Quick Gameplay Thoughts: August 22

Morning all,

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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

Upcoming Runes Reveals

We've been looking at some non damage focused Runes recently after seeing feedback that people wanted more visibility into utility/defensive options, with things like Don't Blink, Guardian Soul and Perfect Timing. Another post looking at a couple more utility keystones from the Inspiration tree this week as a result. We haven't yet locked down what we'll be looking at after that though. Suggestions would be much appreciated.

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Malphite

We've been testing some Malphite changes that have shown quite a bit of promise, in particular giving him a stronger edge against physical damage comps, really playing up his W as a physical damage counter. Haven't yet found the right set of other changes to pair with those buffs though, so we'll be pushing that work into 7.19 instead. Malphite's performing ok already, so don't want to overbuff him, but also want to ensure we're not accidentally hitting him harder than intended.

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Pre-Season and Game Balance

Pre-season's coming up soonish and we figured it might be good to talk about game balance during it a bit. Short version is we're expect pre-season to be pretty messy for a little bit. All pre-seasons are a bit chaotic, since there's a lot changing, and this pre-season's likely to be the biggest yet, given the new Runes system will impact both champion and item balance more than any of our previous individual patches.

We're putting a lot of time into compensating for that already of course. Internal testing gives us only a small fraction of the number of games a live release does though, so we'll get a lot more understanding of what needs work once pre-season goes out. We'll be working to get anything that's out of line back into a good spot as quickly as possible, whether that's individual Runes that are too strong or too weak, champions that aren't getting the right mix of whatever it is. We'll likely do a moderate amount of that through micro patches too, jump on things that clearly need significant changes quicker rather than waiting for the next standard patch.

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Ryze Tweaks

We’ll be taking a look at some Ryze stuff soon, with the goal of reducing his difference in power between regular play and organized teams (if he’s balanced to be appropriately strong for regular matchmade games he’s nuts in pro play especially). Approach there’s likely to be similar to the Shen work we did earlier in the year, so moving power around to change strengths and weaknesses rather than changing ability functionality much. Ryze has long been a problem child of course, so not expecting he’ll necessarily be solved after this work, or that we’ll necessarily hit on things worth shipping immediately, figured it was worth mentioning though, both for visibility’s sake and to see whether any of you folks have particularly strong ideas we should be considering in addition to the things we’re already looking at (wave clear, ability to farm, ult coordination requirements etc).