RiotAxes

From our playtesting, he's less bad late game, but still not very good (even for a Juggernaut) - contrast his teamfight power to Sett, Darius, or Illaoi, for example.

Right now I don't think we have a strong stance about it. We aren't trying to homogenize it, but we aren't resisting it too strongly - it's more about what is right for a particular champion. If we go very far towards homogenization, then we'd need to deal with that, but we still do shotcall things like a very extreme late game curve for Gwen, and some of our other midscopes in flight aren't moderating scaling curves like this one is.

The Olaf mid scope update is coming to PBE today with an intended ship date of patch 12.9 (not 12.8). Putting him up early for feedback, so he should be on PBE for about a week, and then he’ll disappear as we prep patch 12.8. He’ll return to PBE when we kick off the 12.9 cycle.

Before getting into the actual changes, let’s talk goals. One common response to the initial announcement was confusion as to why he’d be next up on the list for an update.

Olaf has a number of urgent issues we’re looking to address. First, he is (and has consistently been) the least deeply played champion in League—on average, that is (Olaf one tricks don’t @ me.) If Olaf is a champion you play, he probably makes up the lowest percent of your games played, and has consistently been among the lowest for many years now. Second, he’s a deeply pro-bound champion: his win rate is kept lower than would otherwise be ideal because he tends to take over pro play when his kit is tuned to win games in...

QSS is for situations where a CC spell makes you stop dealing damage. Renata ult does not make you stop dealing damage. Simple enough, right?

...and does your answer change if the ADC has a QSS and you know he isn't going to use it?

He has axes

Idk, I am honestly more interested in what they do with Olaf because it seems harder to add depth into his kit without fundamentally changing it.

It was an interesting challenge for sure.

It’ll happen to you.

Can confirm

Just want to be clear - the "Apply a global 20% damage modifier" version of that work was never going to ship. It was a useful, informative playtest that uncovered two major findings: (1) that we believe there's a better version of the game where we have reduced overall damage outcomes, and (2) here are some of the places we need to account for when we look for a shippable implementation.

The list of findings I posted was not a list of fatal objections or reasons why we would never do this; it was a list of the kinds of challenges we need to be ready to overcome while doing it.

We are currently at the step of actually doing that nuanced work - finding the good version, getting it ready to ship, and making sure we are ready to account for the impact of it.

We are actively working on finding the good, nuanced version of reducing overall damage in the game.

We are hoping to ship during the season if possible. There's not a good update I can give right now other than we're working on it, we're hoping to ship it when it's ready, and we're willing to ship it during the season instead of having to wait til preseason if we're able to land it, aside from specific launch windows like playoffs/MSI or the leadup to Worlds.

We're fielding a survey. It'll be a bit before we get results. The reddit and English-speaking social media backlash is clear, but that hasn't always meant players overall disliked a feature in the past.

(This does NOT mean that Reddit feedback is worthless, just that y'all are a subset of players and we want good data)

Don't worry I'll take care of it

ಠ_ಠ

I'm sold

It is intentional and we intend to keep it like this. Our bad on messaging.

We have recently playtested with all damage from champions to champions reduced by 20%, and all healing and shielding reduced by 20%. Some findings:

• Late game fights and especially teamfight become more legible and engaging, with better structure.
• Tanks become very overpowered.
• Healing becomes much more powerful - even at -20% healing, each point of healing is much more valuable than on the live game.
• Burst mages (especially ones dependent on a single rotation - Lux is a prime example here) quickly become borderline useless and it isn't clear how to buff them without undoing the reduction in damage output.
• AD assassins migrate to pure glass cannon builds to remain above burst thresholds - ironically, if AD assassins are common in the meta, the game could feel even burstier as a result. I don't think we got any clear read on AP assassins.
• Lane phase yields mixed results; there are more lanes where nothing ever happens, but ...

We pushed it back a patch to allow us to respond to feedback. I don't believe we've made final calls on what mechanics, if any, will change as a result, though.

This is honestly the hardest thing about working on League - nobody is actually a League player, they're Kindred-Shyvana players and Kled-Pantheon players and Yasuo-Yone-Zed players and Tristana-Draven-Samira players, whatever their position preference and champion choice is.

This is a strength of the game and a big reason it has so much wide appeal, but it means that for any given player, they're running into unfair-feeling games routinely and then seeing Riot not do anything about, and it means we're always balancing one player's needs against another's. There are very few unequivocal wins for us to take and most decisions we make hurt the game for someone.

Just to be clear about what the actual boogeyman is: the state we want to avoid is games where the actions you take in the gameplay (both moment-to-moment and at a broader strategy level) don't really matter.

This can happen when burst damage is so high that the correct play becomes staying far away from enemy champions for extended periods of time, and that's why we're investigating it right now.

But it most easily happens when defense outpaces damage - hitting individual skills matters less to the outcome of a fight, so fights become more stat-check-y; because fights become more of a stat check, it's easier to know that you shouldn't fight for very extended periods of time; it's much easier to start a comeback by picking and killing a fed glass cannon who is running over a game than a fed tank or juggernaut in a tank meta.

I'm aware that I don't have to reassure this subreddit on this topic, but yes, it really is going to be a controversial topic with the larger playerbase.

I don't think Riot should change champions exclusively to make them more popular.

I agree with this statement. It's hard to get much nuance into a blog post with this many topics.

In the case of Ahri and Janna, we're working on them because we believe that players who they have previously resonated with aren't enjoying them as much anymore. The goal is make them feel fun and well-supported. We do expect that if we succeed with this work, they'll be more popular, but that's a secondary effect.

I do want to be careful talking about concepts like who champions ought to resonate with - there are a lot of confounding factors and in Janna's case survivor bias is a real concern - she has lost approximately 50% of her pick rate since we pushed her lane phase so hard towards repeatable point-and-click harass, which implies that a lot of people who previously enjoyed Janna were hurt by those changes, but certainly some (most?) of her current...