PhreakRiot

I truly don't believe Shiv needs to scale with AD or Crit. It also already scales hits with level.

• The item's stat profile says it's bad on mages. The fact that LeBlanc and only LeBlanc abuses this item means this is a LeBlanc scaling problem, not a mage poaching problem.
• We are trying to make items scale less as an overall game direction. Considering a full build has 5 items with unique passives, if they near the power level of spells (think about the AP ratio on Lich Bane and compare it to Jax W, consider Nashor's Tooth and compare it to something like Kai'Sa passive or Kayle P/E), then you start playing your items' patterns more than your champion's. In small doses this is fine (Lich Bane again).

Giving it an AD/Crit ratio just brings us back to the item scaling, makes it especially hard to balance for Rengar or Yasuo/Yone, and just isn't needed.

Now if the argument is that Shiv just shouldn't be a first item (no Noonquiver, removing...

The goal was to get Kraken, Stormrazor, and Shiv to be roughly equally powerful. It's fine if one was more popular than another.

Kraken we hit pretty quickly. Shiv people considered underpowered but wasn't (after the first set of changes) and eventually people caught on. Stormrazor we slightly over-nerfed.

I wish we hadn't kept pushing the minion mod when initially tuning it on Live; it launched with more than enough minion damage and we should have just given it stats instead.

To be fair we started with buffing it twice.

That was wrong.

The more changes you include the harder it is to get it right.

We're primarily hitting AD growth, so it will be unfeelable at level 1 and then be negligible for a while if she's mostly reliant on spells.

There isn't any single change that can literally only hit AD LeBlanc. It's just about reigning in collateral damage and trying to retain her overall power level on intended builds.

The intent with Briar for this patch was to essentially micropatch 13.19 itself after getting more data. There's never enough info within a week to have a reliable feel for her actual mastery curve. We can only see win rate movement by day and infer from there. Keep in mind that for any mature champion, your first game can benefit from guides and even just seeing them play in your games. That can never be true for a new release. So we elected to craft changes into a micropatch instead of making a call on this last Monday.

Micropatching is still a drain on resources. It means that some piece of work doesn't get done because people have to be pulled to actually ship it live. There's an extra step beyond, "I edited these two files and hit submit." So we really don't want to make a habit of it. But if it's pressing enough or it's just the right call for the situation, then it's a tool that we have.

It's interesting; these kinds of things are the eventual results of power creep. Certainly, Shiv returning as a good first item is the straw that broke the camel's back and I did a rather poor job of getting the item into a fair state sooner. I spent much of summer just being like, "OK LB abuses Shiv, we have to keep tuning Shiv to make it not dominant on LeBlanc" despite LeBlanc being the only egregious user after like the first balance pass.

But actually LB has a bunch of small things that just slowly fell out of line. No individual change made this build appear but the end result is that she's just tuned kinda weird right now and scales with mage items worse than other mages do. So she just buys other items instead.

Current direction:

• Nerf Shiv (13.18 didn't nerf the wave clear enough)
• Nerf LeBlanc's AD (Lower Triforce and +AS synergy)
• Nerf LeBlanc's mana pool to require building mana again
• Small spell AP ratio increases to hopefully tread water on AP builds

No I didn't.

Yes

The only pings that are changing this patch are the ones on teammates. Self, neutral, and enemy pings are unchanged.

Yes. Pinging your stuff is unchanged.

Lee Sin doesn't have the pro presence of Azir. So the best players in the world with hundreds of games of experience on him indicate that they don't think he's very good, either.

That isn't changing.

That isn't changing.

Using their team name or initials I imagine.

I'm very helpful.

Every change has impact. It's not like Galio is trash. He's a little bit weak on average. A champion can be bad at 1v1 and good at a strategic niche. I don't have really strong opinions on Galio but in general I think playing up a strategic niche is a way to ensure League of Legends has significant variance from game to game.

Nothing really obvious and direct. We're generally aware that the game is more lethal than we'd like. There are some systemic things in the works, some systemic things that are farther out, and some small direction in short-term changes.

The Samira/Quinn/Akshan changes from a couple patches ago are an example of that last one.

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.