Quick Gameplay Thoughts: May 23

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

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

Jungle Follow up

We've been looking at the state of the jungle after 8.10 and have some follow up changes going into 8.11. Details of what and our thinking below, we’ll also look at things again once the 8.11 changes are out.

Scuttle

• One of our goals was to make Scuttle more of a focus for attention by giving it around the same amount of gold/XP as a regular camp (starts a bit lower, scales harder, same ballpark though). We think that the value per Scuttle is now in an appropriate place, but that the combination of that increased value with the current respawn timer results in Scuttle control influencing a bit too much of a jungler’s time.
• We’re reducing Scuttle respawn rate as a result (2:30, instead of 2:15), then increasing Scuttle shrine duration to keep similar total shrine availability time (90s, was 75s)

Other camps

• Then putting a small amount of XP scaling into non buff camps (Wolves, Krugs, Gromp, Raptors) to account for lower Scuttle Xp availability

Runic Echoes

• Our changes to Runic Echoes are part of our work to allow a wider variety of champions in a range of positions. Runic changes were intended to be around power neutral for existing AP junglers as a result, while making the jungle somewhat more doable for many AP champs who've struggled to jungle historically.
• Changes ended up being somewhat power down however. Addressing that in a couple of ways with the most likely being build path (potentially Fiendish Codex instead of Lost Chapter to allow an earlier component spike) and raw combat power (70 AP instead of 60 AP)
• We’re still discussing whether or not Runic Echoes should get Movement Speed back or not as a separate issue. We stripped it off because of how it’s most effective on a subset of AP champs (assassins and those who clear really fast), which fights against our goal of getting a wider range of AP champs into the jungle. Getting it back is very frequently requested by the users of the previous version of Runic Echoes though.

Balance on champs who mainly jungle (in response to both 8.10 changes and just general balance)

• Xin Zhao - lowering scaling damage (AD/level) and gank reliability (E slow %). Looking to keep early damage and dueling power intact.
• Graves - less early AA damage, potentially another change.
• Lee Sin - Got hit by the yellow trinket CD/duration change. Making it so his ability reactivations interact as you'd expect with CDR and giving him a bit more energy from his passive late game.
• Kha'Zix - Changing R adaption back to granting additional duration and cast rather than invis on touching brush.
• Elise - Increased base MS and human W damage.
• Possibly a few more champs (e.g. might be small buffs to Kindred, Yi, Nocturne, Diana).

Still Investigating

• At time of writing we're also looking at how jungler gold and XP over time in 8.10 compares to 8.9, with potentially some further additions to the coming patch in response.
• Jungler XP early is down, which was intended, given one of our primary goals was to reduce jungler influence on lanes early game. Depending on the champ it's taking between 8 and 14 minutes to catch up to prior XP levels. XP later in the game is then up, with on average around +250xp at 20 mins and +525xp at 35 mins. Talking about whether it's taking too long to get back to parity and whether increased late game XP is or isn't the best place to have power added.
• Jungler gold is down over the course of the game, with on average -100g by 20 mins and -200g by 35 mins. That decrease is gold is consistent with the other positions however, who’ve seen very similar drops. That’s due to the changes to the bounty system.

Graph of those changes below. Forgive the somewhat hard to follow nature of these, this is just a screenshot grabbed from our internal tools rather than something that’s been tidied up for wider consumption like some of the other graphs we show.

https://imgur.com/P5vl6yp Given that’s a bit of a mess of lines, here’s another pic with just a few champs (Amumu, Graves, Kha’Zix) on it: https://imgur.com/a/KPgqBBf

New Cursor

Has been testing pretty well. We’ll get it onto PBE in a couple of weeks or so to start gathering wider feedback. Since it’ll still be a work in progress some things may be rough or experimental still (e.g. we’ll probably still be trying different approaches for how the cursor reacts when you mouse over an enemy target).