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8.6 Duskblade and related changes

RiotRiotRepertoir·3/8/2018, 7:01:36 AM·52 votes·56,290 views

Hi everyone,

This is a thread to discuss the upcoming Duskblade changes we have aimed for 8.6 and some associated champion tweaks we have coming alongside them. Keep in mind this is all tentative and subject to change, but I'm trying out using threads like this to make some upcoming change and our iterative process more visible. For those unaware, here are the current Duskblade changes:

  • Melee Damage :: 60 / x / 320 >>> 30 / x / 200
  • Ranged Damage :: 45 / x / 300 >>> 30 / x / 200
  • NEW :: Melee basic attacks instantly kill traps and wards disabled by Black Out
  • NEW :: Black Out won't be triggered if the owner is using a Red Sweeper (so you can't waste it)

The above changes are a large damage nerf to the item. We think the other additions are powerful and good additions to the item, but several champions have been crutching on the high powered damage tuning of Duskblade, and we're looking to inject that power lost back in. I think these changes are pretty generous, but that's pretty subjective, so let me hear it if that's way off. The champions we've chosen are who we identify as the most core users; if we thought they could easily swap to a different build and be just as effective on 8.6 as they currently are on 8.5, they probably aren't on the list. If you don't see a certain champion, that's probably why. Feel free to ask either way. It's possible I've forgotten an important user. Below is the list of champions and changes we're looking at helping out:

Kayn Kayn's adjustments are pretty straightforward damage buffs. They may not fill the damage void left by Duskblade entirely, but W's damage especially is more broadly applicable than Duskblade's was. Also, Zenon (Kayn's creator) has some passive tweaks going on that may also make it into the patch. Those are aimed at flattening his passive's charging experience and helping out lane Kayn, but he'd have better context on that than I do.

  • W Bonus AD Ratio :: 120% >>> 130%
  • R Bonus AD Ratio :: 150% >>> 175%

Kha'Zix Kha'Zix is looking at a significant Bonus AD ratio bump to his Q. We've chosen this to help fill the damage void left by Duskblade in a way that is also in line with effective isolation play (rather than passive damage, for example). The damage bump to Q is so significant because we've also removed his W's bonus damage to monsters. Mechanics like these enforce that he could basically only jungle, and we may as well bridge the gap between jungle and solo lane play a bit where possible; for what it's worth, I don't expect this to make him a primary laner by any means.

  • Q Bonus AD Ratio :: 120% >>> 150%
  • REMOVED :: W 20% bonus damage to monsters

Miss Fortune Miss Fortune's buff is a very straightforward AD growth buff, which is also probably the smallest on the list. The reason for that is that of the list here, she seems closest to being able to effectively transition to other builds without significant cost to performance.

  • Attack Damage Growth :: 1 >>> 2

Shaco Of the stuff here, I'd say Shaco's is most experimental. These changes reflect my understanding (which, admittedly, could be off) that Shaco players feel pretty crappy about their early game because they feel forced into putting points in a Q that yields them literally no damage on rankup. These changes hope to be power neutral alongside the Duskblade changes, but an increase in satisfaction. By flattening Q's invis duration to 3 seconds and removing the CD return mechanic, he should be able to put early points in his E while feeling like Q is still fulfilling its purpose. If he gets to max E, he gets more early game damage and has more control over the outcome of the early game. You'll notice that Shaco has the most significant changes, and that although his damage numbers are not being outright increased like others, his kit's damage should come online sooner and give him needed agency over the outcome over the game rather than relying on Duskblade 1-shots in the later parts. The E slow nerf is to offset some of the increased power of his very early ganks provided by a meaningfully longer invis duration. 3 seems like a reasonable maximum duration for his invis given that it used to be 3.5 pre-rework, and that was at a time when dropping a pink ward when he was around was much more effective than options against his current invis.

  • REMOVED :: Reduced cooldown on basic attacking after casting Q
  • Q CD :: 16/15.5/15/14.5/14 >>> 16/14.5/13/11.5/10
  • Q Duration :: 1.5/2.25/3/3.75/4.5 >>> 3
  • E Slow :: 20/22.5/25/27.5/30% >>> 10/15/20/25/30%

Talon Talon's a pretty simple case of filling in some of his lost damage in a way that we believe will be functional and satisfying to players that enjoy him. His passive damage will continue to scale past level 11 up through level 18, and his R Bonus AD ratio is increased.

