RiotAxes

The thing is some glass cannon champs need to be able to kill fast or they're useless

This was raised by several people as a response, so just to take a position on it: I completely agree.

Lux blasts you with Q-AA-E-R? Cool. Zed kills you with WRQE hitting double or triple Q? Cool. Zed on even gold kills you in one rotation with just his base kit? A lot less cool. Kha'Zix or Talon grabs bruiser items and burst kills an even gold ADC? Also a lot less cool.

There is definitely risk that burst champions get weaker, sustained combat champions (tanks, enchanters, ADCs, some mages, some fighters, etc) get stronger as the immediate aftermath of the changes - predicting the immediate balance in detail is basically impossible. With that in mind, a lot of the validation we've done has been aimed at making sure we have clear alignment on when burst kills are ok and also on what we'll do if certain classes are over- or underpowered. There'll b...

If I comment on this thread, does that take us full circle?

Not ready to discuss yet, sorry

We believe League of Legends is best when it is on average be fast-paced and exciting, but yeah I think it would be fair to say it has overcorrected towards damage, which is hitting away at clarity ("I can tell what just killed me" / "I can tell what I should have done differently") and skill expression ("That assassin/mage hit their whole kit, so they earned the kill").

We'll be talking about upcoming changes intended to slow the pace of combat down within the next few weeks.

A rework succeeds or fails based on how the champion's experience is.

I want to really reinforce this point. A rework's success or failure doesn't hinge on its day 1 balance. We'll be assessing the Swain update based on how it has landed with Swain players after we've had a chance to balance it, after the novelty has worn off, after players have had a chance to adjust. And the sorts of questions we'll be asking aren't "Does he have exactly the right win rate today?", they'll be things like "Is he engaging for Swain players when properly balanced?" and "Is it possible to balance this and keep it balanced across a wide range of skill levels?"

Right now the internal perception is I don't need further nerfs (big caveat we are still actively testing for balance on him, so that could change quite quickly), but the amount of armor shred on Q is very high on my list of things I'd nerf next if he does need more, for what it's worth.

Its abusive in a really low key way. We don't generally want to ghost champions in PvP situations when we can help it, or at least if we do, it's a lot of hidden/unappreciable power and we have to balance accordingly.

"Should feel better" is about as far as it goes. It's a bit of black magic stuff.

Is this feedback based on your PBE experience or based on live? I did tweak it actually.

I ask myself, why even publish articles like these? Where’s the accountability?

This just really stresses how important it is for us to get our new champion and VGU launches right. I don't believe we can make Ryze players happy - we're either going to have to seriously rework him, which will make some of them very sad (every update makes some players sad) or we're going to have to leave him quite weak for solo queue.

We're not infallible (I know you know this, but we know it too), we're going to mess a release up again, and the follow-up to one of those mistakes at some point is going to be that we have to strip out mechanics or 'dumb down' a champion. We have a principled belief that this should be a last resort, but we're going to need that last resort again sooner or later.

From the VFX artist - that approach is generally cool but won't play nice with his R. If we were redoing the champion more comprehensively as a VGU (which he still needs imo, but he's not going to be in the next few), we could probably find a better overall solution.

Passing this to the artists. Not sure whether they're going to change anything, but they'll see it.

So the goal for the mid scope champion updates as a whole is to serve players of that champion, which means we're going to be pretty hesitant to do things that make players of those champions sad (we will not always get it right - but that's what we're trying to do with them).

Like, we might be able to let Kalista have a 1.0 AD ratio on her basic attack again and have all her spells feel good, but if it means we have to make her dash windowed instead of a passive, is it worth it to Kalista players? If we have to delete Azir's dash entirely, is that worth it to Azir players?

There's certainly some simple cleanup we can do on Kalista and Azir and they both are candidates for mid scopes at some point, but it's going to be really hard to solve the things that make them 'problematic' with these tactics.

(And please don't ask me about Ryze...)

No news on Sivir, sorry.

100% intentional. A very long R is meant to be a rare, when-the-stars-align kind of situation.

We have specifically been testing to ensure that he has R casts that are shorter, similar, and longer than his live duration, and that decisions made by both Olaf and his opponents determine how it turns out.

The bet is that between a meaningfully slower early clear speed and an R reshape that is both worse at diving ADCs and worse at running away when caught out, he has room to be balanced around solo queue first rather than pro play first, and if he's being balanced around solo queue, we have room for large buffs.

But forecasting balance on updates like this is hard and it's fully possible he'll need followup balance, as with any update.

Just to speak to the tuning -

It's fully possible he's overtuned and if he is, he'll get nerfed (though its very unlikely we'd be able to discover this on PBE, where games are so wildly uneven). This update has enough change that it's just hard to forecast.

I will note that if we didn't have concerns about what he does in pro play, we would buff him substantially tomorrow. This iteration of the champion's clear speed is significantly slower than on Live (still fast, but much slower), which is a significant pro play impact, and while his R is way cooler scrapping in melee against other melee champions, he'll be both more kiteable when diving ADCs and less able to run away, both of which ought to be important for pro players.

The bet is that this frees us up for really significant buffs at every other skill level. That bet could fail - if it turns out he's still the priority pro jungler when tuned to reasonable winrates then we're in trouble...

Ah, that one's kind of subtle.

So, if I'm going to give you the possibility of infinitely being immune to crowd control, that is very likely to result in situations where the fight is a perfect stat check - able to be calculated in advance - for opponents who can't dash away to break contact. The min range change exists so that Olaf has to forecast his position a little bit in advance, essentially adding counterplay because when he throws Q, if you move away from the Q, he has to choose whether to pick it up or not, and that choice has real consequences to the outcome of the fight from that point on. (Incidentally, part of the reason for adding armor shred on Q is to ensure that picking up the axe really matters to whether he wins the fight or not - don't want him just ignoring it)

I realize it's going to feel bad, but if I reverted it I think I'd also have to cap the ult at 7 seconds or something like that :/

EDIT: This is mainly talking about mele...

The R change reduces his free access to diving targets (it can go infinite - but if you're being kited around, it won't). If he's not as guaranteed to be able to dive the back line successfully, he needs his alternate game plan to be better, which means the tools to not just auto-lose fights on the front line.