Quick Gameplay Thoughts: August 3

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 damage part 2

As mentioned in previous posts we've been looking at damage output, including what sources are contributing what amount of damage. Here's where our heads are at:

• Burst damage is on average too high
• Damage from champion kits hasn't changed much over time
• Non kit sources have increased in damage however and more of that damage is being frontloaded (first AA and/or spell, rather than spread out over a champion's longer combat pattern)
• A meaningful part of that is that damage from pre-game (Runes) has increased meaningfully for many builds
• Some items have also skewed towards higher burst damage. Stackability's an issue there in some cases
• We've likely got scaling wrong on some Runes at least, with many values scaling both with level and ratio. That makes output particularly sensitive to snowball, rewarding leads all the more and making it harder to fight from behind.

In terms of what we're planning to do, that's split up into two parts:

• In the near future we'll be nerfing the worst offenders and tackling things that are easily addressed by balance adjustments (8.16 or 8.17, depending on when the work's ready)
• For preseason we'll be doing a larger pass on non kit damage, with rune damage a likely core part of that, and looking at defenses, both base stats and those you opt into

Initial changes likely changes for that 8.16 or 8.17 work below, possible a bit more gets added:

• Nerfs to runes like Electrocute, Scorch and Cheap Shot
• Nerfing Duskblade's damage proc
• Making Duskblade and Stormrazor share a unique passive

---

Scoreboard Ordering Bug

We've got a fix going through final testing at the moment for the bug where your own team's champions won't be correctly sorted on the tab screen. Original hope was to get that into 8.15, it ended up needing a bit more testing time than was available however. Should be in 8.16, apologies for the hassle on that one.

Nexus Blitz Framerate

Thanks for all the Nexus Blitz feedback so far. One of the most common themes we've seen is that some players are having really low frame rates, even though others (sometimes with what you'd expect to be slower computers) aren't having any problems at all. Given this is an non optimized alpha test that's not surprising, it does get in the way of gameplay testing though and of course is really annoying while you're playing. We're looking into it at the moment and it's one of our high priorities for the next round of Nexus Blitz improvements.

---

Run through of upcoming plans next week

Instead of a regular post mid next week we'll instead run through a summary of the issues we'll be tackling over the next few months. That'll include our current thinking on what we'll be looking to solve in preseason. Thoughts on that much appreciated, in particular given it's early enough we're still able to pivot quite a bit depending on what we learn.

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