Quick Gameplay Thoughts: July 21
Hi 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
More Runes Discussion
Most of you will probably have seen this already, in case you missed it though some intial discussion on the IP/economy side of things with the runes transition was posted yesterday though. Lot more details to come, particularly around what happens with runes themselves, post from Cactopus that's well worth checking out if you haven't read it here though:
Also worth calling out was a post from Ghostcrawler in the replies, in particular since he discusses how we've been looking at runes in terms of their impact on Riot as a business a little bit.
7.16 Balance Approach
We've just started work on looking at patch 7.16 balance work. Since 7.15's a pretty large patch more of the next patch cycle than usual will start out with a lot of analytical work, assessing what we need to respond to, rather than working on already defined issues. Things we'll be investigating include:
- Champs that may be too dominant or got changes recently for being too dominant and need to be watched closely now - Jayce, Thresh, Galio, Elise, Kalista, Caitlyn
- Position assessments - Is Cinderhulk overtuned and thereby impacting jungling too much, what should we do about some mid laners (Ori, Synda etc) who overly present/reliable choices, are many ranged champs who should be good supports struggling too much at present.
- Duskblade - Do the 7.15 changes go far enough, how does its power compare for different types of users
More thoughts to follow after some investigation.
7.16 likely changes
In addition to that research there are also a few changes we'll be testing shortly including:
- Malphite - Taking another crack at him, this time looking in part to get a bit more skill expression onto his kit (think things like the recent Garen W changes, at least in terms of goal). Probably power neutral ish, maybe slight buff?
- Maokai - Likely nerfing, probably Q damage and/or CD. Will be dependent on that Cinderhulk analysis above though to ship or not ship (how much of it is Maokai being out of line, how much that particular item?)
Spectator clean up
Mentioned this a while ago, looks like it should be in 7.16. We'll be removing a few dozen team indicators from spectator view only, targeting things that just add unneeded clutter to the spectator experience. Rationale there is that LoL's already a really busy game visually, and anything unnecessary that's shown makes it harder to follow the necessary things. Changes will be hitting PBE soon, feedback much appreciated there, or on live after the patch goes out, if you notice anything that feels wrong (no longer seeing something really important, still seeing things of low value) . Changes include things like hiding the rings around Akali W or Kindred R because they're well defined already by existing spell effects. We're doing so now specifically because the next few patches will get a lot of use out of spectator in the competitive scene. These should also be improvements that are good for spectator in general in whatever context it's used of course.
being potentially too good of a soloQ pick right now? She has the highest winrate and the second-highest pick-rate of all supports. She also happens to be a popular pick for autofilled people due to her simple yet effective kit. Do you think she's too much of a low risk high reward pick at the moment? A lot of the recent support item changes may have pushed her over the edge and I hear a lot of talk about coin-line being very strong right now; potentially a bit too strong.
