phroxz0n

1. Not happy with the amount of burst in the game, imminently bringing it down
2. It's possible, but we're also bringing lethality numbers down to compensate
3. Something we've experimented with, but nothing to share just yet
4. Mainly if the item is satisfying, if it will fill a hole that we're not serving, if it will have enough users
5. Yes, it's similar to what blue side bot lane has had for a while now. Having the map be symmetrical is good overall
6. Possible
7. I think over 1000, except for late game items like Rabadons is probably closer to the upper limit
8. We always need to strike the balance of clarity vs functionality. Players will always ask for more functionality improvements, but we also need to make the game accessible for new players. We clearly went too far though and are bringing some back
9. Yes, definitely possible. it's showing its age a bit

Disregarding the taking longer in champion select and UX work to be done (which both are significant), we feel it's healthy for players to both be able to play their champions and by extension for players to see a broad range of champions. Having more bans would hurt this pretty significantly.

Champions are meant to be some amount of frustrating (ofc there's too much), but it's healthy for League to have villains and champions to be some amount of frustrating.

We had much more of a focus on clarity this season. For tenured League players, it's easy to overlook how difficult and confronting it is to look at tooltips in the first place, so we wanted to reduce this burden by some amount.

There was a bit of muddled wires in terms of communications around which items should/shouldn't keep stat trackers that got lost in the general chaos of releasing a big season, so we weren't super consistent across the board, but we have much clearer directional alignment internally now around the topic.

We do intend to add more stat trackers back into the game. We want to strike the balance of having good experiential and statistical ways to determine whether things are good. ie. You should be able to intuit and feel when Void Staff is a good purchase compared to Rabadons.

Did the person play normals or just aram?

In all seriousness, the patch being live with ranked on was confusing, forgot that preseason is normally on with ranked on, but the season reset and preseason being live being close together meant there was between 0-9 hour discrepancy in some regions

Ahhhh mb guys, I'll resign tmrw

Yep

yes, people will be demoting from tier boundaries more this season as we made promoting easier. Frankly it was pretty off that a player would be playing with Silvers, while they have Plat rank. or Gold with Emerald rank, etc.

This was meant to say "closer to where your mmr". We still want players to reprove themselves on the new content!

It will be this version with maybe some tuning

We've tried this idea multiple times and it hasn't really panned out for the most part. (both for the original 2019 version and the recent version) Players get more irritated when the terrain is making their pathing worse/making them pay more attention to pathing around the map. It also didn't actually make gameplay more fun. If the current terrain doesn't work out, we have a lot of potential mitigations to make it less snowbally, but over time found that players enjoyed it more and more

it's more like it doesn't cost us anything to design it within the current constraints of the map. It's just the map, so it doesn't really affect whether we have to design around elevation or not.

Agree with the opportunity. In practice though, it is way harder than it seems to remove the height, on top of the art considerations. I'd estimate probably ~40% of the scope of this Season Start's Engineering and Art budget would be required just to flatten the map, because it would require re-architecting how the game is inherently structured on the backend.

The arena is about 80% full

Wanting to give credit where credit is due here: Veigar: truexy Trynd: phlox Zyra: zenith and phlox Ziggs: raptorr Rumble: phreak Liss: me Reksai: truexy

I think that's a possible direction, but would require at least 1 ability to be reworked to make it happen. Rn he has the anti magic flavor on W and R, but it would need to be a lot more of his kits power budget. I remember solcrushed trying something a bit similar to this in Dev but it was too niche and unsatisfying. This was a reasonable compromise to get some of that anti magic flavor in there without making him completely useless when a team wasn't all AP (teams usually have about a shields worth of magic damage). Hopefully that gives some context for the reasoning there.

Galio generally loses prio to mage matchups in lane and that's intended. For Galio to actually beat these Champs in lane and get prio, his combat pattern would need to be pretty overtuned.

So we think his lane is fine; he loses push, but won't die and can farm defensively relatively fine.

Where he is intended to excel is in using his globals to impact the map, hence buffing that aspect of his kit rather than make him generically powerful. Sorry for the confusing wording there.

We're going to be putting a QGT out sometime in the next few weeks that chats about durability, snowballing, game time, etc. that will talk about a lot of the things in specificity.

But for now, the high level thoughts on durability here are that we're not close to being back to pre-durability, but natural patch balance, item changes, new content, etc. do contribute to pulling it back some.

We expect if we're taking good swings at balance we can't only nerf things, we have to buff things as well in ways that align with a champion's fantasy (preferably in ways that aren't durability, like MS buffs to Nidalee or mana buffs to Sylas like you mentioned) instead of damage. But sometimes, the thing that is going to resonate with a Caitlyn player is their damage being buffed.

Ultimately, it's a push and pull. We track the number of buffs/nerfs we do in a patch, and the number of damage and durability buffs/nerfs net we do patch over patch.

Waveclear is Shiv's identity (and it's a pretty satisfying one). Items are meant to be strong at a specific thing and that may be frustrating for some, but it's part of the item's power budget and we intend to balance the item around it.

Granted, when the waveclear is too powerful, such that you're one tapping the casters at range, then yeah that can lead to stalling and lower interaction, but we intend to tune the item around that property.

We also intend to allow AP users to buy it sometimes as a bridge to AP AS builds (like Nashors).

It's about the same. the NET EFFECT is 0.4%, which is (high mastery effect on the observed winrate) minus (low mastery effect on the observed winrate).

High mastery players still perform significantly higher (~2% than the observed WR) for most cases