Quick Gameplay Thoughts: June 16

Morning folks,

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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

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Gnar

We've been trying out some Gnar changes recently, looking at both adding a bit of power and whether his play pattern needs a bit of work too. That's included looking at things like moving his % health damage from his W to his Q. After some testing we'll probably be going with some simpler changes though, conclusion being he mainly just needs a bit of power. Likely targets are mini Q base damage and mega E range, might see those on PBE shortly.

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Diana

We don't have work currently underway for Diana, wanted to mention her though since it's been quite a while since we mentioned her however. Our belief is whenever we next look at Diana we should be doing some changes beyond just balance, so probably a mini-update like Rek'Sai or Heimer's. Unsure when exactly that would be, but did want to mention we're not just forgetting she exists or unaware of player feeling she needs help.

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Kindred

Early assessment of the 7.12 patch suggests the buffs there may not have been enough to put Kindred in a good spot. We're still evaluating whether that's the case or not, on the belief it probably is though we're going to be looking at some follow up buffs, likely in 7.13. Possible targets include E base damage and looking at number of marks needed for the AA range increase after the initial 4 marks.

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Spectator and Allied View team indicator circles

Last year we did some clean up on which team indicators (green/red rings etc) show up to allies, or to spectators, on a number of champions. Result of that was things like the green ring around Trundle's W not being shown to some players or to viewers (didn't offer meaningful information, so was clutter without benefit). We'll be doing another pass like that shortly, in part because we're getting close to the time of the year where there's a lot of Esports viewership of particular patches. Sing out if there's something you've spotted in Spectator in particular that's ugly or distracting and just doesn't need to be there and we'll give it a glance.

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World's Patch

Speaking of Esports, for anyone interested it looks highly likely that 7.18 will be the patch for Worlds this year. We'd originally been thinking 7.19, but that ended up being a bit too tight timing wise. That will mean 7.18's a smaller patch though most, with the goal of avoiding both late significant disruption and minimizing bug risk. Some changes will also be avoided where possible in the few patches beforehand (e.g. major systemic gameplay changes to things like objectives, whole categories of item etc).

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