Boards›Dev Corner

Quick Gameplay Thoughts: March 6

RiotRiot Scruffy·3/6/2020, 5:43:51 PM·1 votes·28,477 views

Disclaimer These posts will often contain talk about future work we're doing, or planning to do, that isn't yet guaranteed to ship. The work or goals could change depending on what we discover, and projects mentioned may get delayed or even stopped. That said, I believe it’s important to share as much as we can even if plans may change.

Gameplay Thoughts moving to /dev As many of you already know, we’re shutting down the boards on March 9: https://na.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/community/saying-farewell-to-boards/ So this will be the last Gameplay Thoughts posted here, but it doesn’t mean these are going away. Both my and Meddler’s blogs will be going up on the /dev section of the LoL website.

Autofill and Duo Parity Progress We’ve been testing Autofill Parity and Duo Parity on two regions each since 10.4 and are seeing some very exciting results.

  • Autofill Parity
  • Before - 11.4% of games had uneven autofill
  • After - 0.97% of games have uneven autofill
  • This is a huge decrease, and nearly completely eliminates mismatched autofill from the game
  • Queue times increased on average only a few seconds to accommodate this new constraint
  • We are in the process right now of rolling this out to all regions globally
  • Duo Parity
  • Before - 59% of games have uneven Duos
  • After - 21% of games have uneven Duos
  • This is also a massive decrease that we’re pretty excited about
  • We may be able to push this even farther, but unlike autofill, we’re seeing some risk where this could start to hurt queue times or match quality (MMR spread) significantly
  • Considering we’re still seeing this in some games, we’re keeping the MMR offset for duos as we’ve had for a long time
  • We are going to roll this out after we see autofill parity is stable globally

Funnel Strategy Our last set of changes to increase the gold penalty for funneling junglers had a small impact, but didn’t solve the problem as much as we wanted. We’re currently testing an addition to the Monster Hunter penalty where funneling adds a 50% XP penalty on minion kills (on top of the current gold penalty). Junglers playing normally should almost never see these penalties.

Philosophically - we sometimes support creative strategies like funnel but we will remove them in cases where we think they are too damaging the overall gameplay experience. Thiis mid/jung funnel has two major issues that warrant us fixing it:

  • It’s a non interactive approach that doesn’t allow enough counterplay opportunities for enemies to slow it down (like conventional laning and jungling have)
  • It’s oppressively strong - this alone would be enough reason to nerf it

Jungle and Top Work Continues We’ve been testing and shipping a number of changes to increase Jungle and Top position satisfaction over the last few patches. We’re continuing our work and have a few more changes still coming, look to PBE for iterations. As we gain confidence that these changes are hitting the goals, we’ll continue shipping them in the upcoming patches.

Death’s Dance Our previous work on Death’s Dance should be coming to live in 10.6. Our core goals are:

  • Create a hybrid defense/offense item for fighters - picked in cases where you feel like you can rely on your offensive output to sustain (probably worse into heavy CC where steraks will better save you)
  • More clearly differentiate the item from Bloodthirster

LoL Dev Team’s Going Strong As we’re entering our second decade of LoL and you see a lot of the exciting new games that Riot has been working on, I thought it was worth reassuring everyone that we have no plans to shrink the team or slow down support in focus of other things. The league dev team has been roughly the same size for the last few years and will continue to stay stable.

Personally, it’s been a dream for me to work on such an amazing game for the last 7 years and I am as excited as ever to make LoL a better game than it has ever been.

Scruffy https://twitter.com/MarkYetter https://ddragon.leagueoflegends.com/cdn/9.24.2/img/champion/Sion.png

_CAW CAW CAW _

176 Comments

Zaghyr3/6/2020, 5:59:51 PM19 votes

Can you explain why you decided not to make any changes to Black Cleaver item 3071?

As far as I can tell, most of the community is in agreement that Cleaver is simply not performing as it should, especially since the vast majority of it's traditional users are moving over to use Triforce exclusively because it outclasses Cleaver in every regard. Cleaver would have been a great item to change for toplane impact changes and to bring it in line with Triforce as a core item again.

