Quick Gameplay Thoughts: August 29
Morning all,
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
Inspiration Keystones
Guess most of you have seen them already, for anyone that hasn't we put out some details this week about a couple of the more unusual keystones from the new runes system. Mentioning this again since we're still hunting for the third keystone from that tree (Inspiration) and ideas would be much appreciated.
Traits of inspiration:
- Non direct damage or tankiness
- Allows some degree of rule breaking, more so than other trees
- Can include kiss/curse effects
- Tends to offer adaptability more than raw power
Traits of keystones:
- The most powerful runes
- Tactically relevant - they'll have some impact on how you play moment to moment and can be optimized more than other runes. You're rewarded for continuing to think about them a fair bit post champ select. Some other runes by contrast are more an optimization choice in champ select you don't need to put though into much once the game's started.
- They can modify a champion's playstyle somewhat, they shouldn't dictate it however.
- They should be applicable to at least a moderate number of champions (not too niche), while at the same time not be extremely attractive to everyone.
- You only get one, so there's a really high opportunity cost to them. That means they can have some very game influencing stuff, like being able to swap Summoner Spells, because you've giving up a lot of other power for them. Being able to go from Exhaust/Ignite early to Flash/TP late's strong, giving up the equivalent of Fervor or Thunderlord's however's a pretty meaningful price in combat power to pay.
Ornn
Note: I'm writing this Friday morning, so by the time this post goes up it's possible some of this is out of date, in particular if we hotfix between now and then.
Ornn's currently struggling quite a bit, and we're looking at what circumstances he performs well in and which poorly. At the same time we do expect him to have a pretty significant learning curve and want to try and avoid buffing him too much early on if that'll cause problems down the line (as we overbuffed Ivern in retrospect for example, who also had a pretty sizeable learning curve). We also suspect that Ornn's teams's performance is being dragged down a bit by people rushing the upgraded items he makes available in the wrong circumstances (e.g. going Triforce when it's not the right choice for your champ, or rushing the upgraded Abyssal Mask too early). At the same time Ornn's also got some lower than usual base stats, so it's possible we might want to bump those up a bit at some point, whether in a hotfix or a regular patch.
Tuesday morning update: Adding a bit extra here, rather than just editing the original post, to try and keep things a bit simpler for some of the other regions translating this stuff. We did indeed conclude Ornn was too weak last Friday and gave him a range of base stat buffs and an ult CD buff. He's performing better, though still looks on the weak side. Next step's going to be looking at his passive, in particular ways it's baiting at least some people into poor item choices. Should see some changes on the PBE shortly looking to change that (upgraded items not available until Ornn's a certain level being the starting point). We'll then be assessing how his performance is going over the course of the week, see if we need to make other changes in the next patch or before.
More Spectator Cleanup
Now that the changes to various team indicators have been out in spectator for a while we'll be taking a pass at another round of spectator clean up sometime moderately soon. Goal there is to make it as easy as possible to pick out the important information, in particular in busy team fights that can be really hard to follow. Our next targets are likely to be hiding small amounts of gold income from spectator (e.g. the +1 or +3 from Bandit don't communicate anything meaningful) and hiding some crit text from spectator (no one needs to see spells critting minions for small amounts of magic damage for example).
Other suggestions here most welcomed. Asked about this a while back and got some good suggestions that we got into the 7.16 patch, hoping to find a few more things again, either that are shown in spectator and don't need to be or aren't shown and would be valuable enough to add to justify making it harder to see other stuff.
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