Quick Gameplay Thoughts: June 20

Hi folks,

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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AD Item Micropatch

Earlier this week we put out a micro patch that buffed Stormrazor (AD and MS), IE (gold cost) and ER (more AS, though shorter duration). Goal there was to buff marksmen who use those items somewhat, with our goal still being to get marksmen back into a better spot without pushing other classes out of bot lane. We decided to go with a micro patch partway through 8.12 both because it helps address a clear need and because it gives us a chance to assess the impact of these item buffs while we're considering which champion buffs to put into 8.13. If the items add more or less power to individual champs than predicted means we can react to that for the upcoming patch, rather than needing to wait another two weeks.

In terms of the impact of the micro patch we've only seen a bit of play with the buffed items at time of writing. Looks like Xayah and Tristana have benefited noticeably, though not enormously. Other ADCs haven't changed much, some movement in how much they win but just within normal fluctuations.

Gold/XP funneling

After spending time assessing funneling strats last week we've come to the conclusion that, at least for now, the correct approach to dealing with them is to address a small subset of champions, rather than trying to make wider systemic changes. The systemic options we looked at all came with significant costs to other types of play we didn't want to affect (lane minion XP penalties with jungle items, return of over leveled jungle XP, limit of one support item per team etc). Looking at funneling play most of it's heavily concentrated on just a few champs who are also on the strong side and nerf candidates anyway.

Champ changes/rationale:

• Master Yi - Removing bonus damage to minions so that he can't clear waves almost instantly. Reducing Q mana cost as well to reduce degree that hits lane/split push Yi.
• Taric - Lowering E base damage and increasing Armor ratio so his effectiveness isn't as gold independent. Also increasing ult CD which is just a bit short for its power.
• Nunu - Nerfing W AP bonus. He's got a VGU coming up moderately soon and AP boosting isn't on the revised kit. Hitting it as a result given Karthus/Nunu is the other big problem case apart from Taric/Yi.

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