[DEV BLOG] Keystone Masteries in the 2016 Season

Posting for gypsylord while he's out of the office today

Keystone Masteries By gypsylord

When Squad5, Stashu, and I set out to work on the new mastery system we had one goal in mind: how do we get a 3-hit passive on every champion in the game? After months of ideation, we came up with Thunderlord’s Decree, made it super strong, and BOOM, now even Warwick can have perfect gameplay.

In all seriousness though, I’m excited to be talking about the new masteries because we’re finally able to take the first steps on a project we’ve been wanting to do for some time: make masteries matter! Our specific goal with this year’s mastery revamp is to make the mastery tree a more impactful part of how you play. Do you like being a wall for your allies? Bursting out a squishy? Making a quick escape? Hopefully the mastery system can finally begin to serve one of its original purposes: providing players with interesting ways to optimize their characters that speaks to their playstyle.

We’re not going too crazy here, mind you, we still feel that overall champions and items are the best way to offer meaningful character differentiation. But we do believe that the improvements we’ve made to the system will result in a lot more players asking the question, “What do I want in my Talon mastery page?” instead of “what do I want in my offensive AD character X page?”

You’ve all probably seen the website but I’m going to highlight some things:

• Ferocity is meant to favor marksmen, melee carries, and sustained damage mages. Resolve is meant to favor tanks, divers, and juggernauts. The old Utility tree has been done away with in favor of “Cunning,” a new tree that offers some interesting stuff for a number of supports, assassins, and burst mages.

• Points in each row are exclusive so if you find the flat pen in tier 3 Cunning particularly attractive, you’re going to have to give up the cooldown reduction that’s right next to it.

• The power per mastery point has been redistributed to heavily favor the tier 3 masteries found deep in the trees. This results in a new allocation layout, while it used to be standard to spend variations of 21-9-0 in the old trees you’ll now be looking to spend 18-12-0 or 18-6-6

• We’ve also thrown in a number of awesome usability improvements that should make the entire act of setting up a page far less painless (THANKS ENGINEERS!). Clicking on a 5 point mastery will automatically dump all 5 points into it if you have that many to spend. That’s great for those crucial 10 seconds after you find out that the Blitzcrank on your team had no plans of ever going support!

• You no longer have to take points out of a tree to reallocate points invested earlier, simply click on the new option you want and it’ll be swapped with whatever you’d already spent point on in that row.

• An icon representing which tier 3 keystone each player took can be found on the loading screen and scoreboard, next to summoner spells. Going to be a lot harder for that all offense AD Soraka to cheese you out when you have a better idea of what she invested in.

Before moving on, I’d just like to highlight how freeing the new exclusivity changes are, design wise. Under the old system, if we put a bunch of powerful stuff deep in the offense tree, you would just take it all. Because of this, power on any individual mastery had to be tuned low and 21 pointers had to be pretty generalized - we were basically balancing for Kayle. No longer! With the addition of exclusivity between masteries in the same tier, we can finally make things speak to specific classes of a champion, instead of “has a pulse and a basic attack.”

So then after taking a look at the tree some of you may be thinking, “WTF MAN I PLAY AP JINX AND CLEARLY THE ONLY THING WORTH TAKING FOR ME HERE IS MASTERY X. MASTERIES DON’T MATTER! WHERE ARE MY MEANINGFUL CHOICES!?” Well... to be honest, that’s not the primary goal here. What we want is for every champion to feel like there’s a mastery path for them. More specifically, we’re hoping to draw out and amplify some of the cool things your champion’s kit does, instead of just loading on general power.

As an example, while Janna may appreciate +10% AP, she’s going to feel much more excited about a +10% amp to shields and heals. One of these stats is for almost everyone, but the other speaks to a number of specific supports. Choice in the system is a secondary goal that, while nice to have, is not as important. There’s 126 champions out there and limited space in the tree, so we’d prefer a world where Soraka and Brand both have 1 path that speaks to them, instead of Brand getting 2 and Soraka crying in the corner. That said, giving players meaningful choices is still an important goal, so we’re trying to add it into the trees where we can. We just may not be able to do it for EVERY champion. Also looking at it in other places this preseason, like the item system.

Lastly, a final awesome thing about this new system is that it’s expandable! Remember how the old trees could have up to 4 points per row? Yeah, well we didn’t get rid of that functionality. Things look sparse now but that’s been done intentionally so we can add to the system should the need or want arise further into new season. This is where your feedback comes in. Think there’s no tier 2 keystones for tanky guys who want a little offense on the side? Let us know, we could add that! Think it would be hella sick if Fiddlesticks had a tier 3 keystone that made his AoE wombo even stupider? Please no, but if you have something that could do that in healthy and exciting way then maybe we could find a place to add it! In the words of Syndra, “[the space to add new stuff to masteries] blah blah blah potential is limitless!” Throw your ideas and wants and feels at us and if there truly is something missing or something that ”ASDF WE NEED THIS” then we might end up adding it in!