Quick Gameplay Thoughts: September 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 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

Pre-Season PBE Timing

We'll be putting a lot of stuff onto the PBE with more time before pre-season than we've done in the past. A lot of content, including all of the new Runes, should be there from sometime late September/early October until pre-season launch in, all going according to plan, early November. Polish, balance and occasionally functionality changes will continue of course while stuff's on PBE, should be possible though to get a look at a lot of what we're planning fairly soon.

Runes longer term

Now that we're close to getting to show off the new Rune system as a whole figured it would also be good to talk a bit about how it'll change over time. We expect we'll make more changes to new Runes than we have to old Runes/Masteries in the past. That's due to a combination of changes now not screwing over peoples's runes purchases compared to the old system and more concentrated power letting us do more interesting things for the power budget in question. Initially that'll probably mean modifications/replacements for Runes as we get balance and game health sorted out. Longer term potentially additional runes added to some slots (more than 3 choices) or, much longer term, potentially adding a new tree.

Galio

We're taking a look at some possible Galio changes at the moment. Goal with those would be to focus a bit more on some of what makes him distinct from other tanks (anti magic damage focus, AP building), making him less of a generalistic and potentially a bit stronger overall, at least when picked against appropriate enemy teams. Can't guarantee that'll go anywhere yet, and probably won't be in a patch for a while even if it does, something we're looking at though.

Orianna

We're also working on some Ori changes again, a follow up to the stuff we were looking at a couple of patches back. That's where W/R no longer fire slightly before the ball actually gets to the location they're firing at, but will now buffer properly instead, so if you press the key just before the ball arrives W or R will fire immediately on arrival. Might also pair those changes with other slight timing tweaks. Goal here's to offer a bit more counter but also ensure Ori's reliability doesn't nosedive like it did when we tried just removing the early W/R firing.

Azir context

Disclaimer: Fair bit of repetition here with post discussion on Azir, posting it though since changes are now on the PBE and some people haven't seen previous conversations.

The Azir small gameplay update's now on PBE. We've got a larger context post coming about our thinking on that in detail early next week, some shorter notes in the meantime though:

• We expect we'll ship these changes in the next patch (7.19)
• We're not looking to fundamentally change any of the core of Azir's play, so this is in some ways an extremely heavy tuning pass more than a mechanics update.
• The biggest issue we want to solve with Azir is that, in his current state, he doesn't have meaningful weaknesses. We want to make range limitations a more significant weakness for Azir and picked range in significant part because making him weaker in other ways often doesn't matter if he's still far enough away and safe.
• Range reduction's happening with lower Q cast range, W deactivation range.
• We're also windowing his personal safety tools a bit more (shorter E duration, R not knocking back after the initial cast).
• In exchange we're aiming for him to have decent sustained damage, scaling and playmaking.
• Biggest source of added power is an attack speed steroid whenever he's got 3 or more Sand Soldiers down.
• Initial balance may or may not be correct as with any update, direction is that biggest thing we're focused on though (what strength/weaknesses and what mechanics to change or not leave as is). I'd imagine it's more likely than not we'll have at least some polish to follow up in 7.20, balance tweaks pretty possible too once we've seen where he lands.

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