Quick Gameplay Thoughts: July 28

Morning all,

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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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7.15 follow ups

• Nasus - Seems reasonable so far. He's scary sometimes, but juggernauts should have scary moments when they're in range to melee you.

• Urgot - Also looking about right, at least initially. Jungle Urgot's struggling pretty hard, but that's as expected, solo lane Urgot seems to be performing fairly well.

• Shyvana - Potentially too strong, no immediate plans for changes yet though, still watching.

• Cho - Nerfs hit him meaningfully, may or may not still be out of line in jungle however. It's good to see Cho as a more functional champion (it's been a while), suspect we'll have to do some more work on him however soon or moderately soon.

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Cho and Stoneplate

Speaking of Cho, figured it would be good to talk a bit about him and Stoneplate. We're very much aware there are some strong opinions about Cho and Stoneplate out there and it's a topic with a range of opinions on it internally too. We talked about that particular interaction a lot before launching Stoneplate.

Feast's a really high true damage spell, capable of getting to around 1000 damage late game on a tank build, with Stoneplate pushing that up a few hundred more assuming a normal number of Feast stacks. That's more true damage than we'd normally be happy seeing from a champ in a single ability. Cho's got some pretty pronounced weaknesses however, in particular his long cast times, lack of mobility and limited reliability. Between those and the need to build Stoneplate, be around 3+ enemy champs and get into Feast range we concluded it was appropriate to allow the Cho/Stoneplate interaction to exist. So far that's still our take on it at present too.

Having said that completely agree it can definitely feel really rough being on the receiving end sometimes and Stoneplate's still pretty high on our watch list. The ability to use strong combos with it allow some pretty interesting uses and makes it appealing in a range of different circumstances. So far that seems appropriate, possible we do have to make some changes to Stoneplate and/or other things if the power of those, especially relative to their counterplay, gets out of line, whether that's Stoneplate+Cho, Stoneplate+Locket or something else again. The increased reliability Cho gets off his E slow's also noteworthy, and it's possible that while this was ok with an unreliable Q that the increased target access he's now got might prove too dominant long term.

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Hotfixes

Forgive the repetition on this one, last time from me I swear. Wanted to cover one final time that our approach to hotfixes has changed somewhat. We've done some technical work which means that hotfixing's now noticeably safer to do. That means we'll be hotfixing a bit more, in particular targeting some things that we're confident are having a negative effect on the game that previously we'd have waited until the next regular patch to change.

Frequency of those hotfixes is likely to higher around big patches, such as 7.15 or pre-season, both because there's more things to potentially need correction and because those are generally the times where we've had a bit less time for gameplay testing on any given change.

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Censoring Mastery/Rune Page Names

For anyone that missed mention yesterday the recent really broad censoring of page naming isn't working as intended. That should be back to previous functionality soon.

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7.16 Mid lane changes

We've got a bunch of changes aimed at bringing strong performing champs who mid a lot down at present. Not targeting anything too large on any individual champ, more looking to shift the highest performing tier there down a bit generally. Some of those changes are on PBE already, should expect a few more, or adjustments to existing ones, over the next few days though (e.g. Syndra nerfs changing to a ratio nerf instead of a base damage nerf).