Quick Gameplay Thoughts: March 9

Hi all,

Thoughts for today below!

---

7.5 Changes

Patch 7.5 started getting played on yesterday and so we're beginning to get an idea of how it's landed. Too early to say with confidence, but we've got a few initial reactions:

• Warlord's Bloodlust and Stoneborn Pact (Bond of Stone replacement) seem to be in good spots so far. For now at least they're looking like good choices on some champs, but not all. We'll probably do a bit of tidying up on them at least in 7.6 (might smooth out the healing extremes a little on Warlord's for example, though that's tentative). Quite happy with the changes so far overall though.

• Aatrox looks like he's almost certainly too weak by a noticeable margin. We're looking at possible buffs, with a decent chance we hotfix at least some of them out. We would expect Aatrox to struggle somewhat as players adapt to new builds, the changed passive etc, it looks like his kit's just too weak as well though. Le Blanc, Varus and MF may also have been hit too hard, so we're both looking at where they've landed to understand it better and considering what we'd do if that were true (want to answer questions like impact on Support MF versus ADC MF, how much LB's performance is affected by some players not yet changing skill rank up orders etc).

• Think we've smoothed out some unintended mark pain on Kindred, we'll see though. Understanding where they've landed off these changes will be helpful for assessing any possible future needs (making crit more appealing's something we've talked about as an option for example)

• Lucian changes look promising so far, with a definite feel improvement. Power impact less clear, though we think we're probably less at risk of Lucian being everywhere given his spell ranges are shorter than when that was previously the case, making him hopefully less universal a pick.

---

Expanded Lux VO

Reav3 talked about this a couple of days ago on Reddit in more detail, figured I'd mention it here as well for anyone that missed it. We've got a lot of new lines for Lux coming in the next patch (same voice actress who did original Lux and Elementalist Lux). That's in part a test of how much impact changing just VO has. Possible we'll do more if it goes well, though too early to say for sure.

---

Goals for patch 7.6

Gameplay wise patch 7.6 is likely to be smaller than average for a few reasons, focusing mainly on a few balance outliers and followup to 7.5. In no particular order those are:

• We've got a number of people who'd normally work on standard patch content focused on mid-season at this point.
• 7.6 is the LCS playoff patch, so we'd like to reduce the amount of change in it at the end of the split as a result.
• We've had a number of patches with some pretty wide impacting changes in them since pre-season (jungle tuning, masteries adjustments etc). We think it's time for a less changing period as a result (7.7 and 7.8 will also probably have fewer systemic changes than usual too therefore).