phroxz0n

There are several champions that are strong with Horizon Focus. For example:

Ahri, Annie: Situational if you are snowballing and going for burst build.

Lux, Neeko, Lissandra, Syndra, Ori: Mages that can trigger either the Immobilize condition or the range condition easily.

Velkoz, Xerath, Ziggs, Zoe: Poke champs that can trigger the ranged condition easily.

Untested:

Seraphine: I think it's good on her due to E and R, but it might not be better than Mythic -> Rylais/Cosmic Drive -> Rylais/Cosmic Drive since she is very good with Ability Haste and the Rylais for E synergy.

Taliyah: I think this item is pretty underrated on Taliyah. It is quite easy for her to trigger the max range condition.

TF: If you are snowballing and don't want to go Zhonyas or RFC 3rd after Lich Bane, Horizon could be a good option.

I would be very skeptical of saying orianna builds are solved when it took 2 years for players to figure out that you could build a first item other than ludens echo on her.

Like I said earlier, there are some Burst oriented builds that include items such as Horizon Focus (that some players like chovy are starting to dabble with), so I would disagree that she only got one new item. I do think there's room for improvement in the balance state, but I don't agree that it's as bad as you make it out to be.

Do you have any evidence of this (orianna specifically) or is it just your personal experience? In pro and high Elo games we see a mix of ludens vs liandries and also a variety of second, third items. I also think some items on her are sleeper like cosmic drive and horizon focus.

Ahri, Annie: Situational if you are snowballing and going for burst build.

Lux, Neeko, Lissandra, Syndra, Ori: Mages that can trigger either the Immobilize condition or the range condition easily.

Velkoz, Xerath, Ziggs, Zoe: Poke champs that can trigger the ranged condition easily.

Untested:

Seraphine: I think it's good on her due to E and R, but it might not be better than Mythic -> Rylais/Cosmic Drive -> Rylais/Cosmic Drive since she is very good with Ability Haste and the Rylais for E synergy.

Taliyah: I think this item is pretty underrated on Taliyah. It is quite easy for her to trigger the max range condition. TF: If you are snowballing and don't want to go Zhonyas or RFC 3rd after Lich Bane, Horizon could be a good option.

I've only played about 5 Leblanc games this Season, but Lich, Nashors, Void, Banshee/Zhonya and Cosmic Drive have all seemed situationally viable on her. Nashor high AP value lets you one shot backline minions and perform slightly better in the side lane, especially against more tanky oriented fighters that you can kite and auto safely. I would go Nashors if I knew I was going to be getting value out of playing the sidelane, especially if I was going for more macro oriented with TP.

For Mythic, I think Ludens and Night Harvester are both decent, though you have to be a bit more careful with mana on Night Harvester and going Doran after Corrupting is mandatory, rather than Ludens where you can go straight into Mythic.

Out of these, I think Cosmic Drive is the most underrated. In a fast paced game, where fights are constantly breaking out (most solo queue games), I would expect Cosmic Drive to be quite performant, as you can capitalize on your low W cooldown for fig...

Your build sounds decent but I would encourage you to think when other Mythics could be better. Most of the items that people are building on Live are familiar but not necessarily optimal. I'd expect them to get closer once the season starts and people have time to try out different things. Theoretically, I'd expect Rocketbelt and Night Harvester to be situationally good. (harvester if you are taking lots of group fights and Rocketbelt if you are playing against a champion that is hard to gap close against eg. Orianna, Xerath, etc.) I would not expect harvester to be performant against someone like Xerath at diamond or above as you are paying a lot of opportunity cost by not being able to force engages with Protobelt. However, if you're not that high, then kitey champions are probably frequently mispositioning, so Night Harvester might still pay off. At high ELO, I wouldn't expect that to happen as often, though. Liandrys is likely decent against multiple tanks.

Ah. Morde was buffed because he feel outside of the bounds of the league balance framework, not because Liandrys rylais combo was removed. The patch notes could have been worded better, apologies for that.

The intention for the morde change is that he has choice for his item purchases. From our perspective it is not desirable that each champion only has one mythic item that they can purchase, but instead have multiple based on the game state. Morde only purchasing Rift maker when he could otherwise consider purchasing Rocketbelt is not a positive outcome. Similarly, being able to choose utility (Rylais) vs damage (demonic) in the second slot and take a tradeoff is desirable for the same reasons of experiential variety for the player and opponent.

Are you judging this in terms of winrate loss if the ability was removed?

Because too much power indexed into pure damage stats results in too much Burst damage.

