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Assassins are a special case. It is a conscious choice to give them haste and utility effects in the legendary item passive so that they have less item power budget in Burst damage. Mages have 3 haste items in their legendary roster.

Any time something new is added, we need to appropriately weigh the risk. In this case, we're not really worried, so long as there are appropriate tradeoffs. If you're opting to go Ability Haste item, you're not going Edge of Night or Youmuus or Umbral Glaive. Each of these are powerful game impacting effects in their own right. Of course there will be some users like Nocturne that are disproportionately good with the item, but every piece of content is going to have a "best user".

League is a game built on variance for maintaining interest. Even a player who plays only Malphite for 10,000 games should feel like loading into the game always presents different challenges and ensures that different fun/interesting situations always emerge.

For that reason, I don't really agree with the last part of what you said. Of course there's a version where we go too far, but I don't think this is it. Portals have a lot of counterplay; there's travel time, their positions are ...

The intention is that if you go both this item + Zhonyas, your damage takes a severe hit. Generally that has played out, but in situations with 3+ assassins it can be viable, in which case, that's intended to be a powerful case anyway.

Any large preseason feature goes through him for sure, so like elemental terrains, dragon soul, item rework, that kind of thing. I can't really think of anything smaller scope that he had to be tiebreaker for though.

There's also a big difference between meddler having to be tiebreaker in an official capacity (very infrequent, because it means all of the above processes have failed) and just meddler giving feedback and letting us make the call (relatively common).

Typically, the designer (and their design lead) has the final call. Designer and GAT member frequently talk through the changelist, the pros and cons, design intent and expected result. If there's a disagreement on these, then we can do any number of things including : bring in more opinions from more senior members of GAT side or design side (including going all the way up to meddler if it's important enough), put something in test to validate the hypothesis (with test goals), ship it with contingency plans (eg. Make a winrate shotcall. If this is more winrate than predicted, then revert it or pull back). There aren't too many issues because everyone has good interpersonal skills and it's handled in a professional manner.

Well kinda. Orianna actually has good lane matchups against the majority of mid laners. Orianna only has bad matchups against assassins in regular play. At high elo, she's fine into them. Karthus is more accurate (he has bad matchups against a lot of things) also karthus is only average late game, he's a midgame spike champion. Karthus is good late game in regular play because players don't play well against him (always 5v5 Teamfight, stack carries on top of each other, no split pushing, worse at picking him off when the map is more open, etc.)

It's matchup dependent. In bot if she has an adc and supp matchup where she can jump in, then she is strong early. If not then it is very difficult to walk up to the wave (typically something with range like Cait morg, etc.)

Hmmm, I can't really say, but I will say that one of the pods is the balance pod.

Simply put, it's a complicated problem.

It is certainly a limitation of the current model and something we discuss a lot internally. One of the values of having a transparent balancing process is that the community can understand why we are making certain balance decisions.

Including mastery curves is potentially valid, though while it has its benefits, it also has drawbacks and we'd need to weigh the pros and cons of including that information in the balance framework.

We'd also need to figure out the correct way to implement this information.

Example Considerations:

• Do we discard only the first game that a player plays?
• The first 3, 5, 10?
• Do we discard 10 games for an easy champion, but 30 games for a very hard champion?
• How do you weigh mastery for a person that played Lee Sin a lot 4 years ago, but has only played 5 games recently?
• Should a game played by a main matter equally to a perso...

I'll take the bait. Yes we play the game.

We have 7 designers on Summoners Rift Team split amongst the 3 pods. Of those, 1 is Master, 4 are Diamond, 1 is Plat and 1 is Silver.

We also have 2 QA analysts on the team, who are Master and GM respectively.

In addition to that, we have a separate Game Analysis Team who are typically minimum D3 and 7 of them are Masters+. 3 of them hover around GM/Chall.

We generally try to have as many different opinions from each different skill band as possible. It would not be a good thing to have every game designer be Challenger for example, because they would have such a myopic view of the player perspective that it would be actively damaging.

Every analyst has a background in statistics, usually a math degree or something similar. They are very proactive about making sure anybody looking at the data understands all the biases present.

We have an analyst that works on the summoner's rift team 100%. But what reddit knows as the balance team is actually only 1 of the 3 pods of the summoner's rift team. That analyst services the 3 different pods.

You wouldn't really assign a data scientist to service a particular team, that's too low scope for the type of stuff that they're trying to do. Their job is to make different types of data available for the analysts to have access to all across LoL, whether that's for Skins, Champions, Balance, etc.

We have a insights analyst who builds out all our reports (we have many reports that tell us a lot of different things; items, game pacing, winrate reports, an automated version of the champion balance framework, role power, champion learning curves, etc.)

Data scientists work on creating the pipelines to get the data to the analysts so that they can then write queries to get the data and put it in a usable format for designers, game analysts and producers, etc. So to answer your question, we do have both analysts and data scientists. Researchers like Blau are a different form of insights. They collect more qualitative assessments from players through surveys and player labs, rather than analysts or data scientists who are more quantitative.

There were changes to the way omnivamp is calculated and granted in the engine that meant we needed to rewrite the functionality of the tracking. I believe it's on the backlog, but lower priority than shipping balance changes or working on other unreleased content that has deadlines to hit.

Because another item may be a higher effective value for the game. Eg. If they have a lot of shielders, then serpents fang may give more damage. Or if you are already over killing but just need to Snowball the map fast then umbral or youmuus would be better. Or if you need to avoid opening cc then edge of night may be better.

Just because an item has the highest raw damage for the situation doesn't mean it's the best item to buy.

I did his mini-rework, yep. Thanks for the perspective.

So your objection is mainly that you feel it's underpowered or bound to non-bruiser champs, not that you're unsatisfied with the mechanics/pattern for AP bruisers.

Do you mind elaborating on what feels bad exactly? Is it that the items' patterns feel bad, that you think they are undertuned or something else? Also if you could describe your ideal state for the item's balance (eg. do you expect AP bruisers to have choice on their second item, or do you think a better state is for them to always buy demonic embrace second?)

Zhonyas, Banshees, Demonic, Cosmic, Rylais, Morello, Lich, etc. are all meant to be purchasable on AP Bruisers depending on the game state and champion.

Taric's is the same root cause bug as Seraphine. We caught the Taric one before Preseason, but not the Seraphine one. Someone is looking at it, so thanks for all the updoots and awareness.

Taric's was even more abusive, because he didn't need to cast any spells, just have a W link active and it would permanently go off.

In low ELO, probably Morgana or Lissandra. You can rush the defensive component (Seekers/Verdant) and then just farm and outscale them. You can also take teleport to follow them when they roam.