[2021] How will the new seed item work?

I'm going to do that designery thing that can be annoying but work with me here. How would you expect/want it to work?

We have something that I think works well, but this item does risk having a higher learning curve than others and I am particularly interested to see if the implementation is understandable/accessible at a glance.

That was our thinking too.

You are right that roaming supports and junglers are the primary users here. Temporarily losing access to a sweeper is a cost for sure, but it still felt like the best place rather than overloading a button that already gets overwritten. The tower button could be an option here, and it was discussed but we felt the trinket fit better with what has already been established.

We avoided the minion button in part because that button is typically used for ability overrides (Senna and Thresh) because it is easy to reach in combat, the trinket button is a bit more out of the way and less likely to be used in combat (though still reachable when needed).

(Fun fact, Thresh was being developed at the same time we started work on this item so we had to figure these out alongside each other.)

We want to avoid creating new buttons and overloading your screen, your right it is technically possible and we MIGHT do it one day, but it is something we want to avoid as it creates clutter, and can be confusing (especially when players can change their button layout).

As for settings options, our thought is that settings should have a broad use case, and we want to avoid settings that only make changes in very niche situations. Settings are also something that most players don't interact with so finding a good default is still the best way to go. For example if replacing things were to become very common in the game we might look at making a setting for it, but we would still want to have a clear rule/default that we were happy with.

"Also, it's not even a but annoying for you to ask. So many games don't and then end up with a bad system that could be averted with a quick question and answer with the community. It's great that you are actually asking."

Thanks! Any feedback here is important I also want to be super clear that we have a system that we feel works and even if we wanted to change it right now it would be to late (though it could always change in future patches if things really don't work out). I'm asking to see if your gut assumptions line up with what we built to help validate the decision we made. If it turns out that most players would expect the most intuitive input to work by spinning your move stick 360 degrees then hitting an emote than replacing the trinket button (what we did), might not make sense (god I hope that isn't what people would expect).

The Scryer's Bloom should be treated like any Scryer's Bloom you normally see on the map. I believe that means that if you hit the plant, and reveal enemy wards, you are flagged as the one who revealed the wards.

I think a good option might be to give us passive stacks on teammate plant kills(?) that can be used to gather more vision with a second sweeper lens or a third ward. Maybe like +12?

This sounds like it might be gearing towards a different item. Vision is a part of it for sure, but a bit goal of the item is roaming and the seed collection/blast cone (hopefully) help here.

The blast cone didn’t feel natural to me however.

I'm very interested to hear your thoughts once you get to try it a bit. Planting, and using these is the primary worry about the complexity of the item. So early gut reads are helpful to understand expectations here, then hearing how it actually works out as people become familiar with it is particularly interesting.

I think the only learning curve with this is letting your teammates take plants kills, along within getting and using the benefit of more vision.

If the holder of Ixtali Seedjar hits the plant they automatically pick up the seed, so you shouldn't need to worry about letting an ally hit it. Though we will see how it pans out.

How can you implement this? Well I think an enchant would be one way to go. Another would be a new rune to allow some more synergy with the sweet tooth rune that also gives some competition between running st/nr or st/anything.

If it were an enchantment it most likely need less stacks since it can’t stack before the enchant was bought.

We talked about a boot enchant, but supports typically build their boot enchants very quickly for their powerful utility effects. So we didn't want to remove that choice when it is already an interesting space for them. An enchant also runs risks of multiple people buying this item, and we expect it works best with 1 on a team (but are ok with 2 as long as it isn't the norm).

But hey what do I know?

You know what you think/feel as a player and that is exactly what we are interested in hearing your experience about.