Quick Gameplay Thoughts: May 17

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:

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Simple ARAM balance changes every few patches

As you might have seen we had some simple balance adjustments for ARAM in 9.10. Our current thinking is that that's something we'll be doing every few patches. Changes will be simple stuff like % damage up or down, with one of the core goals being that a champion's playstyle, timings etc don't change significantly between maps (e.g. avoiding changes to spell CDs, CC durations, dash ranges etc).

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State of some champs in 9.10

Now that 9.10 has been out for a bit short thoughts on a range of champs:

• Yuumi

Was looking weak enough on release we got a micropatch buff out for her quickly. Waiting to see where that puts her in combination with the expected learning curve. Most likely we'll hold off until making any other changes this week at least then reassess after the weekend.

• Yi

Looks a bit weaker in average skill games and a bit weaker again in high skill games. Increasing the delta between his performance in those two contexts wasn't a goal so we're monitoring how that goes. Want to give it a bit of time to see how players adapt to the changes though before making any assumptions, given a number of optimizations have changed.

• Rageblade Users

Generally don't seem to have been excessively affected by the changes from what we've seen so far. Kog's probably the most impacted, but even then's still doing reasonable. Not immediate compensation changes planned as a result.

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Wukong Changes on PBE

Thanks for the feedback so far on the Wukong changes that hit PBE earlier this week. Overall perception seems to be positive, seeing some good suggested areas for improvement too. Will likely be a revised version on PBE sometime next week as a result.

As a reminder these changes are a prototype, not something that could be ready to go live shortly. They'll be on PBE for around 4 weeks, then they'll be taken off and we'll figure out whether to commit to making a more polished version of them or not.