Quick Gameplay Thoughts: October 25
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
Runes back on the PBE
We're in the home stretch before runes go live and they're back on the PBE again now we're past the 7.21 testing period. We've made significant changes to a number of runes since the system was originally revealed, some of which haven't got as much visibility (and therefore testing) as others. Feedback, particularly from people who've played them in game, highly appreciated on:
Guardian - Now triggers on spell casts on allies/priority, compared to version initially shown which was right click on ally.
Sudden Impact - Now also works after exiting stealth, not just on dash/teleport.
Press the Attack - Now deals damage after 3 auto attacks on the target, followed by amping all damage against them for 6 seconds (was stacking AD/AP).
Presence of Mind - Now gives you free spell casts for 5 seconds after level up or takedown (used to restore mana by auto attacking when lowish on mana).
Arcane Comet - Cooldown now reduces whenever you damage an enemy champion with an ability (should be much more appealing on champs with frequent spell casts or DoTs)
Adjusting Jungle XP and Catch up XP in pre-season
We'll be adjusting how jungle XP's earned somewhat in pre-season as is probably already on PBE at this point. TLDR is only catch up xp on large/epic monsters instead of all, some changes to individual camp xp, less ambient catch up XP. More details and our thinking about why these changes in a separate dev corner post to come shortly.
Edit: Looks like that post's out already and had plenty of discussion already. Link for anyone that's missed it though:
Minions/Monsters spawning 10s earlier in pre-season
Another change we'll be making in pre-season is having minions and monsters spawn 10s earlier than they normally would (e..g red/blue buff spawning at 1.30, not 1.40). Goal there's to remove a bit of time that's usually just spent by people afk/alt tabbed. At the same time we don't want to make jungle invades too hard to pull off, so to preserve similar timings on those we'll be increasing the speed bonus from the game start Homeguard effect as well.
Couple of pre-season changes moving to 7.23 instead of 7.22
Almost all of the pre-season stuff will be in 7.22, we'll have a few things though that will be a patch later however. Those are a slight increase to minion movement speed after 20 minutes and minion damage to towers (helps with split pushing for champs who don't themselves do as much tower damage in particular), plus a small increase to overall tower health (leaving towers as tough, or slightly tougher, overall, even accounting for the extra minion damage).
http://ddragon.leagueoflegends.com/cdn/6.24.1/img/champion/Ziggs.png
interact with AP again somehow? One of the coolest things about pre-rework Zekes was that it gave both 50% crit chance AND a 30% bonus to ability power thus the item was still viable in more...obscure lanes
and 
and 
and 
and 
are all some more unconventional AP focused lanes me and my friends enjoyed trying but with the new update to Zekes its interaction with ability power was lost. It would be nice if more support itemization and effects benefited a wider pool of champions rather than just being geared for Right clickers (The already have Stoneborn Pact and
which is directly more effective with AS) .
, 
& 
?
