League of Legends: Wild Rift Dev Tracker

When they do make it past bans we still don't see them overperforming. But even before we had bans in the game they were STILL underperforming.

Give Winter's Approach / Fimbulewinter a try as your first buy. This item is REALLY strong on its core users and is highly overlooked by the playerbase. With Blitz I think this is his strongest first item.

It was definitely your MMR improving.

By polishing in 2.4 I mean we have already made that change to speed up matching, and now can do minor tweaks to improve the pairings you are speaking of.

We don't look at Ranked for PVP matchmaking because players play the two differently enough that PVP has its own skill system that we match on. But we are going to improve the quality of the matches you are having soon with some tweaks.

I can confirm that this is caused by a known issue and that we have a solution planned. We are currently prioritizing improvements to matchmaking wait time and quality over this particular VP gain issue, but the fix is in the pipeline as it were.

This is a side effect of two features of how Ranking system works that affects Master and higher players:

1. VP gains are determined by where a player's MMR sits relative to the rest of their rank. So if you are a Master player and your MMR is higher than most Master level players, you will gain extra VP because you are playing better than most Master level players. Likewise, if you are a Challenger and you have an MMR below most Challengers, you will receive less VP for a win than you gain for a loss because you aren't playing like a Challenger. Meaning, you are losing matches that a Challenger would be predicted to win, so you will drop down to Grandmaster where your VP gains will level out. If instead you were to wi...

Lol Hardly,

Eve is actually the exact opposite, high elo Evelynn players know how to use her stealth to a terrifying degree, where as lower elo players don't take enough of an advantage from it.

Fizz was crazy powerful, and I hardly think this will dumpster him. He is likely just fine after these changes. Lucky for everyone we patch regularly so if we over shoot it we can adjust him in a future patch.

Diana is SLIGHTLY underpreforming in the jungle (part of this might even be Fizz eating her winrate, so Fizz nerfs are also a Diana buff). And we are trying out some lightly Diana jungle buffs to touch her up.

Gragas is another one not mentioned, but doing just fine and brings a lot of utility to the table.

Don't forget Nunu is on his way as another tank/AP jungler next month.

Your right 30% is a extreme. What percent do you think makes sense? Are you saying that 48% is where you think they Akali should sit at?

Sorry, I'm not on the team that handles skins and don't know much about their release plans. But I know they are hard at work making them look so good. You'll see more skins for sure, we showed some exciting ones in the last /dev diary.

This shouldn't have much of an impact on his rune/keystone choices and they should remain at the same powerlevel relative to each other. This could also be argued as the smallest buff to Phaserush, relative to conqueror, because now that his damage is lower conqueror's % damage amp is also lower, while Phaserush is unaffected.

We are looking at champions with high ban rates. Some champions will always have a high ban rate due more to frustration than to power. And I'm curious to hear your thoughts as an Akali player.

Would you rather Akali being objectively weak but less frequently banned or balanced but with a high ban rate?

I suspect players would rather be able to play their champion favorite champions even if they are on the weaker end. But what are your, and anyone else who mains high ban rate champions, thoughts?

Its just nerfing his Ad growth per level, so it will effect each shot, though I wouldn't expect it to be drastic.

Thanks! And thanks for making such great content, its always fun to check out your take on patch notes, even if I disagree and get frustrated at times =P.

Yes as we get into higher levels of play the player base shrinks and an individual's performance carries a larger weight on the total data for sure. As you know, this is especially true when looking at pro play where certain players just mesh with certain champions, and even if that champion is thought of as weak the right player piloting them turns them into a force to be reckoned with. Asol and Singed players are a great example of this, where they have a small player base but when you see one there is a good chance they have 100s of games on the champion.

But at some level it is also a good thing, we wouldn't want brand new Akali players to have a sub 30% winrate just so that skilled ones are balanced at 50%. So finding where we are happy with those extremes is good, and something I think we could be a bit better at. At some level, this comes down to the different balance levers we have talked about, where we want to find levers to buff a champion (like Akali) at lower s...

We do worry about over buffing them for sure, that is why we have been hesitant to give them any buffs before the crit item changes went live.

A large part of the reason that Yi is so tricky is that his identity basically requires him to be a low elo stopping stat checking champion when balanced for higher levels of play. So the trick really comes down to what areas do we think we can buff that higher skilled players are better at taking advantage of.

Ideally, we can reach a place where all champions are viable at all elos, but that will always be tough. In order for champions to feel different, and have skill expression, some will inevitably perform better at different skill levels. In the past, this has often been a major reason for champion kits to receive new mechanics or reworks that focus on a bit of skill expression. A great example in this patch is Soraka. While not a stat checky champion Soraka had been underperforming at the highest levels of play but was...

The total cost of the item is still the same, but this does mean you have to wait a tad longer before you can turn your amp tome into a NLR so it is more difficult to build. Thus why we think of it as a nerf.

But you are correct, buying the item outright largely unaffected (other than the -10 AP).

Scaling AP ratio is an option for sure, we choose to go this route because of how mid tier item build paths are much smoother in Wild Rift (asking players to sit on gold for longer).

The new items did help him, but he was still in a weaker state than the rest of the champion roster. We are hoping that these help push him up a little bit, without pushing him over the top.

As for the idea of pushing him into the "must ban" category. That is not our goal, and we don't want any champions to be sitting at that point. We want players to be able to play the champions they love, and will try and find ways to adjust/nerf them if they are banned to often (though this can be tricky).

Yi has never been much of a high elo jungle pick, and tends to dominate in lower skilled play while being a bit too predictable at the higher levels. That is what has always made him tricky to balance, if we make him balanced at high skilled play he dominates for the rest of the player base. So we tend to be carful with balance changes for champions like this.

Mostly because Lee Sin and Akali aren't actually preforming very well at higher elos. They are popular and frustrating for sure, I won't deny that, but they don't preform nearly as well as many players on reddit think.

Honestly it doesn't matter what elo range I look at with them. When I look at the top 50% of players, the top 10%, 5%, or even when I watch progames the seem to preform fine but are not oppressively powerful.

Obviously there is some frustration/perception with these champions, and we are looking into it, but in terms of raw power we just don't see it.

Good question! Honestly, this could be a whole talk and it can be tricky for sure. I'll try to use crit users as my examples because of their recent item changes, and they have a prominence right now.

Depending on the class of champions we see different levels of item variety. Some classes should have plenty of options (crit users) but if they tend to build the same few items then it's likely that those items might be a problem.

Champions within a class. Even within a class different champions care about different stats. Even within crit users, there are different secondary stats that champions care about. Draven and Miss Fortune don't really care about attack speed, they are about large amounts of AD (for Draven's basic attacks, and Miss Fortune's abilities). So buffing Bloodthirster was a good way to buff them while also buffing an item that felt like it was still being underrepresented in the class as a whole.

Conversely, we are seeing crit users with f...

I can explain what's happening here. The indicator is drawn on the ground plane of the map and the summoning platform is several steps up so there's some weird perspective happening. However, this should only be meaningful on the summoning platform, the rest of our map has small or no offset from the ground plane. If you can find an example of this feeling off when the opponent is not on the summoning platform we can look at a fix. But for the most part it's not meaningful here since the player has the fountain buff (of course there are the rare cases where you time your ult for someone's back, etc.)

The reason why we haven't addressed this before (even on PC) is both technical and gameplay related. The "proper" way to do this is to project the aim indicator onto the ground. This is more expensive from a performance perspective and from implementation/testing time. But the main reason we haven't done it, is that it also can look pretty weird when your indicator int...

Oh thank God, cause I don't.