endstep

endstep



11 Jan

Comment

Originally posted by Wemnix

THANK YOU FOR THE AMP TOMES, ABILITY POWER USERS EVERYWHERE THANK YOU

no problemo

Comment

Originally posted by TropoMJ

First of all, thank you so much for making this video - I've not gone through Phreak's yet but I've just finished yours and it was really fascinating. This sort of communication is super niche (as you said in the video, you have to be super-invested to find yourself watching it), but it's really rewarding. I found myself reading the patch notes being a bit sad at how little context there was on why the item system was changed the way it was (even the dev blogs left a lot of detail that you covered out), so getting to see such expansive thoughts is great.

In general, if this is content you'd be able to make, it would be amazing to get discussion of I guess game design philosophy as it currently is at Riot. Stuff like current thoughts on how various classes are and should be interacting with various systems. One thing which came up a lot in the run down is the idea that mages should be less threatening against tanks than they were in 2023, and the item changes reflect that go...

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Thanks for the thoughts - (maybe) helpful quick answers to these in case I never get around to another video:

General thoughts on how we structure classes - a lot of this comes down to power budgeting classes as a whole and deciding what to trade off when looking to shift a class strength or weakness to a different spot. Using a (somewhat incomplete, but hopefully illustrative) example here with mages, compared to other classes, mages generally have the most AoE and high teamfight impact as strengths, with immobility and meaningful resource costs as weaknesses. By making them less target-agnostic by removing some of their anti-tank outputs, we then generate room to add more AP which is the most satisfying stat we can give mages and this has the side effect of raising the variance of the mage class (since they are now sharper, dealing and taking more damage overall due to the loss of HP + haste and higher AP) which is generally a positive in this case considering that they ...

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Comment

Originally posted by Beats29

As long the content is great I'm sure people will like it, I don't mind it if you can't do it often. At least I prefer quality over quantity. I recall you making a small twitch stream with another rioter (I'm sorry I can't recall atm) where you answered several questions. You even answered one I did about the "demonic embrace spiritual successor" for AP tanks due it's removal and it was very insightful (before we had any ideas about what items would gonna come). So yeah, I'm sure people will like it as long the content is engaging, I think the way you have in explaining decisions makes the viewer interested in the content.

Besides patches, at least for me I would like insights about the goals you had before the official patch. For example, the awareness I got is that the goal this preseason was to reduce ganking, are you afraid for example that ganking paths may be too hard or it's scaling needs something? Also 2nd question, in terms of mage itemization (although they may s...

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Yep, sounds like the stream I did with Phlox last month. Thanks for watching, I had a lot of fun on that one.

Quick answers to these questions:

  • It's definitely possible jungle will need further adjustments, but we expect that with the changes to the jungle and there being more objectives in the earlygame to take that there will still be a lot of earlygame power in the jungle.
  • It's definitely too early to tell on diversity goals - to be clear here, the type of diversity we're looking for is quite different from the goals of the mythic system, where we are much more accepting of champions being bound to specific items or combination of items when appropriate (e.g. Rumble buying Liandry's first every game is not a failure, but an expectation). We do still want to provide some variety, but it doesn't have to be in every slot in this system, and it's simply too early to tell what the actual long-term structure looks like, especially given there's balanc...
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Hey, that's me!

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?


16 Dec


20 Nov

Comment

Originally posted by Blitzedlegend

That zonyahs statline is so gross for Ksante

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


02 Oct

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Originally posted by sirloinsteak050

And the item icon is the ms paint scribble

behold my masterpiece

Comment

Originally posted by mint-patty

Oh hell yeah, great work! Which is your favorite of the three, or if that’s too partisan of a question, what are some fun debates held in-office arguing the different options?

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


10 Sep

Comment

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...

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30 Aug

Comment

Originally posted by Myozthirirn

Each skin is coded as a completly new champion. They also have another set of champions for ARAM, Arena and such. Elementalist Lux just loads each game with 19 champions (One for each player +10 Luxs), thats why they had a lot of problems with crashes in OFA, the game had to load up to 100 instances of lux for the mirror.

And then on top of that all the damage values have to be placed in the tooltip, extended tooltip, actual damage formula etc. Each time they change one skill to deal 5 extra damage they have to change the number in like 2000 places. I'm sure they have some tools to automte the bulk of it by this point but its a miracle this doesnt happen we dont notice this happening more often.

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...

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19 Mar

Comment

Originally posted by ThreeDaysMaybeLonger

Is end step a GunZ reference?

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

Comment

Originally posted by Nibiria

hi endstep big fan

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

Comment

Originally posted by 2th

How you gonna talk the man up but not give us this cookie list? How can we properly judge him? And I swear, if they put oatmeal raisin as their top pick...

oatmeal raisin perma F tier

Comment

Originally posted by endercasts

Endstep is the goat. We were on the playtest team together back in 2017 and 18 and I trust him completely because of his extremely accurate and based cafeteria cookie tier lists.

hell yeah


02 Dec

Comment

Originally posted by Smipims

Thanks for the insight

np

Comment

Originally posted by Aelms

Maybe there’s a middle ground or a mini-game here waiting to happen. I played AP Voli top for fun to try and hit my Nashor-Riftmaker 1v5 split push fantasy, but found the actual fun was in leading enemies into an E-R burst where I’d try to swing that shield+damage lead into a full passive stack engage.

I’d give up all of the raw burst damage if landing E+R was a secret sauce to full passive stacks— I’d still feel amazing for getting that combo down and feel even better knowing that trying to raw R, which already feels kinda meh, isnt the optimal use case.

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...

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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.


11 Sep

Comment

Originally posted by eyalhs

map...It was the first time someone seriously asked the question "if you go all the way off the map on one side, do you come out of the other side like Pacman?"

Well do you?

You do not. But maybe one day.


10 Sep

Comment

Originally posted by eyalhs

So original prowlers claw was literally teleports behind you nothing personal kid?

yes


18 Jul