@Riot How Will Plants Spawning Work?

Meep Man·Oct 13, 2016·4 votes·17,799 views

I know WHERE they spawn will be random (with set locations of course), but how else do they spawn? What I think would be the healthiest is if it worked like this:

Game begins
Set amount of time passes
One of each plant spawns on each side of the map at a random yet set location (plants of each type can spawn in one of X locations)
Jungler goes to kill plant and does
Plant has X respawn time
After X amount of time, plant respawns at a random one of it's pre-determined spawn points, providing a 30 second warning where it is a seedling that can't be destroyed before it spawns
Go to Step 4 Basically, are each plant's respawn timers individual or does a whole crop of new plants spawn every X seconds? Is it like Monster Respawn Timers or Rune Respawn Timers in Dota?

21 Comments

RiotMeddlerOct 14, 201614 votes

Good question. That's the sort of detail we should have included in our earlier messaging, given how important that stuff is to assessing a feature like this. Bunch of details below, bear in mind this stuff's still being worked on though so exact numbers and other details will almost certainly change at least somewhat.

Each type of plant has a few specified locations per jungle quadrant that it can spawn in and limits on how many plants can be in that area at any one time. Blast Cones for example have 5 possible spawn points per quadrant, one of which happens consistently, the other four of which are occasionally. A quadrant will spawn a Blast Cone around every 3 minutes, and there can't be more than two of them in a quadrant. Their spawn locations are all near interesting walls to cross/junctions to control. Scrying Blooms and Honeyfruit have similar spawn times and rules, though use different spawn points (e.g. Honeyfruit only ever appear in the river along the walls).
First jungle clear is almost entirely pre-set. There's only slight variation in when plants spawn (~10s), so you can rely on plants generally having predictable behavior around the start and ends of clears especially. First generation of plants here spawn between the 1:00 and 2:30 range.
Early game (until around minute 15) plants only appear deeper in the jungle, so that they don't feel like they're having too strong an impact on individual lanes. As the game progresses additional spawn points closer to the lane start getting used (e.g. there are Blast Cone locations you can use to dive some towers, but they're not going to occur until around 25 minutes).
Expectation is, based off both plant spawn locations and who's travelling the map, that junglers will be the primary champions interacting with plants early to early-mid game, but eventually they'll be things that are occasionally relevant to any member of a team.
Version we're currently testing is that plants have a 30s growing time (telegraph of when they'll be useable). They'll appear on the minimap once you've seen them, but won't be removed if someone uses them out of your vision until you revisit that spot (like small jungle camps or buildings in an RTS game). While a plant is growing there's no way to interact with it.
After they've been used plants leave some withered remains behind for a short time (currently also 30s). As a result you sometimes won't want to interact with a given plant if you're concerned about signalling to the enemy team that you've recently been through a particular area.
While there's some variation in where/when plants spawn the script that controls them is also designed so that it will distribute plants fairly between the sides of the map (one team shouldn't get screwed) and will pull back towards average results over time (if spawns have been much less frequent or infrequent than they should be on average for a little while the next period will have more/fewer spawns to compensate).

That's the stuff I can think of at present, are there any other details you'd like to know more about?

NeobarneyOct 14, 20165 votes

This in all honesty doesn't sound like a good change to me.

I do hope that in pre season you guys can look at some of the more "drastic" changes such as this one and revert back in case they don't work out, hopefully you guys have learned from past errors.

My biggest issue with this, is that the game in all honesty does not need anymore RNG mechanics included. I see why you guys would want to add more dynamic to the jungle role, however this is not how you do it, in my opinion, JG camp buffs are being removed because they're not as impactful, correct? Then make them more impactful. These Smite/JG changes feel like you're making the Jungler role easier in regards to clearing the Jungle, however the Jungle is not difficult to clear in the first place and while most Junglers take similar paths to clear and move arround the jungle, JG pathing between Junglers is just that, similar.

You don't need to add a Ziggs satchel in the Jungle, you don't need to add free health in the river, Jungle dynamic is change every.single.season and while that's not a bad thing, as someone who has been playing League for many years now, this feels a little over the top.

I do hope you guys see why the community is concerned and hopefully this time arround you guys listen to our feedback. Hopefully it won't take an entire season this time.

Thank you for reading my wall of text.

TL;DR: PLANTS BAD, RNG =/= SKILL (DRAKES OKAY BECAUSE THEY ARE ALL GOOD), RITO PLS LISTEN, VISION PLANT IS OKAY IF NOT FOR RNG (SIMILAR JG MECHANIC WOULD BE COOL,LIKE YOU SMITE SOMETHING AND IT SHOOTS AN ASHE E AND GAIN VISION SOMEWHERE IN THE MAP).

THANK YOU.

RiotMeddlerOct 14, 201611 votes

I can understand the concern, would love to chat further about how you feel once this stuff's on PBE in particular. We seem to have missed the mark a bit on our communication, since the impact of plants seems to have been pretty oversold. They're something you interact with occasionally, with some variation to exactly where you'll find them, not something that will heavily determine the outcome of a game or that you'll encounter all over the place. As with the elemental dragons and the controlled randomness there if they don't work out we'll heavily modify or remove them. One of the biggest advantages we can see to plants, compared to smite buffs, is that we're better set up to have them remain relevant over the course of a game (smite buff interactions drops off a lot after the first couple of clears, given a couple of effects dominate the others and the need to keep smite charges for PVP smites, baron and dragon).

RiotMeddlerOct 14, 201612 votes

Oh, other thing I wanted to mention. There's certainly a chance that, as with anything we do, this won't work. We do believe it's important to keep trying to make the game better each year though and that sometimes good changes may look kind of weird or unnecessary at first glance. Would be highly appreciated if, even if some of you folks are pretty sceptical about this concept, you gave the details a look when they hit PBE next week and gave us feedback on how you feel they affect games there.