  • Passive Damage :: 75 / x / 175 (levels 1-11) >>> 75 / x / 245 (levels 1-18)
  • R Bonus AD Ratio :: 80% >>> 100%

Wukong Wukong is similarly getting some damage buffs, most notably to his Q, which tentatively now increases its AD ratio with rank.

  • Attack Damage Growth :: 3.2 >>> 4
  • Q Bonus AD Ratio :: 10% >>> 10/20/30/40/50%

Zed More damage bumps. Giving Zed some Base AS to make his attacks come out a bit more quickly and increase his dueling threat, as well as some ratio bumps on his base kit.

  • Base Attack Speed :: 0.651 >>> 0.658
  • Q Bonus AD Ratio :: 0.9 >>> 1.1
  • E Bonus AD Ratio :: 0.8 >>> 0.9

Editing this in since I forgot: Quinn also has some stuff coming from Xenogenic, and August has some stuff for Rengar, so that's why they're not mentioned here.

That's it for now! This stuff should appear on PBE tomorrow. If you have questions, let me know!

387 Comments

ChickenWrap3/8/2018, 7:35:44 AM38 votes

Hey Repertoir. I'm liking the changes so far to Shaco. It looks like you guys put a little bit of thought into how you were going to approach this and I seriously appreciate that, because you're right. Shaco is so reliant on Duskblade (as he has almost no good base ratios and scales entirely off of items) that if he doesn't get it fast, he's incredibly weak. He's a feast-or-famine champion with no easy way to feast, as it were, which was really frustrating to play as.

The 3 second flat stealth is a buff early-game, but a clear nerf late-game, which is fine, because Shaco still gets what he needs to reach his target, but the enemy team can see the poofs of smoke happening closer to them. Shaco already builds lots of movespeed items as is. It's just too bad that it doesn't out-time certain shields anymore.

My primary concern is that Q is going to feel very bad to level up now, since you can dump one point into it for the 3 second stealth and then if you're playing AD Shaco, neither boxes nor Q is a good choice for the secondary skill to level up. Do you have anything in the works if Shaco feels too weak after the Duskblade changes? Perhaps adding a base damage ratio to his Q, or changing his spells around a bit so that he has a little more base damage and a little less scaling damage so that he becomes a little less item reliant, like other assassins? Perhaps allowing level-ups in W to reduce the time it takes to arm the trap so that they're useful to drop in team fights?

Gildarzt3/8/2018, 9:05:15 AM21 votes

How disguise a nerf...

{quoted}

Shaco Of the stuff here, I'd say Shaco's is most experimental. These changes reflect my understanding (which, admittedly, could be off) that Shaco players feel pretty crappy about their early game because they feel forced into putting points in a Q that yields them literally no damage on rankup. These changes hope to be power neutral alongside the Duskblade changes, but an increase in satisfaction. By flattening Q's invis duration to 3 seconds and removing the CD return mechanic, he should be able to put early points in his E while feeling like Q is still fulfilling its purpose. If he gets to max E, he gets more early game damage and has more control over the outcome of the early game. You'll notice that Shaco has the most significant changes, and that although his damage numbers are not being outright increased like others, his kit's damage should come online sooner and give him needed agency over the outcome over the game rather than relying on Duskblade 1-shots in the later parts. The E slow nerf is to offset some of the increased power of his very early ganks provided by a meaningfully longer invis duration. 3 seems like a reasonable maximum duration for his invis given that it used to be 3.5 pre-rework, and that was at a time when dropping a pink ward when he was around was much more effective than options against his current invis.

  • REMOVED :: Reduced cooldown on basic attacking after casting Q
  • Q CD :: 16/15.5/15/14.5/14 >>> 16/14.5/13/11.5/10
  • Q Duration :: 1.5/2.25/3/3.75/4.5 >>> 3
  • E Slow :: 20/22.5/25/27.5/30% >>> 10/15/20/25/30%

Buffs:

  1. Less Q cd at levels 3, 4 and 5.
  2. More invisibility at levels 1 and 2 on Q.

Nerfs:

  1. No cdr when you attack after Q
  2. Less invisibility duration at levels 4 and 5
  3. Less slow at levels 1, 2, 3 and 4
  4. Duskblade nerfs

Im sorry, im really sorry, but im fucking tired of your lies, im been here for 8 years maining shaco last 6 and every time you say "we will compensate / buffs / stuff shaco" becomes in a nerf.

You are lying to our faces and im tired of this.

Shíny3/8/2018, 7:21:48 AM21 votes

Nocturne?

