most games for the whole year, even if they're fairly active champions. Some amount of mandatory shifting probably has to happen when picks get stale but I don't love having to do it. This ...
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Comment

Originally posted by Regulargrr

The rare Taric unbanned lobby where everyone goes Taric instantly...

My last Taric lobby there were only two of us. I was shocked.

Comment

Originally posted by Caenen_

I'm not sure if Smite should always only deal a fraction of the health bar of even "small" pets like Heimer's Q turret or Shaco's box, though. I think at that level of damage it'll just feel dissatisfying for the caster (the anti-pattern here is that you're associating to use the spell that instantly bursts minions, but it does very little instead). If you can't combine it with ~an attack or spell to finish the unit off, what's the point of using the powerful cooldown?

What is the argument against giving it the exclusion for targeting minion_summons?

Then don’t smite them. You can also exhaust Soraka. Sometimes you want to slow Tibbers by 20%. That’s up to you.

Smite should not do full damage nor intermediate damage to players’ minions. There’s an argument for not being able to cast it at all but for now letting you decide that maybe it’s worth it seems valuable. It’s not literally never correct.

Comment

Originally posted by Praius

they know they're overbuffing, they want you to feel enticed to pick the new overbuffed character, they state it themselves, they push things over the edge to make people notice the champs.

Wasn’t an intentional over buff.

For what it’s worth the changes were low-MMR-skewed. The buff in challenger was less than the buff in silver. Also he technically deals less damage until first recall. Obviously it ended up being a large buff but I’d rather he have landed at 50.5 than 51.5


25 Jul

Comment

Edit: I just recent realized that this thread is about why it's targetable at all, not why the change was made. This significant changes the meaning of what I wrote here. The answer below is "Why did you nerf Smite against pets?"

Essentially we chose to make a call here. This was “my” project (it was handed to me) but I got input from the rest of the team.

  1. Simplicity. Your interactions with champions closely mirrors your interactions with the things they create. Daisy is closer to Ivern than she is to Gromp, after all. It’s also why I did a pass on durability and somewhat normalized their armor/mr, to also somewhat mimic champion stats. This is the lesser of the two primary reasons.
  2. Junglers don’t need to be uniquely amazing against summoners. That’s the short of it. It’s convenient that this is a jungle nerf but really we should just tune pets around everyone being more or less equal against them. Making it some mid-tier level of damage still preser...
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Comment

Originally posted by MohamedRefai

u/phreakriot can we get some thoughts behind the changes and what they are aiming to do

Q change: differentiating the builds. If AP Kai’Sa has a weak Q, it makes the build have a meaningfully weaker button

W change: lower the chance of popping 5 plasma stacks from across the map. Keep in mind this is more like an 8% CD nerf, like changing a 6 to a 6.5

Neither change is massive. In truth Kai’Sa only really needs about 1-1.5% wr nerf.

But players are really bad at reading patch notes and understanding them. Pros included. We will likely ship another nerf because perception is reality.

Comment

Originally posted by pda898

Funny enough, it is. Classic AP build has 15 haste at max, so W cd on hit is 2.88s now, which means she can chain her passive at 1260 range, which is huge. With nerfs - 3.05, which means 962 range for chain hitting passive. So 2% cdr nerf equals essentially ~24% effective range nerf.

Yeah but Reddit only know how to count to -2%, forgetting that this is actually an ~8% cd nerf.