Quick Gameplay Thoughts: March 3
Hey all,
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
Tweaking CSing under towers
In 8.4 we removed the extra 5 damage to minions champion AAs dealt (it got added back in pre-season) . One group of champs did get hit harder than intended though by that change. That's champs, usually but not always mages, with low base AD. They're now having to land two auto attacks on melee minions who've been hit by towers twice, rather than the previous one. To maintain prior CSing patterns around towers we're shifting it so towers deal 45% of a melee minion's health per hit instead of 43%. Impact on other champs should be very minimal.
Matchmaking Dev Blog
Many people will have already seen this, for those that haven't though I'd highly recommend checking out the recent dev blog on matchmaking as found here:
https://nexus.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/2018/02/dev-matchmaking-real-talk/
It covers a lot of topics that get brought up regularly like:
- The relationship between ranked and normal MMR
- Feeling you get matched with worse allies after winning a lot
- Why we don't use KDA for matchmaking
- Why you still get matched with people you've muted
- And a bunch of other things
Some possible 8.6 changes
We've just finished working on 8.5 and are mapping out things we'll be looking at for 8.6. Some of our current thinking below, as usual stuff will get added or removed as patch development goes on.
Items:
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Jungle items - Two potential changes. First is changing sustain so it's more missing health/mana based. Goal there is to make early ganks a bit riskier like they used to be a couple of seasons back (not ganking at or close to full health, so more chance of a turn around). Would also potentially help out those unable to clear at present because they're so mana limited. Second change is lowering early clear speed a bit as well, push first gank times back a bit later in the game again.
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Abyssal Mask - Potentially pushing it more towards just tankier users. Magic damage dealers taking it to both nullify opponent lane damage and still get sufficient personal damage hasn't generally created good gameplay.
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Duskblade - Nerfing it.
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Locket - Some investigations into ways to make Locket less consistent and less universal a purchase. More exploratory, so possible nothing ships in 8.6.
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Rageblade - Looking to make it more accessible to melee, potentially also less of a first item power spike and more tied to other item power.
Champions:
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Rakan - Looking to buff. We're also fixing a bug between him and Xayah that leads to his performance with Xayah being much, much better than with anyone else. After that bug fix he'll be weaker when paired with Xayah, so a buff even in that case should be good too.
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Rumble - Some form of buff, details TBD.
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Lee Sin - Got hit a bit by Tracker's removal and had already been a bit weak before that. Buffing, details unsure.
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LeBlanc - Changes will be on PBE during the 8.6 cycle from day 1, probably ship in a later patch though. Changes revert the majority of the previous update.
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Ahri - Might have changes in 8.6 (testing, but not certain to ship). Still looking for ways to make her highs higher and her lows lower (does more when ahead, does less when behind)
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Some Duskblade Users - We'll have some buffs to a number of champs who are pretty dependent on Duskblade at present and we expect will be too weak post Duskblade nerf.
Runes:
- Manaflow Band - Nerfing, details TBD.
- Presence of Mind - Looking to change it so it's a reasonable choice on a wider number of champions. Then probably nerfing it for its current best case users, on whom its very strong already.
http://ddragon.leagueoflegends.com/cdn/6.24.1/img/champion/Ziggs.png