The Yetii Rider3/8/2018, 7:29:22 AM13 votes

Assassins are early game champions. How is increasing Talon's damage after level 11 supposed to offset the loss of damage from his first item? That seems a bit ridiculous, don't you think?

I think Shaco needs way more work than this. Yes, Volibear needed it more, but Shaco deserves the amount of attention that was given to Volibear and a real update to his kit. The change to Hallucinate to completely remove its damage in favor of unreliable crowd control is...stupid. Shaco is an assassin, if his crowd control is effective he's going to be built tank. Same as Rengar when his Bola Strike was point and click, same as Ekko when his stun was a longer duration, same as Elise constantly in the past. I honestly do not understand why you keep pushing for assassins to have crowd control. It isn't something that belongs with them.

Are assassins unfun to play against? Yes. That shouldn't matter. Without the burst that assassins enjoy, the game suffers. We need assassins to kill mages and marksmen, hell knows that divers aren't going to do it these days (especially with a nerfed Duskblade). Shaco deserves to have some of his burst back. The "skirmisher" playstyle isn't fun. Dancing around a fight and waiting to potentially go in and just 1v1 for a bit isn't fun. If it was, people would play Nocturne. They'd play Irelia. They'd play Jax. Taking away an assassin's burst, backloading the whole thing and requiring them to mix in so many auto attacks has completely blurred the line between the diver and assassin roles, and Meddler's description of the differences between divers and assasssins was basically "assassins have more mobility" (Evelynn Akali Hah) and divers have more CC (Shaco Rengar )

I mean, Riot has ended up reclassing tons of assassins as divers without really changing their kits in any meaningful way! The two classes are just too similar. Now it's like Elise Nocturne Diana are divers. Well, Diana hasn't lost her burst. Nocturne hasn't lost his mobility. Elise has untargetability and a point and click long range gap closer.

Oh, assassins are supposed to be the best at "target access", whatever that means. Right. Vi <- Pretty sure Vi has the most "target access" in the entire game. She clicks on someone and she arrives next to them. They can't run away. They can't stop her. There are tons of videos showing that Vi's ult has no range limit because she lands on someone as they base and she travels all the way to the enemy fountain without stopping her ultimate. Am I really supposed to believe that Ekko or Zed has "better" target access than Vi? And if Vi has better target access than any assassin, why is she not an assassin?

Please answer, Repetoir. I know you're busy and I know you've been talking up a storm all day. Good on you, I appreciate it. But I am not satisfied with the state of the diver class after the class reworks were canceled. They don't have their own itemization. You can't tune the entire class by changing around item 3147 oritem 3031 like you can do with other classes, and the divers themselves do not have a predictable baseline pattern of play.

More importantly, divers lost a ton of survivability with the tank update, which I totally agreed with. Items like Sunfire Cape and Dead Man's Plate were too effective as single target pickups. But without an update to follow that up, divers are just squishier as a class with no compensation. How is that fair? Why has Riot remained silent on this topic? Does Riot have any plan for divers as a class? They (and AP assassins) are the only two classes to not have items specifically designated for them. They have very little to differentiate themselves from assassins ESPECIALLY after the assassin update, so its no wonder they poach asssassin items and use them better. They still have front-loaded burst.

TheNthDimention3/8/2018, 7:06:01 AM12 votes

Those champions are all super strong as is. They don't need any compensation. In fact, compensation completely defeats the purpose of nerfing the item. Stop this unnecessary buffing of already strong champions. Too many other champions are super weak and need way more help than any of the ones listed.

VoraciousX3/8/2018, 7:53:15 AM12 votes

I'm just curious, why is Wukong getting buffs because of Duskblade nerfs? Isn't he supposed to be a bruiser? I wouldn't think you would even WANT him building duskblade considering that. Same for Miss Fortune? I mean I can see MF needing a buff(she's not TERRIBLY bad according to op.gg but she isn't exactly great either). Again, she isn't intended to build Duskblade. Or at least she shouldn't be.

As for the Shaco changes. I kind of like them in that he gets access to his invisibility sooner, but I also kind of don't, because there's barely any reason to level this ability at all anymore(You have no escape anyways after going in, so there's almost no reason to want earlier CD, and even if the earlier CD WAS attractive, it's literally only reducing the CD by 1.5 seconds late game. Feels like it'll be a pretty big nerf to late game Shaco not having that extra invisibility time(it can be hard to reach opponents even with the current fully maxed Q on occasion). I mean I get that this is to make his early game better but I think overall this will not be power neutral and will sort of be a nerf. I could be wrong, but just from looking at the changes that's what it's looking like to me. His E slow is already not that great(he definitely can't catch up to a target without like 2-3 of them unless they're immobile. Been a while since I've played the guy, but this is from past experience, as I have played him quite a bit, though admittedly not AD).

