RiotXenogenic

We were primarily looking to make sure that the ult wasn't a guaranteed long-duration banish. Without the ability to cleanse it, it makes the Morde player's choice around who to ult a lot less interesting. You basically would just build tanky and R the highest threat target and put them into a long time-out while your teams teamfight.

With the ability to get out of it, it motivates the Morde player to build offense so they are more than just a tanky CC bot, and to think more about who to ult, and why, and when.

I've been a League player since early alpha, and there was a decent stretch many years ago where I mostly played Morde. So, my biggest fear in doing this VGU (and I have this fear every VGU) was utterly ruining the champion for people who liked the old one. When I did Nunu, as an example, he had a couple of really iconic, good abilities (even by today's standards) so in a way, it made the rework a bit less stressful because from the beginning, I already knew what his Q and R were going to be. With Morde, he lacked anything that stood out as an iconic, great ability by today's standards, so we felt compelled to start from scratch on his kit - yet while trying to stay true to his essence/fantasy.

That's pretty stressful for me. You have to make a lot of assumptions, and even though we talked to Morde players, put in a lot of reps on live Morde to make sure we were feeling fresh on his current kit, there's always that risk of getting it totally wrong.

It's intentional that he's relatively straightforward to play, so at least in the short term, it's unlikely we would add complexity to his kit to address balance concerns.

That straightforwardness might mean he's not particularly viable in high level play, but that's alright. Not every champ needs to be. I personally would argue not every champ should be. What pros need out of a champion is often very different than what a typical player wants out of a champion, and with how big our champion roster is, we should try to have options for everybody.

Edit: That said, he might get picked in pro-play - and that would be awesome! I'd be incredibly thrilled. Just stating that "pro viable" wasn't one of our high level goals.

The initial version of the death realm featured that. Turrets stayed in the "real" world and couldn't target you. It was way too powerful, though, and it meant that a Mordekaiser that was ahead was virtually guaranteed to stay ahead because their lane opponent couldn't even use their turret as defense

A few I can still remember (it's been a while!):

Passives:
-Every kill/assist enslaves the enemy's ghost, forcing them to serve Mordekaiser for a duration and assist him in attacking his target. He could have up to all 5
-His basic attack speed was exceptionally slow, but auto-attacking enemies would grant a stack that significantly increased his attack speed. The metaphor here was his mace was a living weapon, and that attacking enemies allowed it to create an ethereal chain and become more of a flail than just a mace, thereby giving him that attack speed and additional range

Q:
-Early testing was done around what it might be like to have contextual changes to his Q shape. We messed around with things like: when you press Q, he starts marching forward in a straight line, then when you re-press Q, the location of your mouse relative to his facing would give a different swing. Something like:

Forward - if the mouse is in front of him, he ...

Certainly. We conjured up the idea of him going to the death realm with his ult very early in development, and in the early stages, the ghost was virtually a "must have." So that output lived in a number of places while we iterated and tested. Sometimes, we'd have a version where if you killed someone in the death realm, you got their ghost. And that ghost output went from being a fully controllable pet to being something that followed you and just auto-attacked to something that would just be there visually giving you stats (similar to what we have now, minus the visuals).

The coolest/craziest version we tried was a passive version where any time he killed an enemy champion, their ghost would fall in line behind him and attack his target when he attacked - and he could have more than one, meaning he could ultimately enslave the entire enemy team if he was popping off.

That was really cool thematically but had a couple of major issues, the two foremost o...

Almost certainly less. It's actually incredible how many bugs the old Morde had. I was told at one point he was responsible for 80% of our live bugs, and I don't think they were exaggerating.

So as long as this one is 79% of our live bugs or less, I will consider it a success on the bug-squashing front.

That's always tough for me. I've been a gamer my whole life, and I know how much it sucks when something you like is changed, nerfed, etc.

It's a difficult balance between trying not to ruin something that people love, but also trying to create something new that even more people will love for years to come. I try to be extremely respectful of what/who the champion was and why people loved them when I do a rework. Of course, you will never please everybody. I feel the best I can do is try to really understand why people loved the old champion and look for ways to bring that essence forward, even if specific abilities change.

Nope

I always saw your posts, and when I picked up Mordekaiser as my project, I thought of you and looked forward to the day we could finally answer "when."

...then I forgot to follow-up when we announced, but I'm glad your time has finally come. I hope you enjoy it :)

j/k I love cats and I love Yuumi

Good, if you ask me. }:)

All 4 will be in the same death realm

Yuumi detaches

Morde takes them to the death realm but they're still bound by her ult. }:)

There was a time during development where we were using my prototype version instead of Real Tech™ and if you killed someone in the death realm, they'd crash to desktop.

I said that is how it should work, but no one else agreed with me.

Haha, that's hilarious. I hadn't ever seen that post, so this poster was just way ahead of the game and/or clairvoyant.

This was a bug and should have been fixed. Can you verify for me that your borders are working now?

Sorry for the delay in responding. This IS a bug and we found the issue and a fix was created. The bug is related to the repeatable "Fight for your house" mission and tracking its completion towards the house rewards.

The fix won't deploy until Tuesday when other things deploy, so you may continue to experience this bug over the weekend and we apologize for that.

However, you will NOT lose your progress, it may just show up incorrectly and may delay rewarding you the finishers/spawn ceremonies, so again, sorry about that. Everything should resolve after the fix deploys Tuesday and after you relog.

In a lot of aspects, this is the biggest event we've ever done. There are so many people involved and so many moving parts. And like every event, we will do a post-event retro where we talk about what went well and what didn't so we can continue learning and getting better and better at making and delivering these experiences.

I will be sharing all of the pain-points I've witnessed amongst players, such as not having more of the information earlier, so I appreciate all the feedback! It directly helps us improve