Quick Gameplay Thoughts: July 25

Hi folks,

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 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

Prototypes

Something we've been thinking about a lot recently is how we could expose more of our work in progress directly to players. Hope there would be that early feedback on things that are still pretty rough could help us identify and fix problems, or, alternatively if something's really not working, help make the decision to kill it. We've tried such an approach a bit on the PBE this year, with work in progress on Quinn, Rengar, Fizz and LeBlanc exposed for feedback earlier than we normally would. That's gone pretty well. We’re going to try doing a bit more of it as a result, including for projects that aren’t just champion work. We’ll have some details to share next week for anyone interested in that side of things.

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Gold Funneling

Since the 8.14 penalty to gold funneling got added jungle items we've been seeing two pain points in particular from it from regular jungle play:

• Regular junglers who get ahead, usually off early kills/assists, who then get punished by it even though they're not the intended target.
• Junglers who often prefer to not finish their jungle items, particularly those that split push later in the game.

We're looking at possible adjustments to the current penalty rules to reduce problems on one or both of those points. Possible there's something in 8.15, not certain yet at time of writing. Given the current penalty itself is a bandaid until pre-season if we do find an adjustment to make it's likely it's also a bandaid that gets removed come preseason when we get a better overall solution in.

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Crit Item Changes

We've been continuing to work on crit item changes for 8.15 this week, with some shifts in what's likely to ship versus our thinking last week:

• We're keeping Zeal items at 30% crit for now. We do want to address crit overcapping. Cutting Zeal crit amount however without also changing how IE works results in marksmen power curves getting pushed later, with more of a marksman's power coming from the second Zeal item spike. That clashes with one of bigger goals of moving some power from late game to early/mid game. We're keeping the crit overcapping in 8.15 at least as a result. We will address it, but didn't want to do so in a way that traded one cost for a larger one.
• We've added an additional passive to IE, where it gives bonus damage on crits against minions/monsters. Not expecting the power from that to be too high, it does help both to give marksmen a bit of epic monster objective power back and improve satisfaction of a common basic action (AAing minions)
• Not a crit item change, but a related one is that we're also increasing the cost of starting support items by 50g to reduce the number of pots a support brings with them to lane. We're doing that because we're seeing supports able to pressure non supports too hard early game due to the larger health pool they've got access to. Supports with inherent sustain and/or protective abilities (generally tanks and enchanters) are the ones we expect to be least affected by that change, given pots represent a smaller proportion of their available health.

http://ddragon.leagueoflegends.com/cdn/6.24.1/img/champion/Ziggs.png