Quick Gameplay Thoughts: March 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

Keeping the game pretty stable for a bit

We're hitting a point in the year now where we'll generally be keeping things pretty stable. We feel preseason followup and other recent work like crit itemization have ended up in pretty good places. Ranked and Pro play are both well underway and benefit from having some periods of comparatively low change. Upcoming patches for a while will be lighter on systemic changes as a result, barring some unexpected problems cropping up. As previously mentioned we won't be doing a midseason patch this year either. That means there won't be a shake up of things and corresponding need for follow up half way through the year, or at least not one in response to a large patch from us.

Champion balance changes will still be a regular thing of course. On that front we're hoping we'll be able to focus a bit more on tuning and polish rather than as many sets of larger changes to problem champs. We'll also still be working on non champion content like items too, though that will be more at the individual piece of content level. We'd like to do some work on Corrupting Flask and Dark Seal for example, but aren't planning anything on the scope of the Crit item work just been or the AP item changes last year.

In terms of what that means for these posts for the moderate future, probably means some will be a bit shorter given there's less to talk about, and that there'll be more focus on other topics than SR balance at times.

Neeko

Looking at Neeko's performance since her hotfix this week it looks like we've hit her a bit too hard. We'll be putting some of the removed power back in as a result, with her AS per level going back up to 2.5% to help out her on hit build in particular a bit. As mentioned previously our goal wasn't to kill the build (the on hit damage is there for a reason!) but to bring it down given it was the strongest thing in the game at the time by a decent margin.

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