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Quick Gameplay Thoughts: October 27

RiotMeddler·10/27/2017, 4:15:15 PM·1 votes·163,781 views

Morning 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 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

Balance team is silver, lol

Been seeing this statement, or something similar to it, crop up quite a bit recently. It's been a common enough joke at times in the past of course, feels like there are quite a few people treating it as fact right now however. Figured the easiest way to talk about it as a result was just to link a bunch of accounts from people on the Live Gameplay team who are fairly highly rated this season.

Note that I've used op.gg below simply because it's a site I personally use, not because Riot endorses it any more or less than any other similar site. Divisions listed are where people are in solo/duo, some people have higher ratings in Flex, others don't play flex at all.

A few other notes:

  • While the Live Gameplay team is the team that does most of the patch to patch balance changes they also do a lot of other stuff too (e.g. item changes, smaller champion updates, runes work etc). They're also not the only team that does balance work (the new champion team for example is responsible for the release balance of a champion, with Live Gameplay taking over after that).
  • This isn't the full Live Gameplay team. There are some lower ranked folks on the team too, and some other Diamond+ players as well. We've generally found being good at LoL makes it more likely someone will be good at designing on LoL, but also frequently had people who don't do so well in game perform really strongly as designers.
  • We've also got a separate team called Playtest with a higher average ranking again (generally high diamond to masters) who are focused on assessing upcoming changes and how they'll impact the game.

Health Bar Improvements

Most people have probably seen this already, for anyone that hasn't, we've got a bunch of health bar changes coming soonish (not in 7.22, but soon after):

https://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/developer-corner/2x0eKJkU-preseason-healthbar-update

In addition to general feedback on those changes thoughts on other ways we could improve health bars further would be really useful too. We're planning a second round of work for early next year, looking at things like conveying HoTs and DoTs well for example. Since we're working on health bars already that makes that the ideal time to add any other features to them that would also be really valuable before the people looking at them move on to other work.

Bandit on the support items

For now at least we're putting the old Bandit mastery on the support items to avoid hitting support income in pre-season. Longer term we may look at better ways to deliver that income, at least at present we'll be delivering it there though.

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

444 Comments

Malicious Metal10/27/2017, 4:45:44 PM41 votes

Don't let these awful claims drag you down, you guys are doing your job pretty well apart from a few outliners here and there, but then again, we're all human.

Speaking of Outliners, how does Galio fare now after the hotfix? Also, why wasn't there more emphasis put on his passive, colossal smash being some of his main damage? i think thematically it'd fit since he likes punching things and an AP bruiser wanting to maximize that cdr refund while brawling seems more intuitive than the Q poke spell.

Shee10/27/2017, 4:21:30 PM28 votes

Shaming people or judging their skills just by their rank is stupid anyways. I'm tired of people of higher elo thinking they are the big thing and feeling superior to the ones that aren't that high in the ladder or that don't play ranked at all.

DarkRitual10/27/2017, 4:25:59 PM14 votes

It's hard to know how large of a shield a player has. They don't last long enough to count health bar lines while also maintaining battle awareness. With the healthbar being worked on, has there been any work to add clarity with shield strength?

The Yetii Rider10/27/2017, 5:40:36 PM11 votes

Going to echo Malicious here, Andre. You and Repetoir and Sotere do great work and I think the Boards kids don't realize how grateful they should be that you write these Quick Thoughts pretty regularly for the benefit of a tiny fraction of your playerbase that actually reads it.

Let me take the opportunity to thank you for that here.

Still haven't heard from you regarding Nunu's lack of access to Aftershock, but I'll let that go. You've probably read at least one of my comments on it, even if you didn't respond.

As to the concern about gold and warding, I still think the burden of vision being placed on one player is inappropriate. It works in pro games but it's not fair to put that on us in solo queue. The existence of SS basically gives the rest of my team an excuse to flame me if i choose not to buy the item.

Obviously your balance team has no problem with mandatory items (item 1001 ) for some reason, but the entire team needs vision, so tying our access to vision to one player's income and priorities is pretty harsh.

I want to play support for several reasons. I like the fantasy of saboteur and buffing. I like the reliability of healing and shielding. CSing is a chore that pisses me off. None of my reasons for wanting to play support include vision, but that is forced on me.

kargish10/27/2017, 11:13:39 PM8 votes

Think the balance team is to be respected, it's not easy to keep 140 champions balanced along with all the items.

Except for Repertoir. The Rengar mains have a total vendetta against that guy.

TomiMan710/27/2017, 4:26:10 PM8 votes

Bandit on the support items For now at least we're putting the old Bandit mastery on the support items to avoid hitting support income in pre-season. Longer term we may look at better ways to deliver that income, at least at present we'll be delivering it there though.

I had an idea waaaay back that if you have a fully built warding item(eye of the....., or ruby sightstone) and you place a ward and it spots an enemy, you(who placed the ward) would get for example 5 gold/enemy spotted and some lets say 10xp/spotted enemy. Each enemy would have a seperate CD till they could be spotted again. Either each ward would have a max limit of "spots" therefor a max gold/exp income, or each enemy could only be spotted lets say twice.

Any thoughts? This would encourge ppl at lower ELO to build support items and give a little bit more gold for those supports who can place wards in the right spots.

For the other support items(non warding) I cant come up with anything but im sure you guys could handle it ;) ** EDIT: After reading your response about placing wards where they would always spot an enemy(in the middle of the bot lane for example), the wards could have a radius where if you have vision, which is not provided by the ward it would not spot the enemy. So example to make myself clear here:If you ward the enemy blue it would spot the enemy jungler BUT if you place your ward in one of the bushes on bot lane it would not since minions and or your tower would provide vision there.(maybe you could count champs there too :) )**

Raxistaicho10/27/2017, 6:15:02 PM6 votes

Also Riot Meddler is a Janna main. Keep that in mind when you see Janna's balance state.

Off Meta Zilean10/27/2017, 7:28:04 PM3 votes

Hey Meddler! Been asking you this ~6-8 times or so over the past month, not sure if you're ignoring me because the way I'm asking isn't polite enough(?) or if you've just been too busy to respond to me!

Unlike Karma, Zyra, etc. Zilean got only armor buffs on the PBE in place of his seals. Previously you mentioned that such mid/support flexing mages were being switched over to HP, so that they were equally effective in Midlane, but Zilean seems to have been forgotten.

Are y'all deliberately removing him from midlane since his support is more popular? :L Or was this just an oversight?

Hope to hear back soon, thanks!

MadCast VoShay10/27/2017, 4:35:08 PM3 votes

Any thoughts on where Galio should be? His rotation is still one shotting people post hotfix if he just gets a bit ahead, even bruisers with MR. Every Galio I've seen is still building glass cannon and using W to last long enough to do his rotation. I liked Mage Galio back in the day, but I think Assassin Galio is nucking futz.

Veraska10/27/2017, 5:00:07 PM1 votes

Do you have any insight on the pbe change to eves E? The passive and r changes make sense to me but the E change has me puzzled