Quick Gameplay Thoughts: July 11

Morning all,

Should be back to our usual couple of times a week routine now for a while :)

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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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Ping Updates

In an upcoming patch (7.15 maybe?) we have some additional work done on the ping system. As previously mentioned there's a warded ping coming, we'll also be making it so you can ping any item to chat, not just certain ones. We originally only added some items to the pingable list out of a concern there'd be a lot of pointless chat spam from people pinging stuff like Longswords. In retrospect players aren't using the ping system like that much and those that do have plenty of things to spam anyway (Ally dead, Recall ready etc). We'll be removing that restriction as a result to support some genuine cases of communication it currently blocks (e.g. trying to ping meaningful components to signal power spikes to allies).

We'll also be taking at a look at allowing some skills to display their ammo in chat instead of their CD (e.g. GP Barrels or Corki rockets) since that's the actually relevant part of the spell. Not sure yet if that'll make this round of ping changes or not though.

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7.15 as Worlds Qualifiers Patch

As previously mentioned 7.15 is the patch most of the Worlds Qualifying games will be played on. That means we'll be focusing more on balance for pro play than usual. Part of that will involve small changes to a large number of champions who are either a bit too dominant in that context or nearly viable but not quite there. Things like a base health nerf to Thresh or higher GP passive damage are possible candidates there. We'll likely have somewhere between 10 and 20 champs getting changed in that way in the patch, though not all will be on PBE immediately. Also worth noting that there's also an assessment of impact in regular play that goes into whether to buff/nerf in situations like this, with some champs who are pretty strong already in regular play (e.g. Panth) not getting buffs even though they're not pro viable for example.

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Other 7.15 Balance Changes

We'll also be doing some work on other stuff in 7.15 of course. Some of that stuff, even if it appears on PBE, might end up getting pushed back to 7.16 though, given the limited amount of testing time and potential size of the patch. Things we're considering include:

• Nasus - Changing E to % shred and making it so while R is active Q has a lower CD. Intended to be overall buffs, in particular to Nasus's ability to fight other tankier folks (often all he can reach).

• MF - Potential buffs to her attack speed, supporting more auto attack heavy playstyles. More experimental, so moderate likelihood some or all of the changes don't make the cut.

• Lux - Potential buffs to her teamfighting (looks a bit weak overall, goal would be to put power into her utility more than her one shot ability though).

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More Runes Stuff

We should have another look at a new Keystone coming this week (probably tomorrow), with a comparison between Perxie, which we talked about previously, and a different Sorcery Keystone.

For those interested in the development side of Runes we've also just finished running a series of player research labs in Korea, with players who are pros, streamers, ex-pros, managers of community sites etc testing out the new system. Got a bunch of useful feedback from that we're excited to act on. Previous rounds included labs in China recently with randomly selected players in two groups (Silver/Gold and Plat/Diamond) and before that in NA with both the LCS teams and randomly selected other players who live in the LA area. Given how large the impact of Runes is likely to be we want to ensure we're getting in person feedback from a really wide variety of players along a range of axis (regular players and pro, different skill levels, different regions, theorycrafters and non theorycrafters etc). We run similar labs for a lot of other content, including things like new champions/VGUs and features like Tournaments or Honour. Runes is one of the biggest (or possible the biggest) and most global sets of labs we've done though, which has been both very helpful and pretty cool so far.