Quick Gameplay Thoughts: April 18

Hey all,

Mid-season stuff should hit PBE today! Really looking forward to seeing everyone's thoughts after it does. Some bits and pieces below in the meantime.

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Support Basic Attacks

As part of our ongoing work on the support position we've got a mixture of both large and small changes planned. We've talked about the revised support starting items already, which is the largest support focused piece in mid-season. As a smaller change though we've also got some feel improvements to the basic attacks of various champions often played as support too. Those are generally champs who aren't very auto attack based. On one hand that means having a good feeling auto attack isn't as critical as it is on say a marksmen. On the other hand it's also tended to mean their attacks haven't received the same attention in past, so there's a lot of room for improvement. We've got some tweaks coming to Sona, Morg, Annie, Janna, Nami and Soraka in 7.9.

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Ancient Coin

The ancient coin line changes will hopefully be one of the more interesting things hitting PBE today, at least for bot lane players. For anyone wanting to do a bit of early theorycrafting the stats we're currently testing on Coin at 22g at Tier 1 and 32g at Tiers 2 and 3 on gold coins, with 8% missing mana restored on mana coins. More details on our goals with those items to follow later today, we're hoping amongst other things to make Coin a more interesting and appealing choice on a wider range of champions.

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10 Bans in Ranked and Draft

We haven't talked about ban changes for a bit, they're certainly not forgotten though. Should be able to get back to some details about that after mid-season, with work on the new client coming along well getting some needed pre-requisites out of the way.

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Poacher's Dirk

We're also testing out some small tweaks to Poacher's Dirk in 7.9. It's an item that's under performed since its introduction that we've hesitated to buff because some of its likely potential users have been challenging to balance. We're at the point though where we think we can make at least some changes to make it a bit more attractive versus just buying a couple of long swords to upgrade later. We're looking at a lower cost and CD, paired with a bit less AD, as a result.