RiotAxes

Stacking champs have some bespoke logic to ensure they do ramp up over game time.

"Are all champions viable" - that is the goal. The balance of the mode is so different from other modes, though, that I'm quite sure we'll still be learning things through the whole run of the event.

No Nexus Blitz for the summer event.

They're not champion specific. You could get a doublecast Syndra ult or a doublecast Galio ult or whatever (though they're not all equally common and there's a pretty large pool of them...)

...and now I can't either. Thanks for that.

Lots - should be on PBE soon. Stormrazor and Bloodthirster both have significant changes.

Discussing what we can do there. We're taking a look at Maw of Malmortius and Force of Nature degree of hardcountering, and one of the motivations for moving Shieldbow out of the Mythic space was that a rushable AD + Lifesteal + anti-burst item on Irelia, Yasuo, etc has really dramatic repercussions on how Mages feel to play in mid lane. But this isn't the same as feeling like your own items are more fun or more balanced. Mages are harder to do simple numbers tuning on, because there's such a gap in their solo queue vs pro play performance - in pro they're already the top of the meta. So, we're looking into it, but there's no guarantee of a direct item change to Mage items at midseason.

We're considering a nerf or change, but I'm not willing to net nerf Fighters in top lane at this time so preferring a buff-the-competition approach.

Yes, with a goal to ship alongside the item changes. There's some risk that the patch date slips still, but we understand that she needs it.

ARAM players don't deviate from the Summoner's Rift item set often enough to yield much data, even when the ARAM items are grossly OP, unfortunately. They'll play alt builds using SR items at a very high rate, but ARAM-only items are apparently a really tough sell to that audience.

I'd still like to do some more of it someday, but its hard to prioritize something we know won't impact the experience very much.

Looking at straight buffs to Sterak's Gage, Goredrinker, Trinity Force, and Stridebreaker, and possibly something for Hullbreaker. Those will be direct buffs to existing mechanics - not really what this article is about.

Galeforce has significant changes in place to ensure that it still has a place in the system.

She could be - but I will say that engagement with Nilah looks pretty different from, say, Rell. She found an audience, it's just not a huge one. Rell, on the other hand, is one of the least popular champions in the entire game, and not particularly deeply played even among players who play her.

So if we can find something cool, awesome, but it's not mandatory in the same way. Nilah's in an ok state in terms of audience; the point I was making is just that Nilah didn't move a whole bunch of melee carry players into bot lane or anything like that.

I'd definitely agree that distinction between Fighter Mythics is a problem (and yes, Sunderer could stand to lose a property). Suspect we'll just be looking at simple tuning

But another problem they have is that they're not all that important to the patterns of Fighters - you'll buy them because they're very efficient with the stats you need to operate, but is it actually important that you have to choose between Goredrinker and Trinity Force, other than the fact that being able to buy both would make you statistically overpowered?

This ties into some of the problems we're having with the Mythic system in general, which we'll be talking about in the not-too-distant future.

Eventually yes, this year almost certainly no. We'd like to be able to change the environment more than we currently can (almost not at all), but it requires people with pretty specific skillsets, and our tooling in that area needs improvements for us to be able to do it more regularly.

Potentially yes, strategy is something that is on the table for changes for preseason.

As I said in a different comment, though, we're still scoping so I'm not committing to anything specific there right now.

Did people like Nilah?

Not enough, but they did like Pyke enough to swap roles for. I personally suspect the difference is that if you like the thing Pyke does, he's the coolest champion in the game, whereas for a melee carry player, Nilah doesn't hit hard enough to get you to swap lanes just to access her, whether you'd like to play her or not in your main role.

So overall pretty bullish on that sort of direction, but we have to be careful with the targets we pick and have clear reasons why we expect to hit them.

I think we'd change them more than that if we went that direction. "There are different minions in the lanes", rather than having them look the same but give slightly differently tuned rewards.

But we're not at all committed to that direction, it's just an easy example of the type of thing that might give us another tuning lever.

Yes - and in 8.11, when we said "Hey, we're making absolutely sure non-ADCs are viable in the lane", the reaction wasn't a bunch of non-ADCs playing the lane, it was mostly people continuing to play ADCs while being sad about it. Getting players to change their behavior would require significantly more than that.

Honestly, we probably had to respond to the ADC-only meta in bot lane in something like season 2-3 if we wanted to head it off. People are so entrenched at this point that it's a bit hard to see what would get them to change.

I expect to be doing some item tinkering after MSI (e.g. buffing up the non-Sunderer fighter mythics, maybe with a Sunderer nerf). But we don't have any really large changes planned for the next few months.

We're looking at a set of pro-targeted jungler buffs for 13.8 to supplement those nerfs.