Veigar changes hitting the PBE Soon
Hey guys, SmashGizmo here to talk to you about some changes to the Tiny Master of Evil coming to PBE soon.
A vital part of Veigar's identity has always been about catching people out and 100-0ing them in the blink of an eye, so when we were looking to remove DFG, Veigar was sitting at the top of the list of characters affected by the removal. When looking at a lot of these characters, we found that the full 100-0 combo wasn't something we wanted to support and decided to re-focus them around other aspects of their kits (i.e. making Ahri more about her movement than the 1-shot combo). But for Veigar, this approach seemed off. He is the quintessential burst mage and we wanted to find a way to let him continue to function as such in a world without DFG. Enter the Q double-hit.
Q - Baleful Strike
Changed to a skill shot that stops on the second unit hit
Grants 1 AP for each unit killed
Range increased to 850 from 650
Cooldown changed to 7/6.5/6/5.5/5 from 8/7/6/5/4
By amping up the AP farming mini-game on his Q, we're creating a new path for Veigar players to achieve their dream of pressing a single button and watching an enemy disappear. As it turns out though, this worked a bit too well, and pretty early in playtesting, we found that Veigar was reliably deleting people a bit too early in the game, so we had to make some small adjustments to his ult.
R - Primordial Burst
AP Ratio reduced to 1.0 from 1.2 (Ratio on enemy's AP unchanged)
Mana Cost flattened to 125 at all ranks from 125/175/225
Cooldown reduced to 120/100/80 from 130/110/90
While 0.2 is a sizeable hit to his Ult's ratio, I want to stress that Veigar is getting quite a bit more AP from his Q in this version than on live and reassure any worried Veigar players out there that we're still seeing those beefy 2K+ Primordial Bursts in the late game with this version.
From here, we should move on to talking about Event Horizon and how it fits into the picture. With the current version of Event Horizon, the optimal use is for the Veigar player to place his Event Horizon such that it immediately stuns his opponent. This leads to the ability feeling like a particularly awkward skill shot with almost no dodgability provided to the opponent once the Veigar player masters aiming it. When we took a step back and thought about what the ability was really trying to get at, we saw the ideal Event Horizon being more about trapping your opponent in a cage for Veigar to torment than simply about stunning a dude at 1025 range. In the interest of pushing towards this ideal, we've added a delay and warning particle to Event Horizon to encourage Veigar to use it more to trap opponents than to immediately stun them.
E - Event Horizon
Has a 0.75 second delay with a warning particle before the walls appear
Mana Cost decreased to 80/85/90/95/100 from 80/90/100/110/120
Cooldown reduced to 18/17/16/15/14 from 20/19/18/17/16
Range increased to 700 from 650
This definitely represents a shift in how Veigar uses this ability, but our belief is that this version of the spell is much healthier and leads to more fun interactions between Veigar and his hapless victims. Instead of blowing up a prone target, Veigar traps his prey in a chamber of horrors and shoots Baleful Strikes at them and drops Dark Matters where they have limited space to dodge. Speaking of Dark Matter, meteors are pretty cool and frankly, Veigar doesn't get to drop quite enough of them on people's heads.
W - Dark Matter
Mana Cost reduced to 70/75/80/85/90 from 70/80/90/100/110
Cooldown reduced to 10/9.5/9/8.5/8 from 10 at all ranks
And with that, we've hit the full set of Veigar changes that are about to hit a PBE near you.
