Quick Gameplay Thoughts: April 25

Hey all,

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

Syndra

Touching on Syndra since she was asked about a lot last time. As you might have seen we've got a change to Syndra's passive bonus to Q on the PBE where it's reverted to the prior bonus of '15% more damage to champions' rather than giving the extended Sphere duration. Goals there are to make getting a high sphere ult less consistent and more of a skilltest again, increase the value of hitting individual Qs and avoid adding extra waveclear (hence champion damage only).

Having said that, that's not to say the older Q bonus is the ideal thing to put there. It is however an understood effect we can swap to easily and get out quickly, which is important here given we'd like to improve Syndra's state but have a lot of other stuff underway as well. We can then follow up with additional power focused changes if appropriate.

Spell Buffering now in 8.10, not 8.9

The spell buffering changes mentioned last time are now in 8.10. Testing revealed bugs with a few abilities so we're both fixing those and checking similar abilities to see if they have the same issue.

Also, since I saw some confusion over this last time, wanted to clarify how this buffering interacts with CC. This effect won't allow abilities to be cast through CC if they couldn't normally be done so. It's basically acting as though the button was pressed a fraction of a second later as it became available. If at that time the champion in question is silenced/stunned/whatever and couldn't normally cast the ability won't happen.

Small Patch/Large Patch

From 8.1 onwards this year we've been alternating small patches (odd numbers) and large patches (even numbers). That system's going to get a bit fuzzy for a few patches around midseason right now, current plan is to get back to it afterwards however. Before doing that though wanted to see what feedback you folks had about it, including:

• Do you notice it at all?
• Do you care?
• Any particular differences that stand out versus how we previously approached patches?

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Adjusting Healthbar height based off camera position

Something else you might see on the PBE soonish is an experiment into lowering healthbar heights automatically so they're displayed on screen if you can see the unit but not the healthbar. Intent is that it should help with cases like Baron and Towers in particular, where where you want to position your screen to see the most important part of the map sometimes leaves the healthbar off screen, making it harder to track objective progress.

If you notice that on the PBE, whether directly or through the videos of others feedback much appreciated, in particular on whether it's more helpful or distracting.

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