Quick Gameplay Thoughts: October 26

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 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

Runes we're looking at

We're working on some runes, with the goal of shipping some changes during preseason. Run through of what we're trying below:

Changes we're pretty confident in

• Dark Harvest - Triggers when you damage a champion below 50% health, dealing bonus damage. Damage increases each time its triggered. Long ish (45s right now) CD>

Makes it more of a finisher, reducing power as poke or genuine one shot (single attack/ability) rune, since it can't trigger on healthy targets. Keeps its stacking nature as a point of difference from other damage runes.

• Overgrowth - Gives flat HP per X nearby deaths, with an additional % HP boost after a certain flat HP total has been earned.

Should be more appealing to a wider range of users, rather than just HP stackers as per the current % increase only. In retrospect we over corrected for this looking too appealing to everyone during Runes original development. Should help Resolve be a more attractive secondary tree as a result. Mixture of flat and % HP helps us tune for a wider range of different users.

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Changes we're not yet as confident in (need more discussion and testing)

• Bone Plating - Potential Removal

Bone Plating's a really strong Rune, even if it's not always recognized as such. It also demands more attention than we think's generally appropriate for a regular rune, given both user and opponent(s) in lane should be tracking its CD.

• Shield Bash - New Resolve rune that makes your next basic attack when you've got a shield deal bonus damage, based off your health and the shield amount.

We want Resolve to be a tree that offers both survivability and gives you other benefits based off your defensive stats (Demolish being a good existing example). Shield Bash is an exploration into that, with champs who get shields, whether from their kit, allies or items, being a broad enough pool to offer a moderate sized user base for a Rune. Still looking in particular into how to split power between offensive and defensive effects (e.g. how much should Shield Bash increase shield amount versus deal damage?).

• Klepto - Changes to make it useful to a wider audience and less mandatory on Ezreal

Might just involve changing CD, drop rate etc. Might also involve larger changes to how you trigger it, rewards given as well. Still pretty experimental and changing rapidly, hence nothing on the PBE yet.

• Celerity - Amplifies other movement speed boosts, instead of providing some constant MS and damage off MS

Looking to make it more of a choice, less general power, particularly less of a general damage contribution. Not sure yet if increasing the power of other hastes gives us sufficient balancing levers for best case users versus others (e.g. if balanced for Rammus, Hecarim etc is it just terrible on almost everyone else?)

• Chrysalis - Assessing if still needed

We originally added Chrysalis to open up the Resolve tree to a wider audience. At the time the trade off in going Resolve was pretty steep for some users, given the forced HP from tree stats. We wanted to offer a mixed early defense/later offense option to help with that. Given there'll be freedom to pick your stats from preseason onwards however that need's reduced a lot. Going to reassess Chrysalis as a result.

Yorick in 8.21

We’ve seen Yorick’s winrate drop dramatically in 8.21 off no major gameplay changes. In cases like this that often means a newly introduced pretty impactful bug. That seems particularly likely given we rescripted some of how Yorick’s ult works behind the scenes this patch to fix some other issues, so something unintended could have occured during that work. Looking into what’s going on there right now it seems like there’s probably a bug with his ghoul’s damage in some circumstances. Aiming to get that hotfixed as soon as possible, though not quite sure at time of writing when that will be. Might be done already by the time this is posted, if not hopefully later today.

Edit since time of writing: Got hotfixed yesterday afternoon. Was an issue where summoning the Maiden would reset his ghouls's to their level 1 values instead of being properly based off Yorick's level.

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