endstep

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I'd be happy to make more videos if people are interested (probably shorter ones though), but I found myself in a weird spot on the Seasonal pod where we don't ship content very often so I don't have frequent content drops to talk to players about in the same way that the Live pod does (e.g. Phreak) or like I did when I was on Wild Rift, so I'm not sure what kind of topics/discussion/thoughts people would want to hear. Besides talking about new patches, are there topics people have in mind?

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This statline isn't real - please disregard. The actual statline is pure AP + armor.

behold my masterpiece

The meeting where we made the calls on which concepts we would present for voting was pretty tame, but there have since been some heated debates around what exactly the Eerie Invitation is inviting you to and what yordle bagpipes sound like

Mandatory pro changes are part of the balance framework (I think this is the most recent dev blog about it, but it's a few years old and I don't work on the Live pod so it's possible there's a more recent post or a more recent version). There are other scenarios where champions are changed for pro purposes (e.g. the framework doesn't suggest champions to buff for pro, only champs to nerf), but the must-nerfs come from there.

Using K'Sante as an example case, looking at top 5 regions, on 13.12 he was nerfed and fell to 70% presence (from 80% on the previous patch). 13.13 saw him drop again to 56% presence, and limite...

This is not true in any real sense - I imagine this line of thinking probably originates from people talking about Elementalist Lux requiring the loading of a large number of different models (which is true), but from a gameplay perspective things like different skins, a champion in different modes, etc., are all the same, as it should be. There are of course some minor exceptions (e.g. in the past there was a logic fork for Zz'rot that would modify its functionality if the gamemode was Urf to prevent people from spamming infinite portals and pushing), but for the case that's being discussed here it's simply not true - if you want to modify, say, a champion's base damage on a spell, that's literally just changing a number in one file. All the tooltips will pull from that value, and you change it in one place and you're good to go (there are exceptions of course, some calculations are hard to show for tooltips for example so in some cases it will be two values you need to change, bu...

Magic reference, to the End Step, the last part of a turn. I haven't really been much into Magic in years though.

holy sh*t is that NIBIRIA I am a HUGE fan

oatmeal raisin perma F tier

hell yeah

np

I am also a pretty big AP Voli fan - enough of a fan to play it for ~75 games straight at one point and have a silly montage made of some plays.

Lutzberg (the designer on the Voli rework) did explore a lot of different ways to scale AP Voli and different avenues to let AP provide power, and the one part of those that ended up shipping was the AP ratio on the passive AS. However, from my recollections of conversations back then (which may not be perfect) as well as my own thoughts here, anything that "cheats" P stacks to max or even grants easier access to max stacks comes at a cost to the power of P, particularly for AP builds. There are very few spells that scale multiplicatively with a single stat, but Voli P scales both the damage and AS with AP, and since AS sc...

This was something Voli had in early testing. It's been a while so I may not be remembering everything perfectly, but I believe what we found back then was that letting R stack P meant that the max-stack P payout had to be lower than we wanted and R's damage also had to be meaningfully lower, so we made the choice to unbind P max stack payout from R even though it was a cool fantasy win to grant full stacks on R.

I don't work on PC League anymore so I couldn't tell you the current thinking there but I suspect the same concerns would probably exist for this mechanic today. The bigger concern is around the P max payout, where it should be a really powerful and satisfying moment, and if you can "cheat" your way there instantly with R then there's much less gating on it and necessarily it can't carry as much power or satisfaction.

You do not. But maybe one day.

yes

view 20 match histories and get one free

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GATGATGAT

It's not that complicated. Lifesteal is represented internally as a decimal - 8% lifesteal is .08, so naturally if you miss a decimal place or typo and put in .80 instead you end up with 80% lifesteal instead of the intended 8%. I've worked as a professional software dev before (though it's not what I do at Riot) and I can tell you that this type of error is quite common, particularly when trying to do fast iteration and push things into a testable environment (which is exactly what happened here).

In League, most of this stuff doesn't get seen by a wide audience though as it never goes to PBE and is fixed before it leaves internal environments. This is one small case where the list was shipped to PBE immediately and so was seen (and was certainly disruptive to PBE games). A parallel here to non-game dev is that you wouldn't see this type of error in other software like web pages, mobile apps, etc., because they don't have publicly-facing non-prod environments of any kind ...