The main changes I would suggest are:

  1. Add a long sword to the build path, making it ---- Phage (1250) + Long Sword (350) + Kindlegem (800) + 600 gold. This would fix one of the issues with Cleaver which is it's terrible buildpath, opening up fighters and bruisers to a little more AD before completion, easing the burden of a 950g combine cost, and the long sword would be used in other items as well if you chose to delay cleaver.
  2. Increase the Armor Shred back to 30% for Melee only. Simply to give power back to cleaver that was lost, especially since Conqueror has no true damage anymore, this item is the only real way for some champions to deal with tanks.
  3. Make the Armor Shred work on Structures. This is the toplane impact change. This would give it split push power to compete with Triforce and give it another use as a teamwide utility item for grouping and pushing.

These changes would hopefully be enough to make champions build this again instead of Triforce when some of them don't even use Triforce that well to begin with, but don't have any other option because Cleaver is too weak.

IRON to PRO3/6/2020, 7:52:29 PM19 votes

While you are at it, make a item 3140 item build path for champions other than ad. The way Id see this happening is this: EDITED

**Item 1 we have already: Mercurial Scimitar ** item 3139 50 Attack damage 10% life steal 35 Magic Resist

**Item 2: Mercurial's Restoration item 3140 Active 10% CDR ** Passive Unique: Items gains 5 Armor and 5 Magic Resist every minute, up to 10 times for a maximum of 50 armor and 50 Magic Resist.

Unique: Increases effectiveness of all sources of health restoration by 30% (including health regeneration,life steal and spell vamp)

**Item 3: Mercurial's Blood **item 3140 Active 60 Ability Power 35 magic resist or 35 armor Passive: heals for 15% of all damage dealt

Numbers are just for example purposes

ModThe Djinn3/6/2020, 5:52:24 PM14 votes

Both my and Meddler’s blogs will be going up on the /dev section of the LoL website.

Is there any plan to add comments on the /dev section? One of my favorite things about the Gameplay Thoughts series was getting to pick your brains about specific thoughts related to that week's posts or get clarity about the reasoning behind changes that weren't as clear as they could have been.

While I understand you get bombarded by a lot of unrelated questions, I think the inability of the community to get feedback for relevant questions or requests for clarity on points raised is unfortunate.

Solari Fortune3/6/2020, 5:59:28 PM14 votes

Kinda curious what are the main concerns the team has for the Death's dance changes

also while not quite the biggest priority, will there ever be more look into updating item icons. Some still really show their age and it'd be nice if item 3115 wasn't just the Prestige Edition of item 3101

Spideraxe3/6/2020, 5:47:04 PM11 votes

Hey Scruffy can I ask how well neeko and Kai'Sa landed after their changes, since they had some of the larger scope buffs

Zoli Ben3/6/2020, 5:49:27 PM10 votes

Hey Scruffy!

Fellow Urgot player gathered his thoughts on Urgot, would you care to read it seeing we are given yet again an indirect nerf to our core item, Death's Dance? Here is the reddit link to it. https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/feern7/urgot_his_current_state_and_what_can_be_done_to/

lol you wild wyd3/6/2020, 5:48:04 PM8 votes

When are you guys going to take a serious look at Runes Reforged? The damage, sustain (health/mana), cdr bloat it has injected into LoL has taken out outplay / counterplay potential.

Fights end in 2 seconds and it has made champion roles way more homongensied.

All champs have low cd, can spam their abilities, do tons of damage, and spike at the same time. It's a shame to butcher such an amazing cast of champions.

The system is better than the old Rune design. Give us back some strategic nuance.

Lopolo3/6/2020, 6:20:32 PM7 votes

Any chance Liss will get some buffs to push her into jungle-pool ? Lissandra summoner 11

GoodfellaZ3/6/2020, 6:03:28 PM7 votes

@Riot Scruffy

Changes to PBE Death's Dance are yet another nerf to Urgot.

Will he ever be considered as Melee ? He plays more like a melee than Gangplank, his ranged poke is essentially non-existent.

Some champions have had streaks of "compensation" buffs in the past, the most recent example being Ezreal's 3 consecutive buffs (9.23, 9.24b, and 10.3) to make up for the loss of Klepto, but Urgot is nowhere near OP and he keeps getting "collateral damage" nerfs (Conqueror Ranged nerf, Turret Plating ranged nerf, and now this DD Ranged nerf).

