Quick Gameplay Thoughts: January 26
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
Splitting Precision's Stats
At this point it's looking very likely that in 8.4 we make it so Precision splits its stats with your other tree selected. That means Precision primary/Sorcery secondary would give AS and AD, as would Domination primary/Sorcery secondary etc. Same change that was made with Resolve recently, which overall seems to have been a net positive in terms of opening up Rune choice more. It's also got the benefit that now regardless of which combination of paths you're choosing you'll get some of the primary path and some of the secondary (though with Sorc+Domination both are Adaptive AD/AP of course). Not expecting this change to address all the issues with stats in the Runes system, we do think it'll help noticeably though and is something we can change quite quickly.
While we think it will open up Precision primary to a wider range of champs it does have some downside for champions who want to take Precision secondary but don't want attack speed much. Something we'll be testing as a result is skewing the stats split towards one tree in some cases. Sorcery primary/Precision secondary in particular might end up looking something like 70% AP/30% AS, rather than the straight 50%/50% splits Resolve uses with all the non Inspiration
pairings.
Mid-Season: Opening up Bot Lane
About a week back we put out a video dev diary covering some of our goals for gameplay in 2018. Worth a look if you haven't seen it:
https://nexus.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/2018/01/dev-diary-gameplay-in-2018/
One thing mentioned there I figured it would be good to talk about a bit more is our plan to open up bot lane to a wider range champions in the farming position. It's something we've been interested in, and talked about, for a long time, but haven't dedicated the needed effort to to properly support non marksmen there. That's meant a game state where marksmen have been effectively a required pick as a result. A lot of players have called us on that, in particular that we've talked of wanting to support more diversity, but haven't opened up the most consistent part of team comps.
Our biggest goal with mid-season is to change that, make it so it's a really effective choice to sometimes run a comp that doesn't have a marksmen in bot lane, or potentially doesn't have a marksmen at all. It's kind of workable at present, but we agree should be a lot more so. That's likely to involve work on items for non marksmen bot lanes, adjusting some supports so that they've got stronger synergies with non marksmen, maybe changes to things like how towers take damage even. We generally want to stay away changing individual champs so that they go bot though, this is about opening up the position to other classes, not putting mechanics on champs that are bot lane specific.
Details overall still being worked on - we're just kicking off planning and investigation right now.
It's likely that, at least initially, we're supporting a range of non marksmen in bot, but that a number of other classes still don't have a way to succeed there (e.g. a lot of mages might be effective choices there, but skirmishers not). Assuming the initial opening up worked well we'd then want to continue to gradually open the position up over time.
Spell Agro Fallout
Very early days on this (writing when we've only seen about 12 hours of play or so). So far though it doesn't look like any champ's got hammered too hard by this change. Pantheon looks to be one of the most affected, but, at least off early data and observation seems to be a fairly mild power loss still. More thoughts to follow once the change has been out for a decent amount of time, no compensation changes planned yet at least though.
http://ddragon.leagueoflegends.com/cdn/6.24.1/img/champion/Ziggs.png
tree will see any changes done to it in any forseeable future.
due to it's passive, is more appealing on scaling mages than aggressive tanks by a very big margin.
lost it's role as a scaling item, partially due to changes done in the mage update and the subsequent introduction of 
and last and certainly least of the bunch. This item has sub-par stats and a conditional active that overlaps with 
while being less reliable. Not to mention it simply loses when compared to either of the above items.
rework, 
rework, Windspeaker's Blessing and Runic Bulwark being removed from the game. Currently there are actually very few ways for a champion to give another champion armor or MR, and certainly even fewer ways to give it to multiple champions at the same time.
or 
, champs who spam the hell out of their spells and already build Roa, or on a 
(I do a 
type situation on our hands, which isn't fun for anyone to deal with. and I personally feel that's the whole reason abyssal scepter was changed to a 'Tank' item, and the aura on 
? When can we expect upcoming changes for him? he desperately needs a viable passive, and more importantly, a VGU.
?
