RiotAxes

(1) Think this is hyperbolic for most tanks vs bruisers, except the big sustain bruisers (more in point 2).

(2) Not in a good spot, too much healing in the game. Currently working on grievous wounds items and likely to also take a swing at healing values.

(3) Yes but the problem is difficult and the game isn't necessarily terrible when champions cast a lot of spells, so it's a bit further down the priorities list.

(4) Highly successful, still a major factor that we actively consider for patch changes. It's going to fluctuate. More damage was added in 12.23 than removed. More damage is being removed in this micropatch than added.

We're micropatch nerfing it while working to get it back to a similar balance state for tanks (considering tactics like making it stack percent bonus resists instead of flat resists, for example).

We have few tools to reshape an item in a micropatch since it can't change any client data, including the text of tooltips, unfortunately.

It's there because it's an important piece of the Fighter item space. It's not an accident.

Black Cleaver, various champion spells

Riot has never said they nerfed legendary items

Just to be clear, this does represent a shift in our approach to Mythic items. (I don't remember offhand everything we've ever said about them, but internally it's a thing we've been changing recently)

Something like that. They’ve always been extremely popular, but 4 or 5 years ago we felt we finally had a good handle on how to best serve that audience, and it had been significantly underserved for a while.

That said, this year ended up unusually dense on them for some scheduling shenanigans reasons and we’re looking to cool it off a bit - I don’t believe there’s one on the schedule next year, and if one is added onto the schedule next year it’d be because we had a VGU that made sense opportunistically (say, Trynd or Jax), not a new champion. I don’t think there’s currently one on the schedule for 2024 either but schedules are extremely fluid that far in advance so very much subject to change.

For the record, Zoe is absolutely as much an artillery mage as Sett is a juggernaut or Lillia is a skirmisher… which is to say not a pure one but definitely in the category.

It's intended to be a nerf from 5% to 4%, not 5% to 3%.

The target here is nerfing heals from around 10% at level 1 to around 25% at endgame; not all champion spells have the tools for us to nail that perfectly. She definitely should not be nerfed 40%. (We used a different target for shields, as heals are also accounting for Grievous changes)

We started exploring them around when preseason shipped. This was the earliest patch we'd have been able to ship them since we started that investigation. They were never at any point intended for last preseason.

This is an absolute bloodbath of nerfs to compensate on the advantages champions get that prioritize on shielding and healing after the whole champion durability buffs.

I want to really emphasize the bolded part here. If we don't act on healing and shielding, their relative power levels go up quite significantly and champions with them end up much more powerful relative to champions without them, so we've applied an across the board (with only a small handful of exceptions) approximate nerf on all of them. We additionally elected to go slightly further on healing in order to allow us to nerf grievous wounds, which we feel has been tuned inappropriately too high for a while now (but which requires something like this amount of retuning when we nerf it, so has been difficult to get traction on).

Some nerfs are clear placebos however

These numbers changes are not intended to get you...

We made the joke some years ago (talked about it, did not ship anything). I promise it's not an amusing mode though - it's funny to read, but the novelty lasts much less than the duration of a single playthrough. It's miserable enough that I'd hate to see it even as an april fool's joke. Or at very least we'd need to allow players to disconnect without penalties or something.

I won't rest until we've turned Summoner's Rift into NURF mode.

Mixed signals. If I had to guess I'd expect them mostly to be similar or weaker, but very low confidence.

Basically they're worse at one-shotting you themselves, but most of them have a long range CC spell optimized for generating picks and picking an enemy when you have teammates around is still lethal; increased champion durability potentially gives them more chances to generate that pick.

The uncertainty is why we're not attempting any pre-balancing here.

what does balance team think about the idea of balancing AD assassins through lethality scalings?

Open to it, haven't felt we needed it very often. Could be a useful tool if necessary after these changes if we're seeking new balance approaches.

Imprecisely. We'll be using the best data we can get access to as well as our judgment but the reality is this game is too complicated to get perfect confidence in stuff like this, and some situations are going to look extreme enough that we feel we need to act when in retrospect it'll turn out we didn't have to, or even did the wrong thing.

For example, you mention a learning curve for assassins around their burst thresholds; there's also going to be a learning curve for ADCs around the appropriate safe distance for them to position at, and there'll be teams that lose games because their ADCs played too safe while the opponent's ADC judged it better. Will this be a larger effect than Assassin learning? It's hard to measure and we won't have perfect context.

It is going to take time for balance to settle back down - there's no way around it.

One of the things we did that isn't part of the patch is we spent time aligning on what good looks like for various classes.

For Assassins specifically - I think it is very likely they will be less powerful and we need to buff them (though that'll be followup, not pre-buffs).

In general, we are comfortable with burst characters killing their targets very quickly - the problem we're solving right now is that many of them can do it while building bruiser items and getting too durable, or without needing to pass any key skill tests, and sometimes even without having to commit their full kit (we don't want Zed killing an ADC with just QWE+AA when they're on even gold), and that too many characters who have other strengths are also able to one-round a squishy champion without giving anything up.

If we need to buff Assassins just by win rate, we'd first check to make sure they can secure kills on squishy targets when they're building burst damage items (l...

We are pretty close to 100% certain we will need to quickly nerf or buff a variety of champions, but there's a lot of uncertainty about exactly which champions and by how much. As a result we're already planning a 12.10b micropatch to address the most immediate balance outliers.

This was a miscommunication. Baron and Turrets would do less damage if we didn't act. The patch will increase their damage dealt in order to keep their damage relevant.

I thought the experiments Riot was doing with SUPER low damage numbers

They told us that there was very likely a better version of the game worth pursuing, gave us an idea of what the specific values we're after were, and illuminated some of the areas we'd need to pay attention to in a real implementation. It was a very useful exercise.

We're likely targeting champion base durability, plus a variety of systems that we know will need adjustment.

We're not doing much direct champion pre-balance, but a lot of the work we've put in over the last few months has been aimed at understanding our balance levers so that we'll be able to react to what we see. I do expect some rougher balance for a bit after changes go live though.

There's a lot to unpack about mage supports but they're not a primary focus right now - if nothing else, Brand and Zyra topping team damage charts has been happening for a very long time and is really the only thing they bring to the table as supports, so it's not the cause for any recent damage creep.

Allowing players to pick damage oriented supports and get enough gold to really scale with them was a major part of the changes that ultimately solved support autofill problems and we'd be hesitant to go back on those; we'd prefer to tune durability around the reality that many teams swap a defensive character (support or tank) for a damage dealing one and balance the two approaches against each other.