Ryze work on PBE

Now you might wonder why Repertoir said ''Work'' instead of ''Rework''. You see, Repertoir was 10 steps ahead of you, being well aware the community would provide the ''reee''

Just hit us up with his next rework already xd

and another one

I love how before pushing changes to PBE RiotRepertoir asked for feedback on the Ryze mains subreddit here: https://www.reddit.com/r/RyzeMains/comments/8c31do/request_for_thoughtsfeedback/?utm_content=title&utm_medium=hot&utm_source=reddit&utm_name=RyzeMains Interacting with the community before a big change to a champion like this is awesome and something that I hope Riot does more of in the future.

A suggestion for Azir:

I think one of the biggest reason which makes Azir so different in pro game and ranked game is his EQ combo.

Pro players can always use a max distance EQ combo with that low ping environment, however ranked players like me can't, because if I want to try a max distance EQ combo, I will very likely fail due to the high ping, which will be a disaster. So most time I just use a middle range EQ combo then follow a flash if needed.

I think you can solve this problem like solving the Alistar WQ combo before, make Azir E speed slower (which reduce Azir power in Pro game but not that affect the Ranked game.) and make his EQ max range succeed easier.[slayer-jinx-wink]

This is not work being done on Ryze. This is another rework being done for Ryze. I just cannot fathom how a single Developer cannot work on the champions that really need work. I think this is his 4th rework now on top of 2 VGU Ryze has received the past 5 years. When is it enough already? Every single Developer is aware of the thematic, art, lore and kit issues Karma has and how her fans feel about her as a whole, but more work is being done on Ryze and work was done on Ahri for three patch cycles. Every single Developer is aware that Lissandra needs a new passive but work is being prioritzed on Ryze and Ahri. Every single Developer knows of all the problems with Morde and his kit, bugs, and art issues. Work is yet again being done on Ryze and work was prioritized for three patch cycles on Ahri.

This is me not sitting here trying to create an argument. This is me trying to wrap my head around the fact that several dedicated Lissandra, Karma, and Morde mains have been asking for change for the past couple days, weeks, months, and years and the same work is being prioritized on Ryze, Ahri, Jinx, Lux, Jhin, and many more popular champions almost every patch cycle and year. When are you actually going to start work on the champions that it will matter on? I'm sick and tired of seeing work and communication being done with Ryze and zero communication about Karma. Meddler refuses to communicate about Karma for the past couple years he has been in his spot. Reav3s refuses to communicate about Karma. Ghostcrawler doesn't care. Here you are talking about Ryze.

Please do better than what you have been doing. Yet again this is a season 2 Karma main still asking for communication about Karma and work to be done on Karma. This is me yet again asking for work you know that needs to be done on Lissandra. This is me yet again telling you Morde has massive identity and kit problems . . . . this is not including his bugs. What are you doing about it?

Reworking Ryze again and wasting three patch cycles on Ryze.

I am so disgusted with, yet again, another Developer trying to convince the community that Ryze is better deserving of work than Karma, Morde and Lissandra.

Honestly, I think you should scrap that ulti and do another base spell (ala Corki) on Ryze

Wow I'm excited for the Azir change. I think one of the most significant changes he should get after changing his stab damage is removing the self-shielding on his E completely which imho should've been done during his rework.

Azir should ideally be a high damage carry and not a hard-engage champion in most situations. Maintaining the self-shielding on his E just gives him too many generic windows to initiate and go in, instead of focusing on when a good opportunity to go all-in might be.

The shield could also go back to only working when Azir collides with champions, it's still a far better situation than him simply getting a free shield with a high AP ratio just for dashing. It would also remove the frustrating aspect of him getting a free shield as he dashes away from ganks and bad situations as well.

I would be very appreciative if you hear me out for a bit.

Azir is my favorite champion in this game, no doubt about it. One of my favorite things about him is one of his unique strengths that he brings to the table, his AOE DPS. No other viable mid laner can match that strength of his. Flat out removing it is just going to be a tough pill to swallow, tougher than perhaps any other design-level change that has been discussed or implemented. If the goal is to cut down on his wave clear, is there a possibility that his AOE does not affect Minions, but still affects Champions?

