Quick Gameplay Thoughts: December 14

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

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Taunt Lines

Something we've been trying for a while is having some champion taunt VO play automatically when champions first see specific other champions. We think that's been pretty successful, with taunt lines set up that way getting played more than champ specific lines that require the player to use the taunt emote near the correct enemy. We're looking at shifting a lot of those older lines to automatic triggers early next year as a result. Current plan is some will still remain as manual triggers where the line's out of context, immersion breaking etc, but most would get moved over.

Feedback, both on the concept and once changes hit PBE much appreciated. Champions likely to benefit in particular are those who are fairly new, so have a lot of taunt lines recorded, including Aurelion Sol, Azir, Ekko, Evelynn, Galio, Illaoi, Irelia, Jhin, Maokai, Sion, Swain, Tahm Kench, Taliyah, Urgot and Xayah. We might also have every champ use a general taunt line the first time they see an enemy champion nearby, still debating that.

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State of Neeko

Neeko's been out for a bit now and, win rate wise at least, started off looking very strong for a just released champ. She hasn't ended up being extremely dominant however. Much of her kit's pretty easy to pick up if you've played a lot of mages before, with familiar skill tests and play pattern. The main difference from other champs as you'd expect is her deception play, the passive especially. So far it looks like the playing against Neeko learning curve might be scaling at around the same rate as the playing as Neeko learning curve for once, which is quite unusual.

Balance wise, we are planning on cutting a bit of base damage off Neeko's Q in 8.24b. No other plans beyond that at present, though we're still keeping an eye on the R ratio in particular.

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Last post of the year

Thanks for reading folks! Since 8.24b's going out and we're nearly at the holiday season this is going to be the last of these posts for the year. We're still in the office for a while of course, but will be focusing on some longer term work for a bit before the break. Hope the remainder of 2018 treats you well, I'm really looking forward to all the stuff we've got planned for 2019 and getting to talk about it with you all. Should be back to the normal posts twice a week routine in early January.

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