Mainly because: 1. Too many things being dissimilar makes the choice difficult to comprehend. 2. For Haste changes in particular, some champions are not meeting the floor for feels and we may have swung too far in terms of reducing Haste on these champions.

Yep, we also tried it, but we felt there was too much Movement Speed in the game, leading to a decent amount of movespeed creep. It's certainly not off the table, but was not desired.

Within the set of healing legendary items, they are aggressive, that's what I meant. Redemption and mikaels are meant to be more defensive and staff and ardent are more offensive.

This is correct. The choice is between more aggressive unique plus ap vs more healing focused and haste. The choice is mildly obfuscated because both ap and heal shield power contribute to the heal/shield strength, but the haste items also have a defensive unique. It is not desired from the design side for all support items to have haste.

CertainlyT was unironically one of the greatest holistic Designers (not just champ designer) that League has had. I know this is going to get memed because people will say "yeah he just taught people how to make broken stuff or how to balance worse", but I don't think he did those things. Designers here are definitely good enough to have their own opinion and be able to defend it. He definitely pushed the boundaries in a way that is not everyone's cup of tea, but that's part of what makes him great. He also knew how to make simple champions (think WW update).

It's unfortunate, because players will never get to see behind the scenes of how he contributed, but one of his best attributes was that he truly passionately cares about League. He was always up to date with all the new builds (often as soon as they were popping up in KR soloQ) and he knew all the little details about the game inside-out. In his spare time, he was always prototyping stuff locally on his computer to m...

We've definitely considered it, but quickly decided against it. One of the underrated aspects of league is that actions have consequences. You can teleport into a situation but it may turn out badly and you die. You can flash in to kill someone but actually put yourself in a worse position or flash into a wall.

There is a strong design theory that actions that carry high reward and high consequence can be more satisfying in the long run. This doesn't mean that we shouldn't give forgiveness on spells, but generally speaking consequence tends to be a good thing for player mastery and longevity of the game (I can always get better at doing this difficult thing). When a player masters and can reproduce a difficult thing, it is on average more satisfying than reproducing something that is more forgiving (see frame perfecting qss).

Oftentimes, feeling bad over poor execution can Ignite the drive to improve (eg. If I had just placed that wall a little better, I might hav...

This is something that we are aware of and are considering options to address. For this season, we wanted to make Haste a combination of a "progression stat" and an "intentional choice" for AP users and we knew it would be at least a little painful (especially compared to the amounts of cdr from last season, like many have pointed out in the comments, getting to 30, 35, 45 for many champions was happening too early and too reliably). I don't think we've nailed the balance of it on the first go, but I'm at least pleased with the way the structure has been playing out (but not the balance of the structure).

This structure is: Get a good baseline haste with Mythics (so your champ feels like it's casting more spells throughout the game), choose between burst/defense +haste/scaling/offensive haste for legendaries/runes and choose between burst/defense/haste on boots.

Lucidity boots on champions are generally underpurchased right now (majorly due to preference/familiarit...

This was my response to a similar post the other day: https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/jwmpsv/i_would_like_to_talk_to_you_about_the_discrepancy/gct4i25/

There will always be an optimal build and players will always want to find it.

I think this is true to some extent, but it doesn't mean that you can't strive for it. Pragmatically speaking, we know that there will be some hard bound champions, because we can't make double the number of Mythic items due to complexity of the game.

To push back on your point a little bit, I would argue that in a lot of cases, where players think things are optimal, there is actually a hidden build that is competitive, waiting to be discovered. In the best case scenario, the newly discovered build doesn't take over the old build, but is situationally as competitive. We see this in many games, not just League.

To give a League example, the AP items that were changed in patch 8.4 took almost 2 years for Pro players to discover that there were builds other than Ludens -> Morello -> Sorcs on champions like Orianna, Syndra that vary based on the game stat...

ROA (with a transformation mechanic) was a mythic for a few weeks in development. It was ultimately pretty unsatisfying as a mythic, due to the time to ramp up, leaving the player impotent for too long.

Our design goal was that there shouldn't be a "one mythic" for a given champion (there will always be a few champions that we can't achieve this on, but is the goal). This is one of the reasons why we're trying to unbind a few of the champs OP mentioned from mana, so that they can engage in Mythic choice in the system.

Some of the champs you mentioned are quite squishy without ROA, and that's a piece of feedback that we've heard and considering how to respond to. Everfrost and Non-Mana AP Mythics with some health should theoretically be an option for some of the champions that used to buy ROA.