SirPurrr3/6/2020, 6:39:11 PM7 votes

Everything in this update sounds good but let's talk about Eternals for a minute. Please allow us to remove ANY AND ALL messages related to Eternals. I have it disabled but still get the superfluous KDA pop-up with stats I do not care about and have zero use for. I still get chat messages about milestones. It's REALLY ANNOYING and very frustrating to have this shoved down my throat. None of it is useful whatsoever.

It's a distracting and completely utterly useless waste of screen space. Why would I ever care about these stats or people's milestones when I'm trying to focus on the game? I want ONLY information that I need and have deemed useful to my play. You have a lot of high ELO and pro players lowering game settings as much as possible for maximum FPS and reduced visual noise but you add this with no option to remove everything? People who are serious about the game do not want this in competitive modes.

I don't need advertising for my allies or enemies. Even if I were to purchase Eternals, I would absolutely never want any notifications of this sort in ranked games (not even for myself). It's unbelievable to me that there isn't a setting to completely remove this. It's actively hurting my gameplay experience and usually we have choices (such as for themed SR).

BTW: I don't use Twitter and barely use Reddit. It's odd to have game information tied to 3rd party companies when these forums are perfectly functional. Riot isn't a small company so why not maintain full control of the space?

Star PlatinumELO3/6/2020, 6:17:42 PM5 votes

Does the Live team have any other Junglers they'd like to add we don't know about?

Personally I'd like to see TF (extra E dmg on camps) Caitlyn (W works on large camps), and hell, even Corki (extra Q and E damage) get something just to have a fully ranged jungler besides kindred to play in my normal games.

Bubonıc3/6/2020, 5:49:54 PM5 votes

What is the general consensus around Twitch as a champion? I think there is room to buff him early if you remove some of his late game power or at least to lower some of his mana costs on his W and maybe E by like 10 each.

Another thing I was thinking that would be cool as a bigger change would to do something new with his passive by maybe giving him some form of old corki passive when he gets to max stacks at levels 13/17 instead of increasing his DoT. maybe like 10% - 20% True damage conversion, or maybe even giving him the old IE True dmg crit passive.

I think he can use any love, as he hasn't really been good at a competitive level since ardent which wasn't really his own doing and before that season 4 with old Youmuu's and BorK.

Finally, do you think there is any way to buff him without making him overbearing for low elo as that is what I think is stopping him from being touched as he is generally thought of as a bad pick for too long imo.

GreenKnight3/6/2020, 5:55:58 PM4 votes

So now we will have to post our questions on reddit, or what?

It was honestly one of the better things on boards.

deigamer253/6/2020, 6:29:01 PM4 votes

i dont think this item 3812 change its gonna be good for champs that build it like Aatrox Riven they are ability based bruisers they need that 80 damage also this champs build item 3071 realizing item 3078 its just too much better for only 700 gold

Huncho Stuntin3/6/2020, 7:24:33 PM3 votes

Hey, is there anything to do to increase Bot lane satisfaction aswel? Feels underwhelming to play ad carry specifically this season when every one one shots, champion pool is so low that it is defined by 2 champions, Aphelios and Mf. Would love to see something be changed for bot lane. ^_^

HaevenPsye3/6/2020, 7:37:55 PM3 votes

Aw. You should keep the Boards. It's organized. And even if less, there are still lots who use it. My concern is: Do devs see all or most posts on Reddit?

GREATBALANCETEAM3/6/2020, 6:24:14 PM3 votes

Hello Riot Scruffy. I just want to know if the team is at all looking at zyra's plant health and how they instantly get one shot by everything. She feels really bad to play diamond plus.

Anevyae3/6/2020, 8:10:56 PM2 votes

I do hope you guys know how harder it'll be to balance this game when you seem to be shoving random champs into being able to jungle.

RekSai CoffeeCo3/6/2020, 6:39:05 PM2 votes

When eternals can be fully muted in death screen, collection and loading screen as well as another mode besides ARAM worth playing like Nexus Blitz (permanently) or TT then i will consider spending money on skins such as blackfrost skins/chromas.

Simple logic= more variety in game maps = more player retention.

Your Boomer3/6/2020, 6:08:57 PM2 votes

All these fighter buffs have been specifically for AD fighters. Where's the love for the AP fighters? Got a feeling Death's Dance is gonna make Singed and Morde feel really bad into AD matchups.

CaptainAntiHeroz3/6/2020, 6:53:34 PM2 votes

Anything on the health of healer supports in the support position? Sona Soraka