Wolf Spririts and Emergent Behavior

Let’s talk about the wolf spirit.

As a default, we want to allow - and encourage - players to find new and surprising ways to play the game. On the flip side, however, we’re always watching for game health issues with emergent gameplay; is this the only way to play? Does it come with meaningful tradeoffs? Is there counterplay?

In the case of the Wolf Spirit, the ability to send the spirit on a long and silly journey across the river by smiting the wolf on the opposite side of the jungle has been known to us since before release (that is, almost a year and a half ago). We viewed this as a strange but very high cost trick for the jungler - specifically because they would also require very specific compositions (Syndra, Tahm Kench, or Blitzcrank). This was further confirmed in our mind when we saw a few videos, a little discussion, and then nothing thereafter. So we kept it!

Fast forward almost a year, and in patch 5.20 we introduced leashing changes in the form of ‘patience’ where it became a lot easier to pull off this trick. We saw some players trying it out and wanted to see how much adoption would pick up - particularly in organized play - before we acted. And… we didn’t see it picked up anywhere once again. So we decided to keep it, again.

As it turns out, however, the lack of adoption of was only artificially true. Due to an unfortunate falloff in communication, we weren’t aware that pros had been banned from using the cross-map Wolf Spirit, despite expressing a strong desire to do so. Combine that with the current high community awareness, and we’ve got new facts on the table.

Given how obtuse this trick is to access (for now) and how much demand there is to use this at more organized levels of play, we’re recommending that the Wolf Spirit behavior remain treated as an exploit for competitive play. In 6.4 (unless testing and validation extend that), we’re going to investigate how we can preserve some of the unique play of a ‘spirit across the river,’ but with real support, balance, and clarity.

We understand that this has been very painful for players, and apologize for the confusion in how we handled the situation.

-Fearless