Quick Gameplay Thoughts: August 11

Hi folks,

Apologies for the late post, busier than expected morning.

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

Vayne after 7.17

Almost guaranteed that we won't have Vayne changes in 7.17. We've seen some promising bits in initial investigation (e.g. making Q unable to crit and shifting power elsewhere so she's less bursty, in particular against squishy targets). Won't have enough time in the current patch development cycle, but definitely want to revisit Vayne shortly.

Also worth noting Vayne wise that yeah, a fair number of players don't like playing against Vayne. Some of that's probably that, even if she's got average overall performance when she does do well she sometimes does extremely well, so her strong games are really in your face. We believe some of it's also part of a wider trend where, with the occasional exception, champions who are primarily or entirely single target damage focused tend to be perceived as much more frustrating than champions who aren't, regardless of their power level.

Ardent Censer, Janna, Taric

We'll be nerfing Ardent Censer in 7.17. Because of that we'll likely be leaving Janna and Taric untouched for a patch, see what impact that Censer nerf, especially following the recent Coin nerf, has on their performance. Will then reassess them both during 7.18. Still looking to get some more skill expression into Janna's kit as well at some point, though the team haven't felt the recently tested changes did a great job of that so will be trying some other stuff at some point.

7.18 Timing

Speaking of 7.18 there'll be a longer gap than usual between 7.17 and 7.18 of three weeks, rather than the usual two. That's because we need to fit one 3 week patch into the year somewhere to some patch release timing stuff around pre-season etc to work out. 7.17 made sense as a time to do that since it then gives us a bit more time when the game's pretty stable to work on Runes/other pre-season content and do a bit more assessment of final changes for the Worlds patch (7.18).

Stoneplate Tweaks

We've got a couple of adjustments for Stoneplate coming in the next patch. The first is a bug fix regarding its interaction with Cinderhulk, where the combination of the two was giving noticeably more health than it was meant to.

The second, which is still being tested, but likely to ship, is a change where the 100% extra health temporarily granted will be split between base and bonus health, rather than all be treated as bonus health. E.g. a champ with 1500 base health and 1000 bonus health would now get an extra 1500 base health and an extra 1000 bonus health, rather than 2500 bonus health. That impacts cases like Cho and Locket which scale off bonus health, so Stoneplate will likely still be a powerful combo with them but won't be giving as much power.