Quick Gameplay Thoughts: December 20

Hi 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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Evelynn

Wanted to talk about a few champs this time that I've seen a lot of questions about who we haven't talked much about recently. Evelynn's the first of those. She got a full VGU just before pre-season and we had some changes on the PBE for her at one point that mainly got reverted.

At present we think Evelynn's somewhat on the strong side, though not sufficiently so that she needs to be nerfed. A combination of the pre-season changes, and some recent bug fixes, have improved her performance noticeably. She is getting overshadowed in terms of play rate by a lot of other junglers, our suspicion is that she's flying under the radar as a non lethality user there however, and is quite a bit better than she's being given credit for. We'll check in on her again after the break, see where things are at, no changes planned for 8.1 or 8.2 right now though.

At some point if she ends up weak we would want to reassess a couple of the changes for her we pulled from the PBE a while back (Q CD down with less monster refund, R refunding some CD on kill). Still interested in exploring those further. No guarantees they're necessarily the buffs we'd ship if she needed power, and as above we think she's closer to too strong than too weak. They had some promise though so would want to look at them again.

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Tryndamere and Yi

Both Trynd and Yi lost some power with the pre-season changes, Trynd more so than Yi. For 7.24b we concluded it was better to put time into a subset of laning fighters (divers generally), working to improve their state, both in terms of kit changes and itemization. We'll be taking a look at Trynd and Yi in 8.2 instead as a result, see if, given the state of the game in January, they need changes, and if so whether that's changes to them specifically or to runes/items they use. No guarantees of anything specific of course, but they're on our list for when we get back.

For anyone wondering the reason I mention 8.2 there, rather than 8.1, is because we're basically out of time on 8.1 work already. We'll get some late changes into when we get back if there's anything really urgent (micropatching a patch just before it goes out basically). Because we have to lock patches down well in advance, and that we put some time into 7.24b, we've got limited ability to do stuff with 8.1.

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Heimerdinger

Finally, thought it'd be good to talk about Heimer. We've got a nerf in for Heimer that looks pretty hefty on paper, with his RQ turret's damage dropping from 200-340 (+0.7AP) to 100-180(+0.7AP). It's likely to be pretty hefty in game too, which we feels appropriate given how well Heimer's performing at present, particularly his ability to make it really difficult for many champs to all in him during laning phase.

Worth noting though that this isn't a halving of his R's power. That's a nerf to the beam damage only, so the R turret's regular shots will still do the same amount of damage as at present. The ratio's unchanged too, so damage later in the game will be less affected. While the RQ is generally Heimer's go to choice of upgrade, other R uses are unchanged so situations where those are good won't be impacted either. It's still possible despite those things that this will hit Heimer too hard of course and we'll give him a look after 8.1 goes out, see if he needs adjustment in 8.2.

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Last post of the year

We're about to hit the holiday break, so this will be my last of these posts in 2017. I'm planning on starting them up again early January once we're back in the office and have assessed the current state of the game. I hope you've enjoyed reading these posts. I wasn't sure when I started them back in February if they'd work out particularly well. I've felt really good about them personally though as a way talk about a range of things in a pretty casual (and often typo filled!) manner. I've also just really enjoyed doing them as well most days. Looking forward to keeping them rolling next year.

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