Quick Gameplay Thoughts: April 20

Morning all,

Mid-season work's going through it's final phases at the moment. We've got all the content on the PBE now from memory, though some of it still needs final balancing, bug fixing or asset polish still.

---

Rift Herald

Speaking of ongoing polish there's a lot currently going into the updated Rift Herald. As a heads up there'll likely also be a bit of further polish that comes in 7.10 as well. We've got some finishing touches that probably won't be ready for 7.9, so we'll be looking to get those in quickly after as a result.

---

Ivern

Unless anything significantly changes we'll be doing a balance pass on Ivern in 7.10. As mentioned previously 7.9 won't contain many individual champion balance changes, given both that the systemic changes will affect balance on most champs to some degree and that we're still very focused on finishing mid-season itself. We are starting to line up likely projects for the following patch however.

---

Starting Items for Passive Support Playstyles

One of the concerns we've seen expressed since we revealed the changes to the Ancient Coin line is that it's no longer a good option for a really passive playstyle. In terms of how you get rewards as a support that's very much intended, we want reward to be tied to action with a meaningful difference between good and poor choices, something old Coin didn't have. We certainly do want to ensure Coin feels like a good option on squishier ranged champs though, so will be tuning things like coin drop position and pick up radius to ensure trying to get them isn't suicide for non tanky champs. We'll also be watching champs like Soraka and Janna who often aren't great fits with Spellthief's to ensure they're not just left without a good starting item.

---

Non Gameplay Impacting: Feeney Art for Rakan and Xayah

A while back we put up a dev blog talking about Feeney art (light hearted temporary loading screen art for champions in development). More about it at the link below. Now that they're out we can also share the Feeney art for Rakan and Xayah for anyone interested, which was what we see loading into playtests for many months before the final splash art was done. As with the final splash art for duo the Feeney art was also made as one piece, then cut in half with that intent it would be shown side by side. That had the added little benefit of being a fun way to test that some code changes to ensure Xayah and Rakan were positioned appropriately on the loading screen worked as intended too.

http://nexus.leagueoflegends.com/2017/02/before-theres-splash-art-theres-feeney-art/

Rakan Feeney art: http://imgur.com/HmNAVpC

Xayah Feeney art: http://imgur.com/YyPmpFM