Turning him into a single target damage dealer leaves him competing with the likes of Cassiopeia and Ryze, as well as the entire Marksman class of champions. Unless Riot is trying to turn him into an alternative to traditional Marksman in the bot lane, I do not see a future in which he has reason to be played or a future in which I personally find him enjoyable. I'd rather a second rework far down the line (after season 8 ends at the minimum) in which Azir's dash is flat-out removed and replaced by a different tool, than for him become a single target damage dealer.

Having such a drastic change be suggested is very worrying to me. In these past 3 years I've played him, Azir's been a weak champion at times, but never an unenjoyable champion to play. Not yet anyway. Please be very careful and deliberate in your approach to design changes regarding Azir in the near future and the far future. It would mean more than you know.

Another one? Like really?

Maybe changing/reworking Realm Warp would be the way to go since it's one of the;if not THE, main differences between pro play and average Joe solo queue. It's great for coordinated teams but not that much elsewhere. Since AP mids often come down to "Can I burst him faster than he can burst me?", being a short ranged mage is bad enough, not having a (huge) damaging ultimate adds insult to injury. I sure miss Desperate Power and scroll taunt (maybe give him a passive like Skarner where he finds Runes and gets back Desperate Power for a while?). Even something as little as "temporarily increases basic abilities cast range" would help significantly imho.

Glad you're giving him some love tho.

Okay, Riot, you could have (re)worked at least 5 other, also outdated and in need of a desperate change, champions for the amount of work you put singly into . I guess balance/design team has a fetish, nothing else explains this phenomenon.

Hey repertoir, I know you have done the last few Ryze reworks, do you think this set of changes may solve his issues in the long run or fix some things you wish you had to him in the past

I really like some of these changes, especially the ones that are pushing Ryze to be better late game rather than mid game. And next to all the criticism about his Ult, i for one love it. It makes it easier to use in soloq and it becomes more impactful in exchange for a really long justified CD. People don't realize though that at least in soloq this isn't an ability that you play around AS SOON AS it's back up again, at least not until this change happens. I'm just unsure if these Ult changes will make Ryze even more impactful in competitive.

Sorry if it's off-topic, but you talk about Azir, I might as well ask, any plan for Kalista? Meddler recently said they were the 3 ugly ducklings of LoL but here you are making changes for 2 of them, what about the 3rd one?

I play ryze occasionally, but I'm not a ryze main, and admittedly I'm not a greatly skilled player. I don't think I'm particularly bad either, and I do think my superstructural knowledge of the game is alright.

All that being said though, I'm curious as to why the non-empowered CC on W was chosen to be a slow. I understand that's a pattern with other abilities in the game (like rengar's E for instance), and that part of the point if to require ryze players to use W more aggressively/often so that there's more opportunity to attack them, but I at points use W to snap answer mobility spells (this may actually be the incorrect play, as I have stated I'm not an exceptional player) and then get away from danger safely. Has the use of a short Grounded effect been considered for the non-root variant? What are the biggest disadvantages to that as a potential approach?

I like the idea of having a Grounded effect because I (to a severe fault, if I'm being truthful) love thematic abilities, and grounding people functions a lot like traditional thematics of runic binding in that case, but I can certainly see why it may create balance issues.

Additionally, since you're moving the empowered q effect to the q tooltip, what is the rationale behind not do the same for the w?

PS: Thank you for trying to make the ult not feel like a trap to level early ^-^

My initial thoughts.

