phroxz0n

Hmmm well I think about league almost all day, everyday as do all the designers on the team. Everyone is constantly thinking about improvements we could make, bugs we could fix, changes we could put in for test, etc. But it's always good to remind ourselves we need to take time to separate work from personal life as well.

I don't think my career choice changed my perspective that much. League is still my master project, but yeah it is cool knowing how every little bit of the game works on the back end and everything. It's also nice to study all of the data we have access to and reason about it.

I started playing s1, I enjoy the game still as much as I did back then. If anything I actually enjoy the game MORE, knowing how much there is to learn and improve at. And there are always new champions to play and get good at.

Nowadays I'm a lot smarter with my time though. As I've gotten older I know that just grinding out games is not the best way to improve, which is not something that was obvious to 2010 me.

Yes, because it's risky, especially for this particular change. On top of that, it's playoffs patch and we don't want to increase the risk of game breaking bugs.

The bug has been tracked and will be pushed out with 11.7 deploy.

See tweet from Squad5: https://twitter.com/Squad5lol/status/1372593910929747974

Rumble Q and Zoe Q are higher

Not sure about what the Gnar nerfs are.

If the buff had side effects that we didn't predict that are undesirable (eg. enabling a new certain combo/pattern), or they buffed the wrong thing (eg. we were targeting a pro nerf, but it had no effect in pro), then that's when we'd consider reverting.

There's a few changes here that have been missed.

1. There is an AP ratio buff on R1 that's been missed.
2. W cast increases max energy by 80 (so if you use it on full energy, you don't waste the energy boost)

This is intended to be a decent buff. The Q buff is very large [you get 3 Q's every time you would have gotten 2 Q's on Live].

LOL I know it's not possible because of how it's scripted but that would be hilarious

And my worst nightmare

Every time I see a "Rift herald does x" on reddit, I'm just sweating and praying it's not a bug. I was half expecting it to charge at the nexus instead of mid outer based on the title lol.

Thanks for the tag!

Ya, we're not pretending, it's mainly a work in progress and we know going in that we weren't going to nail it on the first try. We knew that some items were going to be bound to certain champions, but we were just trying to avoid designing a hard bound choice from the get go.

I think there's a good amount of "we haven't designed the best choice structures" and that's on us, but there's also a good amount of "there are many choices that aren't yet discovered" (similar to Liandrys vs Morellos last season or Ludens vs Archangels vs GLP).

Just because a given player is opting into buying the same items every game, doesn't mean the choices don't exist. And for the players that are interested in optimizing those choices and theorycrafting them, then they can gain an edge that way and that's great.

yep that issue is fixed for next patch, but there's a different bug where the herald charges, but doesn't deal damage.

Yeah my apologies :( this bug is extremely difficult to fix (the herald not dealing damage), because there's no reliable reproduction steps. If you know what happens to causes it I'd love to hear it!

Both. The second issue is caused by the first one. :(

This should be fixed for next patch (hopefully)

Mainly because it is too much visual noise and would be hard to parse at a glance, especially given that there are so many minions in the wave (both yours and opponents). It also gives a clearer read for champion HP bars vs minion HP bars.

I think it's just the Kraken slayer change.

OK, but let's say you did 2000 damage on Mordekaiser in a fight and half your damage is AOE, you would heal for 200 and Riftmaker has 150 HP, while Rocketbelt has 350 HP. (This is already the difference in health) Riftmaker is intended to be better for long combat and Rocketbelt is better for short combat.

If you were playing against someone like Kennen or a hard to catch Marksman like Ezreal, it is basically not possible to catch them with Riftmaker unless they're griefing or playing poorly. I'm not trying to say Mordekaiser doesn't need any balance adjustments, but to say you would never build Rocketbelt over Riftmaker is disingenuous. (Kingen built it in the DRX series yesterday for example, many pro players are dabbling with it in solo queue).

For the champions that you've mentioned, Akali is performant with all of the non-mana AP mythics and Katarina is receiving some balance adjustments to fix up some of her choice structures as well. After the adjustments t...

Yes I do, though item recommendations are being upgraded to increase the number of viable options shown either the previous patch or next patch. Due to a conservative implementation, it was usually showing only one mythic option. Moving forward, it should show at least 2 for most champions.