Changes to Orianna, Nunu, Shen, Karthus, Soraka, and LeBlanc in this episode of the Patch Preview.
Welcome, summoners, 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 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.
Orianna is an extremely high-skill champion, constantly repositioning The Ball to play well.
However, she’s held back by feeling a bit unresponsive. In the Jayce update, we’re making a few specific changes to clean up her gameplay:
First, we are shortening the global cooldown of her abilities so that abilities can be chained together much more quickly.
Second, we’re lowering the cooldown on Command: Attack but lowering its damage, while increasing the AP ratio on Command: Dissonance.
Third, we’re increasing the cast range and tether distance for Command: Protect.
Finally, we’re adjusting the values on her passive, Clockwork Windup, to rely on fewer stacks. What does this mean for Orianna?
We really like that Orianna is an interesting high skill cap champion, but one of the things that really held her back was how much you had to fight the interface when playing her.
Lowering her global cooldowns is really to improve her responsiveness and amplify your skill.
Now it’s much more possible to do big epic skill combos with Orianna’s ball:
Move The Ball into position, slow them down, and shield an ally all in one fell swoop, which is really exciting and hard to pull off. We want to make that possible.
The changes to Command: Attack and Command: Dissonance are really to solidify their roles in what they’re supposed to do.
Command: Attack is a positioning skill that allows you to get The Ball into position and set up plays, while Dissonance is much more about bust damage.
Increasing the range on Command: Protect allows Orianna to use her allies more effectively as new avenues of attack.
This means every ally you see is a possible way for you to set up a new combo on an enemy.
Additionally her ultimate now goes on a short cooldown whenever it snaps back to Orianna so if an ally Flashes out of range you don’t waste your ultimate unintentionally.
Orianna isn’t the tankiest champion, so it’s not really realistic for her to sit and auto-attack for a long period of time.
This passive change simply lets you realistically get a lot out of it.
While Nunu is a valuable support, he isn’t quite up to par as a jungler.
This patch we’re giving him some buffs for jungling, and specifically at being a strong counter-jungler:
We’re reducing the cooldown on Consume, raising its damage at lower ranks, and reducing the number of attacks required to trigger his passive, Visionary.
What were the reasons behind these Nunu buffs?
Because Nunu uses his abilities to get through the jungle, Visionary being up more often lessens his reliance on Golem buff.
Consume is really Nunu’s primary jungling spell, and so buffing it not only makes him faster in the jungle, but more able to counter-jungle since it’s really good at stealing big monsters
Global ultimates have started dominating high-level play and teams are almost forced into picking or banning Karthus, Shen, and Soraka every game.
In the Jayce update, we’re raising the cooldowns of their ultimates, especially at high ranks.
Why have we chosen those specific nerfs for these three champions?
Global ultimates apply a lot of pressure and also don’t need to worry about positioning, so to balance those out they need to have longer cooldowns than other ultimates.
With longer cooldowns, teams without global ultimates now have an opportunity to counter-attack and apply pressure back to teams that do have them.
LeBlanc has become outclassed as a high-mobility mage assassin, so we have a few buffs headed her way:
We’re raising the missile speed on Sigil of Silence, lowering the cooldown of Distortion, and adding a cool interaction to her ultimate:
Now whenever LeBlanc casts both Distortion and the Mimicked version back to back, she can choose to jump back to either origin point. What will these buffs do for LeBlanc?
Increasing the missile speed on Sigil of Silence means you can’t waste the mark it leaves behind by hitting with another spell while it’s in flight to the target.
The changes to Distortion and Mimic do a few really cool things.
First and I think most importantly, this is a really fun change. Seriously, go try it and blink all over the map. It’s awesome.
It also lets LeBlanc be much trickier. Now when you Mimic Distortion you can choose one of three places to juke to, which will really let you play with your opponent’s mind and control them.
One of LeBlanc’s primary decisions is “What spell do I Mimic?” This makes Mimicking Distortion much more attractive than it ever was before.
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