1. The empowered Q will be slightly worse vs squishies but slightly better at tankbusting (the breakeven point for +80% magic damage vs. +50% true damage is at 60MR... 78MR with sorc boots... 130MR with void staff + sorc boots). Since most targets typically have less MR than this the empowered Q seems to be a slight nerf (arguably).
2. The W change is very interesting. It's a bummer not having an instant point and click instant W root anymore... but I suppose that's the point :P. Champs with point and click CC that let the rest of the kit hit guaranteed aren't exactly good designs ( ). However the change seems to open up interesting options. Max damage is QEQWQ...EQ...EQ, quick root is EWQ (instead of WEQ on live)... will be significantly less damage because Q isn't empowered, max burst w/ speedup is QWEQ.
3. Curious as to why the damage from mana was shifted from Q and E into the W. (Not complaining... just curious as to what the decision was).
4. The 1.5s E cooldown (0.825s with 45% CDR) is gonna be machine gun fun if you can stand and spam spells. This is the largest buff I see in these changes.
5. With the reduced cooldown on W and E looks like increased sustained damage (The E change from 2.25s -->1.5s is huge).
6. I never used Ryze ult anyhow (I always leveled up his damage spells first and never trained ult until Lv17 anhow). But 4000 range will make some interesting plays if you like his ult.
7. Refreshing E on damage is interesting. So you can auto attack a minion in lane to refresh E (without being forced to spam your spells or else "waste" the empower). I like this change.
8. 100% splash on E instead of 50% is great. (On live you splash an E at level 1 and it hits tanks for 20... who then regen for 20 due to Dorans shield... effectively doing 0 damage!) This will make enemy missteps (going near a minion you can splash from) much more punishing. Very nice for lane.
9. The W returning mana is nice, and give opportunity for enemies to punish when CC is on cooldown (15s cooldown at rank 1). Makes an interesting choice.
10. The combination of the removal of root on unempowered W and the true damage on empowered Q will make it very difficult to blow up squishes. On live at full build a flash + WEQ instantly kills a squishy. This will no longer be possibly which is a significant nerf (they can flash away, and empowered Q won't hurt squishies nearly as bad). If the intent is so that Ryze can't instantly kill a squishy within a 0.75s window of a point&click root (which is likely the intent of the changes ) then power needs to be added in elsewhere... but I'm not seeing it.
11. W will no longer work with Aftershock unless empowered.
12. Overall it appears to me these changes are slightly power negative. I don't think the E buff outweighs the Q nerf and W nerf. I could be wrong though. Currently Ryze has the lowest win rate in the game (44%) so I think power will need to be added in somewhere to bring him in line. However I think these changes are healthy in the sense they remove the point and click instant W root and also give a 15s counterplay window where W is on cooldown if used for mana regen in lane (kind of like Zed's shadow).

Anyhow glad to see an attempt at balance instead of more nerfs :P

Would Riot consider a variable number of lockout/bans for pro play? For example in a pro best-of series in the 1st game they get 10 bans but by the 5th game they get 50 bans (40 previous bans + 10 new). Or lockout champs that were previosly played in the best-of series. This would force champion diversity on the pro’s. Then you would be free to balance for us regular players without much consideration for the pro’s.

you guys are so hypocritical. On your post about mana changes on the pbe riot claims "Mages should run out of mana if they’re casting constantly in long fights. Mages should pay clear costs when they use their spells to clear waves quickly and safely" but you're thinking about taking away the mana cost on Ryze's W and letting it restore a % his total mana.

I'm so glad we're having this discussion about resource management. What are your plans for ? Is it finally time for that rework you brought up last JUNE? Is he getting a mana bar? How do you plan on balancing his waveclear for the new meta?

you know you are playing League of Legends when there is another ryze rework

So Ryze can have 5 reworks but Mordekaiser can't get a revert? Damn even a bugfix would give us a bone! Just do something with him already please!

At late levels Ryze's ult winds up with the exact same cooldown and an even longer cast range than before. Do you think that could be a cause for concern or are the problems currently surrounding his ult more focused around early/mid game?

Ryze rework number 5 or 6 now? :P

Jokes aside it sounds pretty good, espically like the mana restore on W

Making Azir dps single target completely ruins his identity. It also removes a lot of value from landing a good shuffle in teamfights, since can only attack one of the cc-d targets . Additionally, if you remove his waveclear he needs to have a decent early game or he'll be useless as a midlaner.

