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 patch 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.
The biggest set of changes in this patch is the removal of dodge as a global stat from League of Legends.
With this removal comes a significant re-work on parts of Jax, the Grandmaster at Arms.
Though dodge is being removed in general, Jax will be gaining a unique, short duration, 100% dodge ability.
For the run-down on all of his new abilities, check out the Jax Champion Spotlight by clicking the link in the video description or the box right here.
Talk to us about the Jax remake. What issues are we looking to solve and kind of champion are we looking at with the reworked Jax?
When we removed dodge from the game, the biggest question on a lot of peoples’ minds was, “What about Jax?”
We’ve answered that in a few ways and we think people are going to get excited about them, especially Jax players.
The first is that dodge is still kind of on Jax. What we mean by that is Counter Strike now gives 100% dodge for a short duration.
This is now much more reliable and consistent than the old stacking random dodge and hoping it procs during a fight.
Jax can now tactically wait for a lot of focus fire, especially physical, to come in, hit this 100% dodge, reduce a lot of damage, and then get his big payoff with the AoE stun that Jax players are used to and expect.
This is not only going to continue to promote skilled play with Counter Strike but separates the good Jax players from the great Jax players.
Great Jax players will maximize the damage reduction they get from this dodge as well as timing that stun just perfectly.
We’re really excited to see what players will do with this.
Another change we did is that the old Jax had similar cooldowns on Leap Strike and Empower.
This made Jax a burst melee mage instead of a sustained melee fighter. Instead this patch Empower’s cooldown is much lower.
This creates a lot more uptime and makes him a more sustained fighter that relies on Empowered attacks and his other moves.
Another change is to Jax’s passive. We’ve removed the old stat conversion passive that he had before.
He was getting really tanky without even trying late game while still dealing tons of damage and there weren’t a lot of gameplay or things the enemy team could do about it once it reached that point, which was pretty often.
We’ve given him a stacking attack speed buff. This allows him to be that sustained fighter we talked about earlier as well as jungle really effectively.
We’re really excited to see Jax both in lane and in jungle and see what the possibilities are there.
In keeping with dodge removal, Ninja Tabi is undergoing some changes.
It’s losing its dodge and instead gaining a percentage damage reduction from all non-turret basic attacks. What role will the new Ninja Tabi fill?
We expect that Ninja Tabi will be as useful in the same role as it was before if not more so due to the added consistency.
We wanted to retain its role as cheap early game anti-physical boots.
This will be maintained with the new damage reduction as well as having the same build path that it did before.
The final point of dodge removal is Sword of the Divine, which caused your champion to ignore dodge for a few seconds when activated. What’s the future for this item?
When we were looking at Sword of the Divine, we asked, “What is this thing going to do now?” and where we kept ending up was somewhere really close to Ionic Spark from Dominion.
Instead of making not noticeably different items, we let people on Summoner’s Rift and Twisted Treeline buy Ionic Spark.
It’s a fun item, it fills that “proc attack speed” role and it has a pretty unique feel to it, so we thought,
“Why not bring a fun and interesting item from Dominion into the Classic game modes as well?”
Riven is receiving a number of tweaks this patch. Her health regeneration is going down and some of her damage is being pushed into Broken Wings.
First, why are we nerfing Riven. Second, why are shifting her damage into Broken Wings?
Riven’s changes really revolve around hitting her laning power. We kept seeing a pattern of her dominating pretty much every lane she went against.
We hit her natural health regeneration: Since Riven has a shield, having high health regeneration combined with that meant that damage wasn’t permanent.
As hard as it is to get through the shield, when an opponent breaks it, that damage should stick.
We changed the level-up incentives on Broken Wings and Ki Burst.
You should be leveling Ki Burst in order to get stuns more frequently, lowering that cooldown and adding to your crowd control power.
Leveling up Broken Wings should be the attractive damage option.
The new level-up benefits should incentivize leveling up Broken Wings for damage and Ki Burst for crowd control.
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