Quick Gameplay Thoughts: November 15

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

---

Thoughts on Senna so far

Initial thoughts on Senna below. It's still early days so these are more current observations than things we're extremely confident in.

• Senna's looking a bit stronger than we predicted she'd be in her first few days. She's not sufficiently powerful to currently need balance changes however. She might end up being too strong in a while, depending on how her power grows as people master her kit, we'll wait and see before jumping to any conclusions though. We don't have any changes for her in 9.23, intent is to assess her again once we see where the combination of preseason changes and increasing player experience with her ends up.
• From what we've seen she's effective as both a support and an ADC as hoped. Early indications are that both Lethality and Enchanter style builds are reasonable choices on support Senna.
• Two of Senna's intended weaknesses seem to be present as hoped so far. She's vulnerable to getting jumped on and is more vulnerable to skill shots/AoEs while attacking, given how long her attack frame immobilizes her.
• Senna's clearly too strong on ARAM. We're cutting her soul generation on ARAM back down to the same rates as on other maps as a result in 9.23. It was set higher for launch since other stacking champs have needed accelerated stacking on ARAM to avoid being excessively weak. That doesn't seem necessary in Senna's case now that we see how she actually performs in ARAM.

---

Kit Updates and the dangers of creating multiple incompatible audiences

A problem we've noticed with champions who've had their playstyles change really substantially is that we end up with multiple potential audiences for those champions whose needs can end up being incompatible. Karma's a particularly good example of that, with significant playerbase segments who want original Karma (1.11 to 3.4), initially reworked Karma (3.5 - 5.9) and current Karma (5.10+). While there's certainly overlap between what those groups want from Karma as a character there are also substantial differences. For cases like this as a result meeting the needs of one group can often come at the cost of excluding others. That's not a unique situation to kits that have been changed a lot, but it is a particularly amplified one. Other clear examples include Graves (bot lane players wanting a more standard ADC experience versus other players after the jungle/short range version) or Le Blanc (original/current kit versus the less bursty more clone focused kit the assassin update tried).

Going forward there are two things in particular we're keeping in mind for the next time we get a situation with incompatible group needs like that. The first is to try and identify cases where we've missed the mark for existing players quickly and then, if feasible/appropriate, adjust things before a significant player group become attached to the new form of the champion. Reverts like with Kog, LB and Rengar are examples of where that overall went well in our eyes since they happened comparatively quickly. The second is to avoid splitting audiences again if at all possible. Trying to serve two distinct audiences is tough already, adding a third direction to the mix makes it much harder again and all but guarantees we’'ll be leaving a lot of players unhappy.

Some significant bugs being worked on

While I don't normally get into individual bugs here I figured these three had a wide enough impact that an update would be appropriate:

• Camera locking sometimes even though you're playing with unlocked camera

We've got a fix for an issue causing this and will have it in 9.23 next week.

• Client minimizing sometimes mid game when extra mouse buttons are pressed

We've got a lead on this one but don't have a fix yet.

• Client Freeze/Crash in loading screen

This one's proven hard to track down a cause on. At time of writing we've just identified a possible cause and are about to start looking into what a fix would look like and what sort of timeframe that would involve.

---

Upcoming TFT Patches

Overall we feel the new TFT Set is in a pretty good place balance wise. We'll be making moderately sized changes only as a result as we head into the start of the ranked season for TFT next week. We're expecting that some strategies will become clearly strong once ranked turns on and people start playing more optimally. Overall though we're cautiously optimistic based off play so far that Rise of the Elements will be easier to keep a wide range of comps viable in at once than Set 1 was, due both to the pool size changes and the design of its traits.

In patch 9.24 (last major patch of the year) we'll then be introducing a few new units to round out the roster a bit. Expect to see those on PBE next week, with two of those units being from a new class.

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