@IronStylus: How's Taric going?
I didn't see anything about Taric on the champion update that Fruity Sebbles put up, so I was wondering if hes on the backburner or if there is just nothing particularly interesting going on with his development?
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Slowly, from the art side at least. We've been working on a few thing that will come before Taric and are deep in production or have high-priority in pre-production for various reasons. Currently, and Scruffy can probably speak better to this, but his new kit looks like it's shaping up nicely. For us on the art side, that's huge. We can have much more narrow of a focus now that we know specific actions a champion will take and how we build the character around those actions.
Currently Narrative is helping us on high-priority stuff that's in pre-production. They sort of occupy the same area that Concept does because they help formulate the very core of the character. We think that Taric will be a big discussion in the "near future". Sorry that's so ambiguous.
That said, we have about 30 concepts of Taric from various artists. This however was done in a bit of a vacuum, back when we were moving in a direction that we really hadn't validated properly, a very much straight-forward dude in blue armor and gems. Since then, the casual discussions around him between art, gameplay and narrative aspects are aligning around something with a slightly different flavor than what we had originally anticipated, and that's good. When the official ideation sessions strike up again I think we'll have a good spring board. Narrative helps tremendously in those discussions because we want to understand what made Taric into Taric and what his current pillars of design are.
Likewise, having gameplay in place really helps as well because we're not designing in a vacuum, we're working towards the goals of fulfilling the needs of that gameplay.
He's in pre-pre-pre-production many projects are going to be coming out before him. Don't expect him to come out until late this year or early next year
It seems the champion update site only lists the next update in one of 3 categories: 1.The champion who'll be the next one to receive a model-update only(kassadin in this case) 2.The champion who'll be the next to receive a full VU,coupled with an ability update(Ryze in this case) 3.The champ who gets a complete relaunch(poppy)
Taric would most likely fall either into category 2 or even 3,but poppy has priority when it comes to relaunches and Ryze is simply much further in development than Taric(they started in 2013 working on him,even though they probably took a break at some point)
Thank you for taking the time to listen to us, Iron Stylus. While I can't speak for anyone else, I know my biggest barrier to the discussions is that although I can draw and sketch ideas, all the art I do is non-digital. My personal preferences in medium and the lack of a scanner near me makes it amazingly difficult to adequately relay what I'm seeing as possibilities. I don't think flooding your offices with hard copies of art is the solution either, so it means I have to look to sources from the internet and other games and say, "well, like this armor but not really because it should be different..." That's a very awkward exchange for me. I certainly wouldn't walk into my tattoo artist's parlor like that, and I don't like to do it to you guys either. I don't have a good solution, other than keeping up the way we have, which flooding forums with pictures and asking you to blend them so they make sense. But I think it's a lot of why the process is taking so long.
Random question I'm hoping IronStylus will pick up on if he gets a moment;
There's been a lot of discussion about the direction of Taric as a champion in his art, narrative and abilities etc. including his 'outrageous' reputation and the fact that the community sometimes see him as a well loved joke.
With regards to his visual upgrade, what sort of thought has been out into the update of his Armour of the Fifth Age skin? Is there a concerted direction in mind of retaining its humorous aspects, or is that not something you've been really concerned with preserving given that it's a skin and not central to the character?
I definitely think a great idea for the rework would be something allowing Taric to briefly stun and Blind for a bit longer with Dazzle And for his ult you could make him Reflect targeted abilities/skillshots/whatever in the direction they came from for a brief time, kind of like with Sivir's spellshield except with a 1 second channel time or something to stop him screwing up everyone's ults
So he could pull cool plays reflecting enemy projectiles back to sender with good timing by flashing in and rebounding a Caitlyn ult