Anti-Paladins hurt my brain! As if that's a real class haha. I sort of see Morde as a Sorcerer who got just enough strength to move in Heavy Plate unencumbered and uses a magical mace that allows him to spellcast without penalty and then proceeds to wreck everything the DM throws in his path while randomly and, quite confusingly healing his allies >:)

I think it's fine to talk some shop as it's a very real part of my day-to-day. Surprisingly perhaps it's the opposite on skins:

Last year we pushed stuff back (and made, begrudgingly, decisions to cancel some projects) as often as we had to because we didn't have an effective way of tracking production pace as the team grew to almost double it's 2014 size. This year we've still had to cut a couple of things for various reasons but absolutely no content from personalisation has slipped a patch, which is pretty incredible.

Last year we had a pretty intense push to build a world class team with much stronger structure and try our best to make a skin for as may of our champions as possible. We learned a lot, but found that it took a toll on everyone, was impossible to manage and was very hard on other teams trying to co-ordinate with our own. This year by holding ourselves to timelines and goals we were able to work well with our awesome promo team, champion, champ up teams, esports, merch and even live systems (such as the Project Caches).

I hope that your perception is at least in part due to the results of us really striving as a team to make each year better than the last and keep driving the quality bar up for LoL content, despite the challenges we face! As for this skin-heavy PBE cycle part of it is that skins take a while to develop and the launch dates don't always reflect when the work began or the bulk of it was done. You also might see a lull before a big set like Star Guardian because most of the team is hard at work on that - so really we are working hard on something all the time.

One last thing is that we have conversations every day about player value and how we think each skin is shaping up. If there's a skin in the works that isn't meeting our expectations we are very vocal about it. But the forums etc. always remind us that each day we spend polishing any particular skin is a day we're not working on a new skin for a champ that really needs one, and with 132 champs and counting that's a challenge that's not going away any time soon.

Thanks for your thoughts! I actually did the concept for Ekko so it means a lot to me.

I'm glad you love AuSol too, good to know he's got a fan base :)

I'm really happy to hear that both sets are resonating with people! And I totally agree. In a way it was my brother who planted the seed in my head. He'd always play Rugged Garen, which I got for him one Christmas, and I'd ask him why he liked such a simple looking skin. He just said the splash looked like Aragorn and he liked the fantasy style.

Years later when I got to Riot I pitched the idea to the team unsuccessfully in many many meetings. With all the excitement of Sci Fi, DJs, Popstars, Mechas and Magical Girls, my pitch of 'What if we did down to earth classic fantasy skins' sounded a little underwhelming. But through 2015 we tried a lot of 750 thematics, which were very challenging because of the limited scope and really short development times and eventually I found a way to pitch the skin line that really clicked with people. Even then we tried to make sure there was great value in each design - Gragas had never had a serious skin, Varus conversely was always very intense in his other skins, Braum and Ryze had rarely worn shirts :P

I'm glad we got the chance to do a second set. Counting Rugged Garen, Barbarian Sion and perhaps even Greybeard Veigar there's now plenty of adventurers from which to form a balanced party. You could probably even mix in Woad King Darius, Woad Scout Quin and Woad Ashe if you wanted to have deeper ADC picks.