endstep

ah this is probably my fault, I'll take a look at it - should be fixable, no promises though

No problem! I enjoy being able to talk through thought processes and design decisions, so it's nice being able to pop in every now and then and answer questions.

Not that we tested for S14. However, I did make Mantle of the Twelfth Hour in Wild Rift as a Lifeline tank item before I left WR to come back to work on League. Based on my experience making that item in WR, I believe HoT effects usually serve the tank space better than shields for Lifeline items for a number of reasons, not least of which is that it gives tanks more power in prolonged engagements (again, similar to Jak'sho vs Stoneplate where core tank patterns are best supported by long-term power rather than concentrated momentary power - the shield is much more temporary than the heal).

I removed Stoneplate for several reasons:

1. Tanks only have space for one capstone item in a non-mythic system. Jak'sho has a much stronger theme and is much more in line with the tank fantasy (become more durable if you can survive for a while), so Jak'sho was chosen for this slot over Stoneplate.

2. Stoneplate's active in its most recent form was anti-burst, which is at odds with the general structure of tank builds, particularly with the changes for S14. We wanted to make tanks more durable across the board (which we did, by ~7% slower time to die in champ combat for tanks) which removed some need for anti-burst tools - if you're just tankier at a baseline, this naturally makes anti-burst tools less relevant and therefore less deserving of a spot in the shop.

3. Stoneplate's shape required it to be heavily teamfight bound (via the %resist scaling per enemy) in a way that was low-satisfaction and overly biased lategame tanks towards only...

It does. Shadowflame works like this:

1. Who is dealing the damage? It only checks damage dealt by the holder (this includes their pets and other things like items that are sourced back to the originating champion).

2. What type of damage is being dealt? It only proceeds if it's magic or true damage.

3. What percent health is the enemy at? If they are below the threshold, it crits, dealing the increased damage.

It has some other hidden rules, like not applying to summoner spells, but Liandry's damage would fall within these, since it deals magic damage and is being dealt by the Shadowflame holder.

All of that having been said, I would say Liandry's Shadowflame Yorick is a...bold choice.

Cryptbloom was designed as a Void Staff alternative. This led down a pretty linear path:

1. We don't want an item that does more damage than Void Staff, so it probably should have less pen and/or less AP.
2. We can give it other stats if we want to fill out the stat profile. Haste makes sense here since by the time I was working on Cryptbloom I knew that there was going to be slightly less haste in the rest of the system (no mythic passives, nerfed haste boots, no 30 haste items, etc.) and we were willing to accept AP champions getting some of that haste back with a damage tradeoff. But HP was also something I considered, though I never actually tested that version.
3. In keeping with #1, we want an effect that doesn't provide any damage, because we don't want this to compete with Void in terms of raw damage output. It also probably shouldn't be pure stats since that's what Void is, so it wants some kind of unique effect. Given the above reasoning, it shoul...

np

This is completely unrelated to tethers, and is attached to another bugfix in this patch.

I used the same underlying piece of tech but not the same code. Aatrox's W uses a specialized setup to account for the abnormal shape (and also attaching the tether to a point rather than a unit), whereas every other tether is effectively a circle attached to a champion, so I wrote a new script for the other tethers that's a lot simpler since it can assume a lot of things (e.g. it's always two units being attached and the area is a circle).

Thanks very much!

This is unrelated to Soraka E, as Soraka E is not a tether. This change only addresses tethers.

I can take a look at Soraka E but no promises, as I believe the issue with that is a very different one than the tethers (to my knowledge, both are tickrate related but in a quite different way).

It's possible, I recall when we were working on them there was discussion around things like this. I'm not up to date on whether there's still followup happening or not though, that would be on the Live pod which is more Phreak's area.

I believe Varus R uses a different system but I'll take a look at it later today and see if it could be improved

good summary, thanks

Zac Q tether range change is part of a larger set of tether changes, it's now an edge check rather than center check. This PBE deploy has a bug where the initial check on Zac Q is still center rather than edge but that will hopefully be fixed in the next deploy. (Also the tether changes are only partially on PBE, and subject to further changes).

edited for clarity

BasicAttack exclusion on Malignance comes from original testing without it where a number of cases were technically correct, but violated expectations. For example, should formswapper attacks in their alternate forms create Malignance pools? What about if they have damage attached to their ultimate swapping like Jayce R? Without the BasicAttack exclusion it's hard to intuit why Jayce R > AA can trigger Malignance but Elise can't trigger Malignance at all (or even decide whether Spiderlings should have the ultimate tag or not). The current version is the set of rules that generally aligned with people's expectations (though I agree there are some cases in the current ruleset that aren't the most intuitive - at some point I might revisit and see if there's not a better ruleset out there that matches player expectations closer than this one).

If it were designed to exclude pet attacks that's a whole separate tag that, as mentioned, could easily be excluded (and there's no int...

Malignance's damage was originally not tagged properly (didn't have the "proc" tag) which is what caused it to count for Eclipse. The tag is fixed in this patch, meaning anything that disregards proc damage will no longer register Malignance damage as a contributor.

It does, but as with all crit damage modifiers on Shadowflame, it only applies to the bonus damage from the crit, not the original damage.

So if you deal 100 magic damage and it's amped 20% by Shadowflame to 120, Randuin's doesn't decrease the entire 120 magic damage, just the 20 bonus being added by Shadowflame. In this case Randuin's would reduce the damage to 114.

This is a bug we're aware of, it is purely visual however - the gameplay works, but the visuals on the healthbar don't always properly represent the status of the shield. We'll hopefully have a solution for this soon regardless.