Quick Gameplay Thoughts: January 18

Hi folks,

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 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

---

Galio, Ornn and Sejuani

Wanted to follow up on these three given we've recently done work on each of them. One of our main goals with changes was to make them easier to balance for both average and pro play, so that they're not really weak or excessively strong in one context when balanced in the other. Not done assessing any of the three, and likely there'll be some tweaks to all of them ahead, but wanted to share thoughts on where we're up to right now.

• Galio

We overbuffed Galio in retrospect, so right now he's overpowered in both regular play and pro. We think it's likely we've bridged some of the gap, but can’t get a clear read on whether that’s true or not given he’s just the right pick everywhere regardless right now. We've got some nerfs in 9.2, should be able to get a better take on things after that once regular and pro play settle down a bit.

• Ornn

We were expecting the 9.1 changes to be significantly power positive. His average performance has actually decreased a bit instead. Assessing that's complicated by both some need to relearn his play (particularly removal of shield and different use of passive) and the fact that his play rate tripled after the changes (influx of new players always depresses performance on more difficult champions). We're adding a bit of starting power to him in the form of base HP and Armor in 9.2. Taking it carefully however to avoid overbuffing given Ornn's history of being shown to be really strong once players have nailed down exactly how to make use of his kit.

• Sejuani

Early days here too, feeling cautiously optimistic that changes narrowed the gap a decent amount though. She looks like she's in a reasonable spot for solo queue and, while she's still getting a fair bit of pro priority, it's not as much as we'd previously have expected relative to her solo queue performance.

---

Assessing damage output

As mentioned we're doing some work looking at rates and sources of damage output in the game at present. Hoping to have details to share about our conclusions by the end of next week. A bit of info on both how we're approaching the problem and current thinking below as well though.

Some of the angles we're looking at this from:

• Damage output from different profiles of character (e.g. output from a full offense build, versus a full defense build)
• Ability to survive damage along the same lines (full defense build, hybrid builds, full offense etc)
• State of damage output at different points in the game (are there issues throughout the game, primarily in laning phase, mainly in late game team fights etc)
• Where damage is coming from (base abilities, ratios, item unique effects, runes etc)
• How much of the issue is total damage output versus how bursty that damage is
• How repeatable high amounts of damage are (is this something that can be done every rotation, or is it dependent on a long CD being used?)

Goal in answering those questions is to try and target our changes at the specific cases really in need, avoid either making changes where they're inappropriate and/or not making big enough changes where it really matters. Some things we're currently trending towards in that regard:

• Damage from champion kits is generally not the issue
• Early game (laning) damage is overall appropriate (some clear exceptions)
• Ability to stack up front damage from a range of systems, item uniques and runes especially, creates some issues
• We've potentially got scaling in too many different places (ratios on kits, items and runes), leading to too much of a win more/lose more scenario once a lead's achieved by one side or the other.

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