If you want to balance Azir, his E is what you need to look into.

Can you please focus on making him viable for soloq, while not OP in competitive? Azir mains are suffering from this ridiculous balancing, hard nerfing a 44% winrate champion.

I wanna ask about realm warp specifically. Aren't you kind of afraid of making a really powerful realm warp available earlier in the game in pro play?

I wonder if maybe the approach should be more like, rank 1 realm warp only ryze can travel in the warp.

I like these changes overall besides w being a slow without e with reduced root duration compared to live though it is reasonable. Out of curiosity, if Ryze is able to safely gain more power into his kit, is it possible to add the spell vamp back into his kit in some different form (part the old ult from 2015)? That is one thing that I miss from his previous kits.

As a ryze main, I can see some merit in these changes. Mianly the mana refund on W, cooldown increase on the ult and making the Q bonus damage base damage instead of scaling feel like good changes.

However, I also have the following suggestions for his kit:

1. Make his ult cooldown depend on the amount of people he teleported --> effectively nerfing him in coordinated play. (However still keep his ult up very high, like 120s + 120s per champion). His ult should be very high cooldown since it's probably one of the main reasons why he is so unbalanced, decreasing the power budget will lower this impact while keeping the unique and cool aspect of the ult.
2. Letting E be the main mana cost/gate would be a good way to tune him, since his base Q & W are weak and don't need to be mana gated! This could also solve his waveclear problems of having too much of it.
3. Change his base W to a mini camille ult for 1,5s: Allowing people to dodge, while still keeping the "prison" theme and being much more interesting than another slow. (Also, prevent movement abilities in this zone, otherwise it would gain to much hidden power). Sadly this is probably much work.

I also have my concerns with some of the other changes: 4. The ult range increase at low levels will probably make him even harder to play (hello TF)!! arly ganking bot will be another thing to master. I'm still more of a fan of range increase per level (e.g. 2000 - 3000 - 4000). 5. I have found the e scaling cooldown to be very disruptive for my combos early game, It is still something that frustrates me, maybe a set 2 seconds cd, unaffected by cooldown reduction. Nerf it by using another way like increasing the mana cost!! (check point 3.)

Please get rid of Azir's dash, he is never going to be balanced with it. I know before when you guys were considering his rework, you had to choose between a shorter range with the dash or long range without it. Obviously the current iteration has not worked out so well, the dash still gives him too much safety. Please consider going back to a longer range with no dash (or disable q during dash), or I fear you will never balance him for pro.

I enjoy playing a lot of champions but I do play Azir the most. From the end of season 7 to today, Azir has received nothing but nerfs. His win rate dropped from 52% to like 45%, but since the pros keep picking him he keeps getting nerfed. At this point, I think the pre reworked Azir is actually a lot better then he is now.we all know the mini rework didn't solve the problem, Azir still has mobility and consistent dmg and self-peel. However, instead of addressing the problems, his AOE dmg, which is Azir's core playstyle, is being nerfed to single target?? What's the point of picking Azir compare to Cassiopeia, who has higher single target DPS and sustain? If you are reworking Azir again, please don't hurt his AOE, do something like the Ryze reworks you are doing on PBE, which still retained Ryze's play style. Thanks!

I think meddler mentioned that there will be no more work done on these pro-scene problematic champions and you intend to relocate those resources to other champions that need them more.

So what is this?

Played a ton of Ryze and my only concern is:

Realm Warp (R) has a longer range to make it easier to use per cast, but its cooldown is waaaaaaay up. More accessible baseline, but fewer opportunities to cast. Yes, this does make Realm Warp a more powerful spell per cast, which may seem unintuitive. However, the intention is that the extremely long cooldown means it's something that solo queue players have to think about less as a portion of their total success, but also something that pros are able to utilize less as a portion of their total success on the champion.

