Quick Gameplay Thoughts: April 27

Hey 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

8.10 and 8.11

8.11 is the patch that will have some marksmen item and base stat adjustments in it, along with some other stuff including some tweaks to early jungling. Those changes will be on the PBE during the 8.10 cycle (so starting next week) and we'll have some context posts about them up just before that.

8.10 also has some stuff in it too of course and wanted to talk about some of that:

• Bounty changes (solo gold instead of team gold) will be in 8.10. After those are out, and the 8.11 changes have had some impact on how much teams look to marksmen to carry versus other positions we'll then consider rolling out further changes aimed at getting more solo carry potential back. Doing so over a series of patches rather than all at once to avoid swinging too hard and creating other problems (e.g. things like excessive early snowball).

• Potentially some follow up balance work on mana items and/or mages, depending on exactly where the 8.9 changes land. If we need to add power to individual champs a common starting point's going to be adding more impact to abilities, rather than defaulting to giving them mana back (don't want to just reintroduce the issues we're trying to fix with these changes). Definitely possible mana is what will be appropriate in some cases where spell impact's already high as are mana needs though of course.

• Some regular balance/game health work, including Kha'Zix (R evolution gameplay needs work), Sion (low interaction waveclear), Sterak's (making it more relevant to more champs by reducing or removing Triforce synergy and providing other power).

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8.9 and Baron/Herald

We've been testing changes to Baron and Rift Herald's stats for a while and those are going out in 8.9. Figured it was worth mentioning even this late in the 8.9 cycle since that doesn't seem to have got that much attention.

Baron:

• Whether or not your team can take an early Baron is currently too dependent on whether not you've got a strong tank who's in a good spot around 20 mins. That can lead to games that are effectively over dragging out until the winning team feel safe taking Baron and puts more pressure on team comps to include tanks.
• We're distributing damage more evenly across teams during the Baron fight as a result. Base damage at 20 mins is down to 285 from 400 for example, AOE damage however is up (to 120+0.3 AD per second, from 60+0.1)
• We're also seeing Baron get taken too quickly, which doesn't give opponents enough time to contest and force a fight. That takes away a window for comebacks and can make a brief period of Baron control too influential in deciding that game's outcome.
• We're adding more base health to Baron as a result (9000, from 6400).

Rift Herald:

• Rift Herald's not always delivering on its intended purpose at present. It's frequently better to just take a tower direct and not consider Rift Herald. It's also not serving to help games that are functionally over resolve quicker.
• As a result we're reducing the damage it takes when hitting towers (150 less) and increasing damage it deals to towers (was 25% of own health +150, now the greater of 40% of its current health and 1500).
• To avoid it being too impactful on even games, and better reward intended counterplay, we're also increasing the damage the summoned Rift Herald takes when you hit it in eye (was 20% max hp, now 40%). Quick response will shut it down quicker than before, if unchecked it'll more consistently take at least one tower.

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