RiotMaxw3ll

Trying to make champ by champ changes is fairly unsustainable, which is why we use this balance buff method. The good news about Ashe is she only has two abilities that have CDs affected much by the nerf, and both are VERY powerful on ARAM. We could get more nuance if we needed it, but for now we're still doing the science on figuring out what these new mods will be like

It's very possible (not easy), but it could be done. My issue is that I don't think the damage caused by the item is the big problem so much as stacking AH and slowing the enemy team every 2 seconds is. Mandate just enables you to do something while being super annoying and get a bunch of AH cheaper.

We tried it falling at various angles but unless it restricted player movement in this way the terrain just wasn't changing up the game. Most of the movement on howling abyss is towards or away from the Nexuses (Nexii?). Falling in the middle or at an angle didn't really create cool vision plays you could make.

We tried plants for quite awhile but they ended up not helping the vision game too much for a couple reasons:

• Plants were an objective that could be contested by the winning team. The plant positions had to be very specific where you could use them and the enemy couldn't take them, and if Teemo was shrooming up an area
• Plants were single use. Your ally wasting the plant felt REAL bad, especially if you know where a trap is that you want to remove and then they blow the plant on nothing
• Revealing the traps didn't do a whole lot. you still had to get there and kill it, which was fairly hard. We tried versions where the trap was either perma-revealed or destroyed, but it just negated what made traps interesting gameplay elements.

My guess is that once these new changes settle, we'll look at addressing trap champs like teemo and shaco directly rather than systemically changing the whole mode for just these two.

We could, but I don't actually think it solves the problem. In all cases Ashe maxes W and just fills the lane with slowing projectiles that make approaching a gigantic pain. We could change mandate so it did zero damage and people will still just spam W and be unassailable by melee classes. Actually targeting how often she can cast W I think has a better chance of doing the trick of reducing her reliance on W as opposed to auto attacks.

Also I think you underestimate how many people want to do weird stuff on ARAM. It's... wild in there.

if we removed it straight up the characters are just unplayable (some assassins have like a 30~% win rate without them. We're going to scale back how much we use the damage without it being super painful if you get stuck on any character.

there are two different directions the towers fall. The direction is chosen randomly and it's the same for each team. Either "up-ish" towards the brush or "down-ish" When it falls upwards, it leaves a small gap where you can go through it (so there are two approaches, one covered by brush), and when it falls downward it closes off that part completely.

At least play it first.

We've found its the opposite, actually. When you push past the terrain you have less room to run away and position that limits your options. We've paired these changes with an update to death timers to account for it when the game starts going long.

There was contention around that, but we considered it. The balance buff changes give you the idea of how this character plays differently from their SR counterpart, but doesn't really give you a great idea of the power of the character in ARAM. Seraphine would have giga nerfs in champ select that makes it look like you're just never supposed to play seraphine, when in actuality she's still a (more than) reasonable pick in ARAM.

To more directly answer the question: We don't have any plans to do so right now, but we're always reassessing things like this.

Yep. Once we get some data on the AH nerf, we’ll try and give her some damage back

This is it exactly. We have a general idea of what win rate impact the damage mods have at this point but we have no data on any of the new ones. Once we get that data we’ll look for the best places to shave off power.

If you have to walk at the enemy, the narrower chokes can be a detriment to the pushing team, but simultaneously if the pokey champs push into you, it gives them less room to maneuver away from someone with a snowball gap closer. Hopefully you’ll be able to use them to make clever flash plays, but we’ll be monitoring what these changes do class by class

oooooooooo

That is a paraphrase of one of his VO lines for exactly that reason

K’Sante would want you to live your truth

I would love it if that were the case. He’s probably susceptible to getting poked out because he doesn’t have great ways of getting in without heavy telegraphing.

u/riot_llama would know more I think

His mana is alright. You definitely can’t waste your W, but unless you spam q AND e you probably aren’t running out.

His laning is strong. Not top class early game champ but can definitely fight you and trade effectively. With his ult, he can definitely turn around a 1v2 if the enemy doesn’t respect the angles of the knockback

This is actually a tough question, because his kit was locked way before the new jungle was designed. We ran some tests, but it was with the current items and things. I’m sure we ran more tests since but I’m not the person who would’ve done it.

It was in the back of our minds. His power curve requires him to be somewhat gold reliant to succeed, so his support isn’t likely to be his main role. It is possible that in certain matchups he’d be a reasonable support pick, but his kit is working against him there.