RiotAxes

It's understandable that top lane players aren't happy when they see Vayne in their lane - but significantly exaggerated impact, yeah.

One of the really understated facts (good or bad) about role select is that players have sorted themselves based on what kinds of laning experiences they want to have. It doesn't matter which role Seraphine is highest win rate in or best in pro play in - players who like Seraphine as a character almost always queue support. It doesn't matter if Darius beats Teemo (he doesn't right now, but there've been many states of the game where he did) - Darius players are queuing up to have the melee 1v1 experience. And it doesn't matter how many mages are viable in bot lane - players who want to play them are mostly not queuing into bot lane.

We have several different things we're looking at - sentiment, odds of victory given X lead at Y time, differences in odds of victory based on MMR gap within a lane, things like that.

The biggest confounding factor here is that bot lane's value to winning the game scales steeply with player skill and top lane's does not (unsurprisingly, since a lot of these measures are zero sum). Which means that when most ADC players feel fine, influencers and pros feel like we're in a pure bot lane meta, etc.

Drake change should be pretty meaningful there. Remember that high objective value doesn't just give you the snowball of claiming the objective, it also prompts bigger fights which means more kills giving gold and XP.

That said, snowball isn't that far out of its historic levels right now for most players. It's pretty high for top tier players relatively, but for average play we're pretty close to historic levels.

So, I'm gonna disagree with him a bit here. And one of the things I want to get across here is that Riot game designers are not a monolith - we each have a different perspective on things, and that's a strength of the organization, not a weakness.

ADC was relatively a bit underpowered on 13.1a, in addition to having some systems design that was not optimized well to feel good. Since then we both buffed their items and nerfed one of the competing carry classes quite hard in mid-late game carry potential (Fighters), which is also a relative boost for ADCs, so a solid buff ended up landing them relatively somewhat overpowered.

Dragon changes will also have an impact, but that one's complicated - it's lane-to-lane balance and how snowbally the game gets at the same time.

For Prowler's, it's more about finding a good replacement. I wouldn't rule out some version of a dash staying, but I don't think it's super likely.

But again, this is stuff that's quite a ways out, almost speculative to talk about.

It's a bruiser pattern, though. It's an item that is about heads-up duels. Papering that over with a pure Assassin stat profile doesn't make the game better. Bit of a misfire on the holistic design, though it's doing good things for some other spaces, and assassins don't hate it.

We're looking at redesigning both Duskblade and Prowler's Claw (or replacing Prowler's), potentially to ship after MSI if everything goes well. Also a chance that those changes hit some unforeseen problems and it takes longer, though. Definitely agree we can't leave Assassins stranded forever, and Prowler's Claw is doing some deeply uncomfortable things to the game right now.

I think the Fighter mythics suffer from not doing anything particularly essential for Fighters - they're statistically good and fill nice holes in build paths, but if we didn't tell you that you had to build one by making them that gold-efficient, a lot of champs probably wouldn't. I've actually had pretty similar thoughts about them as Mythics - Steraks/Hullbreaker/Deaths Dance would make a neat trio, maybe Goredrinker for a different version of front lining or something. With all that said, they're not the squeaky wheel right now.

We're considering a fairly different model of Mythic item content design (i.e. what items exist in the system), but it's pretty early stage exploration right now, would be post-MSI for a pilot project at earliest and pretty likely not to go anywhere.

Maybe shred guitar instead?

So, I'm not sanguine that Galeforce is ok in the long run, but it generates pretty different outcomes from Stridebreaker.

The actual problem with Stridebreaker as a dash was - a primary point of satisfaction for juggernaut-type champions stems from how powerful they feel once they're in melee range. Giving them a readily purchasable dash meant they reliably closed to melee range, and if they're reliably closing to melee range, they can't just win fights once they get there. So we were going to have to start balancing all the juggernauts to not be juggernauts anymore, and lose some of their core satisfaction.

When Galeforce is the best, it escalates how much self-defense ADCs have, which necessitates some pretty scary diver and assassin patterns to cope with it, with either very high burst or some pretty crazy (think Death's Dance) defenses. But it isn't transformational in quite the same way for ADCs. If it ever catches on as the default item for skirmisher...

Still figuring out the best format for these, seems like this one went pretty well though.

Can't talk about anything like that right now. ASol is looking good though.

She had the skill curve of an Akali and that made many players deeply unhappy, so we're working to change it.

A brand new player isn't trying to learn the nuances of how to position in lane or kite - they're trying to find the fun. It's definitely true that Yuumi isn't going to teach all the skills you need to learn to be a good League of Legends player, but playing Yuumi with a friend turns out to be an effective way at figuring out why you want to bother learning those skills in the first place.

I think you might be having too much fun today. What can I do to make you sadder?

We are aiming not to have a situation like that happen again. Additionally, there is no general goal to reduce skill expression, and I 100% agree that it's core to what makes Lee Sin who he is.

Oh sh*t they're onto us

We need to talk...

Not sure. Slayers (skirmishers + assassins) have no consistent damage typing, so MR and Armor aren't clear levers between them. And mid lane isn't a rock-paper-scissors relationship. Bruisers beat Slayers and lose to Mages, but Slayers and Mages tend to be matchup-specific. Some mages crush Yasuo, some lose to him.

The biggest thing their level 1 armor is modulating is how dominant they are in bot lane, both support and bot lane carry. So it'd be pretty challenging to up their armor - upsets a lot of mid lane balance while moving more of them out of mid lane entirely.

Suspect tinkering with Slayer base stats is more promising - if they all gained some base armor in exchange for something else (MR, health per 5?), we potentially move the needle on how much Bruiser mid win rates get inflated by countering very popular champions, which makes it easier to allow Bruisers to be present in mid lane without nerfing them. Would have a side effect of moving Slayers towards to...

A lot of it is - if I pick Lucian for the first time, I'm gonna fall flat on my face. But I'm gonna do a lot of cool stuff where it's obvious why I failed, what I need to practice to do better, and why it will be awesome once I do learn to do it.

If I'm a new player, the important thing is whether I'm excited to play the next game. Doing well in my current game can definitely help with that, but it's far from the only factor.

Pick rate nerfed, maybe. Win rate buffed?