League of Legends: Wild Rift Dev Tracker

Balance is a big part of it for sure, but it is also very on brand thematically for the champion. He is mindlessly charging into battle and a battle cry fits that really well.

It is true that assassins typically deal damage with their abilities, however, there have been instances where assassins would build crit because it was very reliable for them. Rengar with the original Solari Chargeblade is a great example of this. He does end up dealing a bulk of his damage through basic attacks, and the original Solari Chargeblade gave him enough crit chance to count on it when going for targets. Assassins tend to want reliability because they need to put themselves at major risk when going for a target.

So while most assassins tend to deal damage through abilities, there are plenty that could reasonably build some amount of crit chance if it was just a flat amp to their basic attacks, Rengar being the obvious example. But crit chance being random means that building it has much more inherent risk, and an assassination attempt where you don't crit likely means a failed assassination. Thus building for AD+ARpen is more reliable, helping to create differen...

So to clear things up that is not the reason why we like randomness, it is possible that some Rioters like it for that reason and that it is 100% valid. But there are a number of reasons for random crits can be good.

First I want to define two terms that come into play here.

Post-Action Randomness - This refers to randomness that happens after an action is taken. The obvious example here being Crit chance like you are talking about. This is best used when you want to add variance to an otherwise "solved" situation. It creates drama and pushes players to react to what just happened. A great example is rolling a 1 or a 20 in D&D.

Pre-Action Randomness - This is randomness that the player is made aware of ahead of time, and asked to plan for. The obvious example here is the Dragons on Elemental Rift. You know ahead of time what one is going to spawn and are able to plan for that.

Both have their places and can be used poorly. But the existance of random...

This is great! I don't know how to Samira and this definitely showed me how much I don't know how to Samira...

I turn on semi locked camera so I can push the camera towards the action and have it stay offset from my champion (similar to the offset camera we have in league). I also use my index/2nd finger to navigate the camera on the minimap. It takes a bit of practice, but I don't find it jittery. Also useful for aiming long range ults, you can use the minimap to pan the camera and then when you aim your ult it happens within the camera view so it's more accurate than aiming without moving the camera across the map.

We are open to changing it if it becomes a problem, but we think this is a case where the excitement is higher than the actual power, and that is a good place to be. It is always possible we are wrong, and if that is the case we'll reevaluate.

Thoughtful players like this are why I love riot.

Totally understandable, as compensation here is a fun fact of something we added to Sion in Wild Rift. When Sion respawns as a zombie he has a small fear around him.

Oh ya that was part of it too, I'm becoming a forgetful old man now.

As a rule, though we do prefer you to need to hold a button for charged abilities. We feel it is smoother and amps up the feeling of the ability. We don't like to make exceptions, and put a high value on consistancy/clarity but depending on the ability we might end up needing to bend that a bit even if we don't want to.

I did talk about this on Twitter!

Unfortunately, this is a fundamental difference between LoLPC's controls and our own. Any ability that you can aim must happen on button release in Wild Rift, whereas on PC it can be set to happen on button down. This is because on LoLPC you have your mouse to aim with at the time you push the button. Previously all abilities would happen on button release but abilities that don't have any aiming we can make things happen slightly faster if they happen on button down, we made that change last content patch.

Touch screen controls require any aiming to happen on button release unless it is something we want you to be able to adjust the aiming of. In Sion's case we would need to fundamentally rework, and reduce power in the ability if we were to allow you to adjust its aim while charging. We did make some slight adjustments to help compensate for this, but it still does mean that instant Qs are a bit rougher than we would like.

We play the game a lot, but it does vary based on the person's role. We have plenty of people who play the game daily (on top of our daily team playtests), but like too much of anything, it can also be draining. In those cases we take breaks from the game, play other games, or what have you, just the other week I was feeling this way so I opt out of our daily playtests and did play during my off time.

For designers, like myself, it is obviously important to be familiar with the game you are working on, but we also want to be playing other games too. It is helpful for new ideas, to see how those games solved unique problems, see what people are enjoying, get an idea of the current standard etc. But it is also good for us outside of our roles as designers, remember we are all still gamerz and started out playing games long before we even thought about making them. And we do want to enjoy other experiences (both in games, and IRL) like anyone else.

We are human and will miss posts, or it is possible that depending on the feedback the person who sees it doesn't have an answer. We don't all know everything about the game and might not the best person to answer something. Or just be busy and miss it or see it don't have time to respond.

In my case I have been off Systems and Balance for a while now and recently handed off Maps and Modes to another designer so I can focus more on champions. So it's a bit more difficult for me to talk about my work because it is often much further out. It makes it difficult to have the most up to date info on the live game, such as current balance. I also make a point to ignore raging and trolls, they don't want to have a chat so it doesn't seem productive for anyone.

I still try to respond to things when I see a topic I can speak to, or a good chat to be had.

Hype!

I like that we "beard your feedback" =p. We get feedback in a lot of ways. Reddit and Twitter are both places we frequent for feedback from invested English speaking players (Twitter has more non English speaking players). We also have teams that help out by getting us feedback from non English speaking regions. And our Insights team will often create surveys, you might have seen these in the game, or use other methods of collecting feedback.

We also talk a bit with pro players and content creators, during Elemental Rift's development I set up a discord server for content creators and pro players that we used to chat through everyone's impressions. And frequently watch patch run down videos, and other player created content to get a feel for how everyone is feeling.

Sion was one of the first champions I started working on, and I am not upset that this is the first clip from players that I found.

Elder Dragon is trying to execute you.... But Tryndamere has other plans.

This is why we have you rank your position preference for all 5 positions. If you tried to wait only for your top preferred position, the wait time would actually eventually devolve to infinity for all positions except the most in-demand on (i.e. jungle). Just think that as more people try to play the line for all positions except jungle get longer and longer because everyone is waiting for a jungler to appear. Although realistically your wait time would be roughly around when most people give up on queuing and quit.

It is something we are talking about, but not sure when, or what changes, if any, we would make. Wild Rift Asol has many of the same problems with satisfaction, appreciably, and living up to the promised hype by his "space dragon" fantasy. This has good potential so we are very interested.

But Lonely Mummy is his whole thing?!?!

As for Annie's Q this isn't a coding issue. We feel this is a better design for the character, the biggest reason being that Annie's Q is often used for last hitting and would require Annie to constantly be selecting targets, or changes to Q's targeting algorithm. The first ends up being very exhausting, while the second just creates clarity and learnability problems. Plus it being a skill shot lets us put some more power into it, and lets Annie build up her passive faster, or check brushes. There is a lot to be gained by making abilities a touch less reliable.