Quick Gameplay Thoughts: May 12

Hey all,

Some stuff below. Also, if there are things you'd like to hear more about besides the usual balance adjustments, patch follow up and whatever's on my mind do let me know either here or on Twitter!

---

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

---

Rek'Sai Changes

We'll hopefully have the Rek'Sai changes in patch 7.11. It's possible those move to 7.12 instead, depending on how work on her ult animations/sound goes, 7.11 is currently looking pretty likely though. Our goals are to give Rek'Sai a more engaging ult, reduce difficulties balancing organized play and regular play and better support a fighter, rather than tank, playstyle. Core changes include:

• Higher bonus AD ratios and lower bases (Q at 15-35 + 0.4 bonus AD from 15-55 + 0.2, E damage at 50-90 + 0.7 bonus AD from 80-120% AD)
• W now knocks up a single target for 1s, and slightly knocks other units back from Rek'Sai, rather than being a 0.5-1.0s knockup based off distance from Rek'Sai
• Tunnel CD after use drops much more with rank (10-2s, from 10-6s)
• Fury generates much faster (25 per attack/ability), converts to health faster (3s instead of 5), restores less health (20-190, rather than 25-450). More in/out pattern as a fighter, using lower tunnel CDs in part.
• A new ult. Short version is Rek'Sai marks targets as Prey when she damages them by any means. She can dash to marked Prey up to 1500 units away, dealing 100-400 (+1.4 Bonus AD) + 20-30% missing health. Short channel (1.1s)

Exact numbers are still going through tuning of course, and there are some other small changes I've omitted.

---

7.12 Support Item work

We're targeting some work on support items in 7.12 (7.11 possible, though fairly unlikely). Goal there's to open up more options for characters building items to help their team, rather than being pretty locked on to Locket and Redemption. We like the design on both of those two items, they're pretty fun, have some skill expression, pretty satisfying etc. They've got too much of a strangehold on many builds though. Still figuring out details, likely changes include things like Locket's shield having a lower base but scaling with caster's Armor/MR (so goes well with other defensive purchases and abilities), Redemption having a lower base but scaling better than usual with healing/shielding boosts, build path changes to Knight's Vow, Zeke's, Righteous Glory etc.

---

Elemental Dragon Ideas

Thanks for the new elemental dragon ideas in the previous thread! Some of them were similar to ideas we've kicked around ourselves previously, some were new and well worth thinking about. It'll be quite a while until we playtest anything (maybe next year even), but it's always good to have some concepts to think about until then.

Reading through those suggestions a vision drake cropped up as an idea more than I'd expected. There's a lot of ways a vision drake could be done poorly (unsatisfying, low, or hard to appreciate power). Things like more wards or more frequent trinket uses are likely to fall into that category. If going a bit more inventive though there might be something with some pretty gameplay to it that could work though (e.g. circling dragons who provide windowed vision for you team and can be interacted with by the enemy? Could make them spawn with your minion waves etc). Will have to put more thought into that.

We'll also likely take a look at the drake encounters themselves at some point, whether with testing on new drakes or possibly beforehand. At the least a pass on whether the difficulty taking each drake's in the correct spot (gut reaction: close, but might benefit from some tuning). Possibly some quick work to make the fights a bit more distinct too, though we don't want to over complicate them (they're there to reward map control and encourage PVP interaction, not to be a difficult PVE encounter you only take if the enemy can't contest meaningfully).