Quick Gameplay Thoughts: June 30

Morning all,

Lighter post today, lot of work on long term stuff not ready to be talked about going on right now.

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Usual Disclaimers

These posts will often contain talk about future work we're doing, or planning to do, that isn't yet guaranteed to ship. The nature of the work could change or, depending on what we discover, projects mentioned may get put delayed or even stopped. If you'd like to see a Tweet whenever a new one of these posts goes up: https://twitter.com/RiotMeddler

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Diana

As you'll see on the PBE today we're continuing to explore Diana changes in testing. Those aren't intended to be a full fix for Diana's issues (we still expect to do a small update to her gameplay at some point), but are instead intended to put her in a better spot until then. We think it's likely the eventual direction for Diana includes auto attacking as a meaningful part of her kit, so one of the things we're looking it is ways to make that higher impact later in the game.

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Garen

Speaking of champions we're doing smaller stuff on now and plan on giving larger gameplay changes later, Garen's in the same boat this patch. We're testing a W change where it's got a short window where it's much more effective when first cast. Goals there are to both give him a bit more power but also a bit more skill expression, with the timing on that cast mattering more. Garen's always been difficult to balance for different skill ranges and part of that's because his kit doesn't give the same degree of reward for mastery over many of its elements that other champs do. This won't fix that by itself of course, but expectation is it'll help somewhat and we'll look for similar changes for the larger changes coming later.

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Warded Ping

Is still coming, looks like 7.15 at this point (another casualty of that shorter than usual 7.14 development cycle, with other engineering work that's higher priority pushing it back a patch).

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No Posts Next Week

Due a combination of 4th of July having us out of the office and some other stuff going on I won't be able to do these posts next week. Next one should be on the 10th or 11th of July as a result. One thing worth watching out for next week though's that we should be getting a more regular series of Runes posts going, starting next week, with a goal of showing off at least a new thing or two each week until close to pre-season when the full system hits the PBE.

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Kayn/Darkin

Non gameplay sidenote, but wanted to call out that a bunch of us, myself very much included, have very much enjoyed the ongoing discussion about what the deal is with the Darkin based off the new info associated with Kayn's reveal, including speculation on future possibilities, whether any other Darkin are already in the roster besides Aatrox etc. Some theories that are pretty out there, or speculative, and some ideas that are pretty accurate. Makes for fun reading.