The Fake Shaco3/8/2018, 8:13:52 AM12 votes

Even if I'm certain we're not all going to agree on how we feel about the changes, thank you for posting something that seems to be a semblance of understanding what feels innately bad about shaco.

To add to it, and somewhat repeat what others have said: The kit as a whole feels weak sometimes.

Q - No damage (and the rank 1 problems your changes are aimed at) W - Unreliable for fights, undocumented AI changes and undocumented loss of CC and displacement immunity. E - Damage is abysmal for what is our only relaible non-auto damage source. (At least, in game it feels that way) R - Similar issues with W due to box triangle, but probably the spell with the least issue. Also the spell that adds the most power in his kit due to double-procs and being a huge damage amp when shaco's damage is all in his autos.

It's hard to feel good about it when our only reliable damage is "Auto and throw a weak E" in a few different forms.

Though honestly, hearing about shaco at all from someone, and hopefully a little discussion about him with you (because we really feel ignored sometimes) would be great. We know shaco's unfun to play against sometimes. We know he can be strong right now. We just want him to feel good as a champ.

PS: AP shaco feels like it was hit with a bat and left to dissapear and I miss the trickster playstyle it invoked rather than AD's oneshot from stealth. Box baiting and predicting and outplaying is extremely fun and it's sad that it is vastly inferior due to the box problems and other things. (Passive amp adds AP damage after the 130% multi not before)

Souji3/8/2018, 8:25:19 AM12 votes

Finally Talon's passive scales past 11. We've been asking for this.

Kenpãchi 3/8/2018, 10:39:55 AM8 votes

Hey @RiotRepertoir don't you guys think zedZed W cooldown is too high , I mean his only way off trading is 22 sec cd , and electrocute is 50 sec lvl1 aswell , which makes his early game so weak , do you guys have any plans for that ?

Ikarlok3/8/2018, 12:55:49 PM7 votes

why riot hate shaco so much :C ?

cocacolalips3/8/2018, 9:06:13 AM7 votes

aren't you worried nobody is going to buy duskblade anymore? it losts ~50% of its damage and the price doesn't change to reflect that.

the only champion that is going to buy it still is khazix because he can spam the effect one bazillion times a fight, everyone else is most likely going to skip it, like they did one year ago after you also nerfed the item.

I feel like we have been all over this 3 years back to back, you introduce/rework duskblade during the preaseason, it's op, you nerf it, nobody buys it anymore, repeat the following year.

Shaydrox3/8/2018, 1:40:52 PM6 votes

First off, massive thanks to you, RiotRepertoir. Many people were freaking out about what seemed like small compensation buffs, compared to the large reduction in Duskblade's damage.

This is exactly what I was hoping to see for Talon. This helps him scale rather than rush a ridiculous powerspike item and then slowly fall off in damage. The ultimate ratio buff seems juicy (might even be too much) but I 100% agree that his ultimate could use most buffs as it feels a bit weak in his current state. Also the passive scaling past lvl 11 is something many Talon players on the TalonMains subreddit have been talking about too. It will also help out when not crazily fed. I'm happy to see my champ getting some love with these Duskblade nerfs ^^

RiotAD Yuumi3/9/2018, 1:16:19 AM5 votes

Rengar:

Base AD:: 65 >>> 67 E (bola) Bonus AD ratio :: .7 >>> .8 (applies to both base and empowered bola) R leap bonus damage Total AD ratio :: .3 >>> .5

Buffing some the ratios for Rengar's all-in to compensate for direct damage lost on Dusk.

Also looking to add some base AD to assist in early jungle clears.

Erdamon3/8/2018, 7:46:40 AM5 votes

Hello Repertoir,

I apologize for going offtopic here but I would really like to ask, do you have any precise info on what Rumble changes are currently being tested/theorized, and what will most likely make it to the PBE in the near future?

Monster mode3/8/2018, 8:04:42 AM5 votes

Its atleast going the right direction for shaco with stuff like this coming up

But could we get some sort of scaling on Q, Because we'll lose 250 damage just from the duskblade nerfs

Zed genius3/9/2018, 2:23:54 PM4 votes

Do you have any plans on removing shadow reaper and giving zed his W bonus ad back at some time? It really feels worthless and u get like 10/20 ad unless u are playing vs a full items jhin with 800 ad