Quick Gameplay Thoughts: January 30

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

Refinements to Bounties

We've got some adjustments to how bounties from CSing are calculated coming in 9.3. Our goal with introducing CS based bounties was to recognize when players and their teams were substantially ahead via CS gold and give catch up opportunities in those cases, rather than only when a player was ahead on kills. In some cases that's been working well, in others however players have been ending up with CS bounties not because they're ahead, but because they've caught up since their last death. We'll be making some changes behind the scenes to the CS bounty calculation as a result so that the threshold to hit a bounty better reflects actual game state, meaning that you should only have a bounty from CSing when you're meaningfully ahead.

Healing on Akali Q

At this point it's likely we'll be taking the healing off Akali Q. We're doing so because we believe the current set of tools Akali has means she's lacking in sufficient weaknesses, in lane in particular. Sustain is generally a tool we give to characters who have weaker all ins, or difficulty making an all in happen when they want. Akali's pretty good in both those regards however. Trying to trade and gradually grind down a champ with all in strength's normally a good response, sufficient healing nullifies that as a weakness however. Couple that with decent waveclear from Akali (in part because she uses energy, not mana), plus decent roaming to take advantage of that pushing, and it's hard to find strong enough weaknesses against her. That lack of clear enough weakness is then amplified again by Akali's ability to flex between multiple positions, allowing her to sometimes take a more advantageous match up. Being a flex pick isn't an inherently problematic thing, but it does add additional power to an already hard to punish kit.

It's certainly possible that removing Akali's healing leaves her in a pretty rough spot overall though. In cases like this where a champion's been problematic for an extended period we've had decent success in the past by taking a heavy pass to them to remove issues, then going back and adding power shortly after if needed once we've seen where they've landed. Zoe early last year was a good example of that, proving very difficult to get into an ok spot power and frustration wise with a series of smaller adjustments. Only after we took a really heavy pass and then put some power back in were we able to get her to a better, more stable state. We're looking at potentially bringing Akali's based HP5 up to average, from quite low, in 9.3 alongside the nerf, larger compensation, if needed, would be later though.

More Updated Movement Animations

We’ve got another round of updated walk/run (mainly) animations hitting the PBE shortly. Feedback on these once they’re there much appreciated. As before we’re targeting movement animations generally because they’re seen so often, so they’re a great way to improve a champion’s overall visual quality for the time involved per animation.

• Dr Mundo - Mundo does things his way. In this case that means getting an updated Q throw animation instead of a walk or run anim.
• Gragas - Updated base run
• Katarina - Updated base run
• Lux - New no boots walk anim and updated base run
• Shen - New no boots walk
• Twisted Fate - New no noots walk anim
• Zyra - New no boots walk

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