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To be clear, this is very much NOT the plan
I think you might be having too much fun today. What can I do to make you sadder?
To be clear, this is very much NOT the plan
I think you might be having too much fun today. What can I do to make you sadder?
/u/RiotAxes Boss ASU’s are great, but my biggest fear with them is the possibility of reducing skill expression. Now after hearing Lee is getting one, this raises my worry. Caitlyn for example had some bugs that were “fixed”. But that resulted in mechanics to be removed, mechanics that overtime became innate to the champion even though they originated from bugs.
Please tell me this won’t happen with Lee who is an EXTREMELY skill expressive champion
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.
So it’s all part of Riot’s plan to justify future Ryze’s nerfs
Oh sh*t they're onto us
Meddler wanted it but one pricing meme was enough ;)
We need to talk...
Read moreWhether mid lane mages are supposed to specifically start with very low base armor, iirc this is a carryover from old rune page preferences (same reason tanky supports have particularly high starting armor, as players ran both defensive seals and quints on those specifically).
Low armor makes these champions weaker in lane/early game against physical damage sources (lane minions, jungle monsters, AD bruiser and assassin champions). Thus there may be unexplored space here as I see many mage players complain about laning against assassin and bruisers in mid lane (despite ultimately not having a bad winrate in those games), as well as mage players perhaps wanting to explore jungling.
Or I could be completely wrong here and changing their early physical durability would lead to completely different design space problems (mages dominating top lane leaving bruisers stranded, AD assassins having to have their power curves massivel...
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...
Read moreRead moreA bit about skill floor and skill ceiling.
Lucian's maximum potential is completely ridiculous, but you don't need to do any of that to see some basic success with him, especially if you are playing with an engage support instead of an enchanter.
All you really need to know is: Engage happened? -> (W+)E forward, AA, Q, AA, continue to walk forward and autoattack. That is enough for not just Iron and Bronze, but also the median player.
And teamfights or more generally post-laning phase isn't that much harder - sure you have a shorter range than a lot of ADCs, but you get a lot of additional mobility and the ability to deal damage while moving (Culling), so you will be fine if you just play him as you would any other ADC. Of course you aren't going to get the Galeforce forward into Culling chunks that Lucian is supposed to do at high level play, but you don't need that.
Now compare that with Yorick: Sure, you can just waddle up to people and bonk them ...
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.
OH NO RYZE IS NERFED
Pick rate nerfed, maybe. Win rate buffed?
She starts at 19 like a bunch of scaling mages mid lane, so their armor growth is rather high to catch up. List: https://leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_champions/Armor
I wonder if that's actually 'right' from a design perspective anymore, in particular with the dynamics seen in mid lane, maybe u/PhreakRiot can shed some thoughts on why yes or no?
I wonder if that's actually 'right' from a design perspective anymore
What specifically do you have in mind there?
Beaten by a little girl.
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.
Read more"we're definitely not going to kill mage supports off"
Why not? Literally what's healthy about them, except for being a last minute pick when everyone else on your team goes full AD against a Rammus? They get to absolutely annihilate the enemy adc without ever worrying about resources and CS (thanks spellthiefs!), because their kit wasn't ever intended to be in bot lane anyway 🤷♂️
Since the durability patch, they have been so much harder to deal with as a tank support. I can all in with Leona on a Lux (if that Lux player is too stupid to zone from half a screen away) and the Lux will most likely survive the engage anyway. And that's funny, considering Leona is the only tank support still somewhat viable versus mages, Braum/Naut/Rell will get popped immediately by a mage all in cause their sustain just isn't good enough.
Mage supports were never healthy to begin with, but they couldn't break the game cause they were squishy. Now that you've removed their o...
Brand is a nearly 10-year support pick at this point. There's an audience that we're going to be respectful of.
Is there any new info about fixing top lane satisfaction? Feels like we were the only lane not touched on here haha (despair)
Other than very excited to hear that you're continuing QGT, always liked reading them.
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.
Many of them have moved to Support instead, but when we poll players on champion frustration, Mage supports are reported as among the most frustrating champions to play against in the entire game.
Surely it couldn’t be because Spellthief’s removes any need for mana management while also being the easiest support item to proc and evolve? Surely.
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.
Read moreI'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.
There’s been some question of making power farming more worthwhile in order to reduce how often junglers gank—we’re potentially taking a small stab there
I think this is cool, but I wanna know the thoughts behind how this is happening.
How does the balance team go from "gank junglers are too powerful" to "we should nerf treat gold and increase xp per camp?"
- How did the team decide gank junglers are too powerful?
- In what ways are they too powerful?
- Why did they choose the "treat gold" and "camp xp" levers, and not something else?
- What do they plan to try next if this doesn't work?
/u/RiotAxes I'm always grateful when y'all take the time to wr...
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.
Sadly I don't think you can say that about most of the balance team at this point.
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 can assure you people would have been freaking out and saying Riot's got no clue what they're doing with last patch ADC changes if we didn't get Phreak's video beforehand.
People need to stop talking about the Balance team as a faceless, abstract entity; They're a group of people with probably the same enthusiasm and knowledge as Phreak, they just don't interact with players and I can't blame them seeing how the playerbase treats 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.
can we not think of pantheon as a support?
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.
Is 18 months of unacceptable state of play not an excessive amount of time to give before doing what is being done in this patch? It's not like the pick has not been top priority the last 2 years+
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.
I can't remember if it was pre-rework poppy or karma, but I remember some champion having a 38% win rate. Yuumi could make a run for the record.
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.
So if this still doesn't bring her out of pro play she is going to be looking at more nerfs?
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.
Holy shit they f**king murdered Yuumi
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...
Read more"Behind me lies a farm. I wonder if there is bread upon the hearth, and if I will ever return"-Pantheon
My absolute favorite quote in all of league
I'm so grateful for the writers on that project.