RiotAxes

Pick rate nerfed, maybe. Win rate buffed?

I wonder if that's actually 'right' from a design perspective anymore

What specifically do you have in mind there?

Just raising visibility - there was a bug with autoattacks that was depressing many champion winrates by very large amounts (3-4% in some cases) that was introduced with the patch. We fixed it last night, and Annie's winrate is now falling considerably. As a result, I don't believe stat websites are going to paint the correct picture of Annie's power level for this patch.

She's still overtuned and may be hotfixed - just noting that she's not a 59% win rate champion.

Brand is a nearly 10-year support pick at this point. There's an audience that we're going to be respectful of.

The bet was that ensuring that the winning top laner could scale throughout the game would move the needle on agency and satisfaction; in practice we needed to push items further than we sustainably could in order to succeed that way. We need new tactics as a result.

I will note that resolving the bot lane 3v3 slingshot is likely to help here. Hard to have influence on games that get that snowballed that fast in a fight you can't participate in. But that's not going to be resolved instantly.

I don't see evidence that the trend is that recent. Suspect it's more that having to dodge a pillar of flame every time you step up to CS is infuriating when the Brand doesn't have to position around his own last hitting needs, and that flipping a defensive/long-fight oriented champion (tank or enchanter) to a burst character completely changes the shape of the game.

We're definitely not going to kill mage supports off, but it's a clear warning sign to be a lot more careful allowing mages to migrate there, and its one of the reasons getting mages more comfortable in mid lane is important.

I've always liked the Quick Gameplay Thoughts series, because I like getting in-depth thoughts on why game balance/design choices were made. I kind of thought this article was lacking.

The plan is to go more in-depth in some of these articles - this one was a bit of a reintroduction to the space, so I went for a survey of what we're currently thinking about instead of going deep on one of them.

For all we know most of the balance team could be like Phreak. The only real difference is that we're getting videos with his reasoning for the changes.

I want to really emphasize this point. The balance team IS staffed with those people. Not all of them want to be front-and-center talking to players. And Phreak brings 10 years of on-air experience talking to an audience about League of Legends, which makes him uniquely effective at communicating changes.

He's doing great work and I don't mean to imply otherwise - but the narrative of him fighting (or revolutionizing) the balance team is simply false.

Pantheon will not be balanced as a support-first champion. He's a long way away from that right now, though, and his support audience is real.

Yes, it's much too long. We were too slow to act on her. We've attempted to deal with it through our normal balance strategy, and she demands a different approach.

Ryze, Kalista, Azir, Akali have all been around that low at one point or another. Olaf and Evelynn were put at least that low for extended periods of time while being reworked.

It's a clear sign that something isn't working, but it's not unprecedented.

If she's still an OP pro pick then yes, we'd nerf her again. I don't think that's going to happen, but it's certainly not impossible.

I want to talk about what we're doing with Yuumi real quick. Couple things right up front:

First: She's significantly overpowered right now in pro play. We do nerf low win rate champions who are overpowered in pro play; usually the thing that eventually lets them off the hook is a successful rework of some scope. We're already working on that.

Second: Our approach to Yuumi over the last 18 months or so hasn't been effective. She's increasingly more of a pro problem over time, with a lower win rate for average players than ever, and players are letting know that she's not in an acceptable state. We agree.

This patch, we're nerfing her with the goal of getting her out of pro play if possible. She's going to be in a rough state for solo queue in the meantime. When it's ready, we'll be shipping an update with the goal of bringing her winrate back up without bringing her back into pro play. At the same time, we'll be aiming to make her more supportive of specific...

I'm so grateful for the writers on that project.

Certainly for at least some of them, but not necessarily with the same implications for game balance. Bot carry very likely has a related pattern with the set of mages who tend to counter ADCs, for example, since nearly every matchup is vs an ADC.

Using Pantheon as an example, his mid lane win rate appears to (and there are LARGE caveats on this analysis, so I emphasize "appears to") be inflated because he is both sharp in terms of who he counters and is countered by AND because the things he sharply counters are so much more popular than the things he is countered by. If every champion was exactly equally popular, his average win rate would very likely fall quite a bit in that position even with no gameplay changes.

(The inverse pattern is found on Akshan - his mid lane win rate is depressed by the fact that Yasuo is very strong counter to him, which gives him the appearance of being better top lane sometimes)

I did some digging on this right before the holidays. Zed, Yasuo, Katarina, Yone, Sylas, Akali are all top tier popularity champions in mid lane and there've been patches where at least one of them is in something like 30-40% of all games as a mid (it varies - but not as much by win rate as you might think, the patches where these go down tend to be when there's a new mage midscope, or Viktor got a huge and permanent playrate spike from Arcane, that sort of thing, not necessarily the patches where they're relatively weaker or stronger).

The thing that makes this hard is that they all have weaknesses to a specific profile - durable stat checkers with a reliable CC. It's pretty hard to get reliable data on true toplane bruisers midlane because they're so unpopular there, but aggregating the data from patches 12.17 through 12.21, we were able to get a decent dataset on Renekton, Riven, and Sett. I looked at Pantheon as well because even though he's played mid lane, he fits the...

Isn't that simply because it's the only good/reliable GW item?

I think that's a contributing factor but not the main one. Gold is extremely multiplicative in League of Legends. If you know you need a given team utility effect that isn't going to multiply out the rest of your fantasy, its an optimization for teams to put that option on the already low econ player. We've seen that in the past with the aura Aegis of the Legion being assigned to either supports or junglers years ago (depending on the meta).

The answer here about being a solved solution is also relevant, though those things will move over time based on changes. We've found players are really slow to respond to patches when we're talking about adjusting behavior over weeks, but actually pretty effective at responding to a new meta over a period of months, to my totally-not-scientifically-accurate understanding.

Don't expect to resolve the Enchanter item particular pain p...

To (1) - they're very different spaces, don't think decisions on one necessarily tell us what the optimal decision on the other is.

For a bruiser, assuming we're going to tune them to about the same spot (...somewhat lower than how they're doing today, but not that much lower), if they have less repeatable output, we either have to make them even more durable, or make them burst harder, or sustain harder or find something else for them to be good at. Think repeatable outputs are closer to the fantasy and closer to being fair than the alternatives. I realize some folks are going to disagree.

For many mages, I think we get a different answer as to what the right tradeoffs are. But mages are such a diverse group that I suspect we just need to better support the differences within the class. AD being cheaper than AP is weird... it's not intrinsically a problem (we tune ratios around the items that exist, if we added a lot more AP you'd probably see your ratios go down t...

We're not massively reworking the Grievous Wounds mechanic. Frankly, it has flaws, but the alternatives also have flaws (including "just delete it").

The direction will be something much closer to the pre-Items Update system - components with 40% grievous wounds so that you can access a counter when you need it, growing into stat sticks that make more sense within builds, but not specifically upgrading the GW amount. For example, Mortal Reminder will once again trade off against Lord Dominik's Regards - will have armor penetration and grievous (vs armor pen and giant slayer). I'm aware that this won't fully solve the issue - we're looking at healing soon as well.

That is the current plan, yes.