I'm sure some will ask "why not just replace Realm Warp?" The answer is that Realm Warp does exciting things for the champion that we like, but that the primary satisfaction driver of the champion is his core combat loop, so we'd like to keep that intact and just adjust R to be less important overall.

You are right, this isn't intuitive.

These changes are not addressing the real issues with Ryze, if anything they are exacerbating them and the infatuation with the current ultimate isn't helping either. Yes it's cool, fun and adds dimension to his game play but his real issue (which you are also addressing) was always his instant point-and-click hard CC and more recently his oppressive waveclear + roam pattern.

Additionally, what I am afraid of happening is that he's going to be so weak early that he won't really ever get a chance to get his feet off the ground. His hard CC was the only thing making him a threat and keeping him safe, taking that away and pulling power from his early laning phase is going to hurt... a lot.

There are so many gates to his power already (most of which are remnants from previous iterations of Ryze) that - combined with his skill expression which is no longer just 'point-and-click CC -> punish' anymore, Ryze just won't be a viable choice when it comes to Solo Q which I presume is a large portion of your player-base.

My thoughts?

Give up on this ultimate already, go back to the drawing board and figure out something that resonates with the cool things we love from Ryze, notably his core combat loop.

Please stop settling with something that's just nice to have in the game vs. something that resonates with the champion. Besides, this means you can still use 'Realmwarp' -style skill for a future champion whose kit could resonate with it more than Ryze has.

{quoted}

Azir

As mentioned above, Azir is also expected to see some work this patch. For Azir, I think the approach is much simpler, but will be like ripping a band aid off. The tentative plan for him is to make his soldier attacks fully single target (only dealing damage to the target the attack was order was issued on), and with the power budget that provides us, be able to buff him back up to where he was when his recent rework was shipped. The goal here would be to reduce his wave control significantly while retaining his core satisfaction as a high dps, medium/high ranged mage. More on that coming soon,; hopefully something to the PBE later this week if it seems like a reasonable path.

Thanks, Repertoir

With the Azir changes, you hinted at bringing his ranges back up a bit so he can have more of his old play style. To add the range you said you'd likely have to remove the AoE on his Soldier AAs, however the soldier piercing AA is one of his main wave clear tools, removing it would give him wave clear worse than or since only his Q will be able to deal AoE and technically his E dash but its CD is very long and damage so low it doesn't really merit it.

As kinda a middle ground, I think it would be worth testing something like Xayah passive on his Soldiers in that they deal full damage to targeted and reduced to all others in the line increasing with rank to 50%, or add an effect onto his Q that makes it so the first 3 soldier AAs after casting Q pierce all targets in a line for full damage, this would limit his wave clear early on since Q has a very long CD without ranks or his W usually isn't ranked first but it would still allow him to maintain some ability to clear waves, heck even changing the 3 soldiers = AS steroid into 3 Soldiers = piercing autos plus less AS would be a good compromise.

Spell queueing This is actually tentatively being applied globally across all champions in 8.9, but it's worth calling out for Ryze especially, because it will tend to benefit characters that cast rapidly the most. We put some tech in with Irelia to make the game process your spell casts a bit better, so if you've noticed how smooth she feels, this is likely a large contributor.

What exactly do you mean by spell queueing here?

I've noticed that with Irelia, you can press Q a moment before it resets, and it will still cast once it resets. Other reset spells are hard-locked from queueing it since it's on cooldown. Is this the buffer that's being globally implemented?

There was also a QoL change made with Rengar where movement commands could no longer munch his W or E if they were cast during Q. I think this is a great QoL change that should also be made global. Thoughts on this?

I've been a ryze main since season 2 and you removing his root is my final straw, you have been constantly punishing ryze players for years now.

You get rid of one of the only tools ryze can use to punish people with but you keep his impossible to use in solo queue ult....?

You didn't even increase the duration that spell flux is on the target but now you expect people to land hit a W after an E?

The most telegraphed attack in league of legends, how could anyone ever be rooted now unless ryze flashes

Sorry, i'm going to Heroes of the Storm until this shit is fixed. Goodbye.