Sir ClashOct 14, 20161 votes

I love your attitude about game design. Thanks for all you do! :)

NeobarneyOct 15, 20161 votes

Thank you for replying and for sure will check out, I'm not hellbend on disliking all changes done to the game, maybe the community is over reacting, maybe we're not but I guess we'll see, as always hopefully this will be a nice and good change to jungler dynamic. However I do have one concern, If It's not as impactful in the first place, as in you won't be interacting with plants all that much anyways, then why have them? Isn't that the same problem with some JG camps buffs?

Meep ManOct 14, 20161 votes

Thanks for replying bro! This was my main concern and I feel better now.

WildEmpyreanOct 14, 20164 votes

I would like to know what the thought process was for these changes, I really like them and am interested to see where these go, but, why in the assassin update. These are changes for a jungle re -work. Although I can see how these would help assassins roaming and such, I just want to know why you are implementing these specifically. Thanks.

RiotMeddlerOct 14, 20169 votes

Plants aren't intended to be particularly linked to the assassin changes. While we do class updates in the pre-season they're also the best time to make other bigger changes to the game that are more experimental and disrupt balance for a bit, since ranked's off for a while and pro play's on a break. Things like item changes, mastery adjustments, plants etc end up happening at the same time as a specific class as a result even if their goals are different.

Great MutaOct 15, 20161 votes

Hello,

I wrote a post covering multiple areas where the behavior system could use some adjustment. Would you mind taking a look at it?

The link is here: http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/player-behavior-moderation/pNE9Gnm8-my-ideas-on-how-to-fix-various-stressful-and-behavior-issues-in-the-game

Thanks

RalanrOct 13, 20162 votes

I'm starting to worry that these plants will make some junglers unable to function because their losing some pretty reliable sustain for an rng mechanic that won't always give sustain.

Meep ManOct 13, 20166 votes

Smite now heals Junglers for 100 + 10% of their max health upon using it on a monster.

RalanrOct 13, 20161 votes

Ahh. Didn't know that. That's pretty interesting (buff to tank junglers?).

Meep ManOct 13, 20161 votes

I guess. You have Smite much more often then Red Buff is up so Jungle Sustain has overall been increased with Smite and the heal plant (HONEY!). We might have a ton more jungle diversity with this increased sustain.

RiotMeddlerOct 14, 20168 votes

We've been tuning camp stats as well to account for both the replacement of smite buffs and other changes. We're also putting time aside in 6.23 to look at any individual junglers that get hit hard by the pre-season changes.

Shadow HazardOct 14, 20161 votes

I'm calling it now it will be the single target champs that take the hardest hits. The information about camp changes will for sure favor the AoE type champs.

PartFootballOct 14, 20161 votes

So since the smite reward changes are gone for a flat heal, does this open up paths such as wolves > raptor > red (as an example of an odd path) without being handicapped by not having gromp or krug buffs?

Are you tuning for leashes on camps still, or can most junglers expect to be able to clear reliably well without one?

And last question, are there any planned changes to bot lane taking camps level 1? I don't have to deal with it at my elo, but seeing pros play around it and high elo streamers take it almost every game makes me curious.

Thanks for your time Meddler, I appreciate the communication.

Meep ManOct 14, 20163 votes

I think it's very likely Fiddlesticks will need help since 3 camps were just changed to be harder to clear for him. His E is now basically useless on Blue and Red (on top of it already being bad against Gromp), and Raptors were made worse to him since Fidd prefers multiple targets, but not anymore than 2-3 for his E.

L0G1C B1TOct 14, 20163 votes

A big concern of mine is that smite buffs benefited Jungler specifically where I feel these plants (especially since I am melee and these kinda screw melee) will just be used by laners. Also Things like the vision plant aren't even close to what raptor buff did. The cool thing about raptor buff was the fact that you KNEW (when ganking or invading or taking drag) that there absolutely were no wards. You could walk around and it came WITH you, Sure there are pinks (and I use those all the time) but limited to 1 pink is harsh. SO this is a huge nerf to that play style.

Also if I am being heavily invaded (and my laners can't/won't get a pink), I can clear vision from my own jungle. That combined with a pink behind red, and smiting wolf (another tool I won't have) every time means I could reasonably protect my jungle, or play around it.

SO basically this limits my choices as a jungler. I get a knockback (useless really unless running/chasing someone), an Ashe arrow (useful for drag and stuff I guess, but very limited) and a heal that my laners will prob more often than not take from me. And I get screwed because my fav champs are melee (I already deal with Nid, Graves, Elise, etc being so jungle dominant these days :-( ).

I'll try it out, see how it feels, but even ignoring the RNG part it just seems... meh. Lose so much as a jungler... I feel jungle pathing and such will be MORE stale (now don't have to worry about smite buffs). So sad I am loosing all the nifty tricks and play styles around smite buffs. :-(.

(BTW stop using the example of card games like hearthstone to explain good/bad randomness. I don't play these games BECAUSE I hate RNG. I used to play a lot of Super Smash and in like every tournament large and small, local and national, that I have been in or just watched, we turned OFF all the dumb items and such. Brawl came out and they made the same choices you all seem to be making "we got these new Smash Balls that are cool and provide interesting gameplay" and everyone collectively said "no thanks" and turned it all off. Then of course tripping... uhg...)

~David

maxis35Oct 15, 20161 votes

my main question is about Ivern, since one of the big things about him was that he could share the red/blue buffs with people and now that the buffs are gone how will that affect him?