Welcome to the League of Legends Patch Preview. I’m Phreak and I’m here with Morello, Lead Champion Designer.
Together we’ll be discussing some of the gameplay changes coming into the next update for League of Legends.
Note that this video does not cover every single change, but will explain the thought process behind some of our decisions.
We have a huge set of changes to Shen coming in the next patch, with every one of his abilities getting a change. What are our goals with these changes?
One of the big goals with the Shen buffs was to make him scale better throughout the game.
Vorpal Blade’s health return now scales off of Shen’s maximum health, even if allies hit it.
This means as Shen gets tankier, his Vorpal Blade heal is still relevant.
We’ve taken a similar approach in increasing the health scaling on Ki Strike.
He will continue to be a threat and make other players want to attack him, which is a primary role of a tank.
With primary tanks like Alistar, while they’re being disruptive and stunning enemies, they’re preventing the enemy team from dealing any damage.
We wanted to take a similar approach to Shadow Dash. When Shen hits someone with Shadow Dash, they deal reduced damage to Shen for the duration of the taunt.
This means that even though they’re attack him, their total damage is still going down over the course of a team fight.
One common complaint from Shen players is how constrained he is for energy.
In longer fights, we wanted to give Shen a way to restore energy if he plays smart and looks for opportunities to do so.
Shadow Dash will now restore energy based on the number of enemy champions taunted.
This means that if Shen can land a clutch Shadow Dash, he’ll get a lot of energy back and be able to use a lot more abilities.
Another way we’ve let Shen manage energy is by adding energy restoration to Ki Strike.
In addition, his attacks will lower the cooldown of Ki Strike, instead of when he gets hit and while Feint’s shield holds, that rate is doubled.
Therefore, if Shen can get in there and manage all of these elements, he’ll be getting energy back much faster than we see currently.
Sona has taken the throne for “best support champion” for a while. We do have some Sona nerfs coming into this patch. How are we bringing her in line?
The Sona changes are completely oriented around her early game power.
By reducing the power on the rank 1-4 auras and letting them catch up at rank 5, we get to remove some power from early game Sona and balance her out more effectively.
But we get to keep what’s fun about Sona intact, which is the active abilities.
There is a new thing that Sona players can now think about, which is “Which aura do I want to spec into?”
Since Sona’s auras now get noticeably stronger as they rank up, you can spec into which aura you want to go to and get to rank 5 first, which is a new decision for Sona players to make.
We also have a number of changes to Soraka: We’re tweaking the mana costs on Starcall and Astral Blessing.
We’re also upping the mana given on Infuse but removing its ability to give mana to Soraka. What are the goals with these changes?
The Soraka changes revolve around two things:
Increasing her ability to restore mana to friends and support in a unique way, as well as reducing her immovability in lane due to her own resource sustain.
By removing the ability for Soraka to cast Infuse on herself, we make it so she can’t have infinite mana anymore and therefore the mana costs on her other skills are actually meaningful.
The upside to this is that Infuse now restores more mana when used on friends.
This is an interesting lane decision you can make if you want to bring Soraka and feed the other guy in your lane mana.
We wanted to make sure Soraka could still zone and harass effectively, so we lowered the cost on Starcall to make up for the Infuse change.
We have two Vladimir nerfs coming in: Lowering the bonus healing on the early ranks of Tides of Blood, and slightly lowering the damage amplification from his ultimate, Hemoplague. Why are we nerfing Vladimir?
When we lowered the cooldown on Transfusion and the cost on Tides of Blood, we liked that he was able to cast spells more often, but he was getting too much sustain early in the game.
By making the healing bonus scale with ranks of Tides of Blood, this will smooth out the curve between the early game and the late game.
Vladimir will still feel good in team fights late game, but without the abuse cases in lane early game.
In longer games and when heavily farmed, Vladimir’s late game damage was a little too high.
By reducing the damage amp on Hemoplague, this allows us to lower his late game damage without taking away the fun gameplay for Vladimir.
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