Welcome to League of Legends Patch Preview
In this video we'll be covering some of the major changes coming into the next patch for League of Legends
Skarner is getting a huge suite of buffs in the next patch.
What problems are we fixing?
One thing about Skarner now that players have had a good chance to figure him out and get used to him,
we wanted to see where he really stood versus where he needed to be.
The main thing we wanted to change about him was his Crystal Slash had a scaling mana cost that went up as you ranked the skill
which constantly left Skarner out of mana and unable to do anything
We've flattened and lowered the costs accross all ranks
to make sure Skarner can always use the skill thats designed to be reusable and spammable.
Skarners attack speed per level was probably a lot lower than where it needed to be
for a fighter who does a lot of auto attacking.
We brought that up by a signigicant amount.
You know Skarner is using his Crystal Slash a lot and he's also auto-attacking
to bring that cooldown down. Without the attack speed per level,
he's just not able to do the effectively as he needs to.
Finally, we've increased the duration of Skarner's Ultimate Impale to better reflect it's ultimate nature.
It is a hard CC and it does drag people around but it didn't quite have that,
"This is my big skill, this is my marquee moment" feeling and I think that's what players
expect so we've increased that by a little bit.
We'll see where it stands after this and be evaluating from here.
Almost all of Hextech Gunblade's stats are getting hit in the next patch, what are the goals of this nerf?
We've ran some math on Hextech Gunblade and the stats that you get from the amount of gold are frankly pretty insane.
We took a look at that for these hybrid characters, you know the Akalis, Jax, those guys that are out there.
They are getting so much gold value from this single item
that it just makes sense that they buy this and they go from "Hey, this guy was manageable" into "Holy crap what do I do now"?
Instead of hitting any one thing significantly,
we've tried to hit everything a little bit to make it so Gunblade still feels like the item that
people are buying and have fun with but it's not quite as powerful.
The other thing we did was really Dominion focused. We've made the Spellvamp
on Hextech Gunblade unique. What you're seeing on Dominion is this kind of skirmishy, dueling kind of game that goes on there, is people using
the Spellvamp to stack Gunblades to become essentially invulnerable to one or two targets at a time.
We're seeing this again on Akali and Jax and also on characters like Cho'Gath
and other characters you wouldn't neccessarily expect to do this, that usually signifies a problem. That change will give
it the nerfs it needs on Dominion without us needing to effect it more on Summoner's Rift.
Corki's Gatlin Gun is getting somewhat remade,
instead of hitting for a percent of his total damage and having the number of hits scale per level, we're
normalizing it. It lasts 4 seconds at all levels, has an actual base damage
and now scales off of bonus damage instead of base damage. What are the goals here?
Gatlin Gun is kind of an old school skill thats a little clunky and needs a little help.
It has what we like to call a bad best case/worst case scenario
which means in some cases Corki's is just tearing through people doing tons of damage, shredding armor,
doing all this stuff and other times you tap a guy with it once and it doesn't do anything.
We don't like that about it, I don't think Corki players are particularily attached to that so what we did is instead
of making instead of making the duration scale as it goes up,
we've made it a flat rate that's in the middle. We actually give it a base damage as well as
scaling and we've actually bumped that base damage up from derviving out of that total attack damage to its own value.
What this does is not only gives it a buff in the now, but also allows us to tune additional knobs
and make adjustments to both of these things when balacing Corki so that we can make sure
Gatlin Gun stays a viable and not overpowered skill in the future.
We have a number of changes coming in for Dominion, from game mechanics to personal score.
What can players expect in the coming update?
We do have some Dominion specific changes, you know a lot of people
have had a chance to play Dominion, get their impressions about it.
Everybody does have their favorite strategies that they're starting to fall into now.
While we do want the meta game to settle cause we think players
will find a lot of things to counter, things they may think are too strong now,
there are some adjustments we want to do in the short term that we know
are problems. One new system we introduced into Dominion was the idea of personal score.
The old kind of kill, death, assist ratio thing wasn't a good indicator of who was doing well on Dominion and who was doing poorly.
We think that players really enjoy being able to measure themselves against the other
players in the game. The problem with personal score currently is that it doesn't reward all actions that make you successful as a team in Dominion.
It really does a good job of rewarding offense and kills
but it does not do a good job of rewarding minion pushing or defense of points. Those are really
important actions in Dominion as I think a lot of people have started to figure out more and more as time has gone on.
So what we've done is we've increased the amount of personal score you gain
by activiely defending points against opponents as well as increased personal score gain from pushing minions.
This will mean if you're that player that goes bottom
and does the lane pushing and messes around bottom while your team teamfights top, instead
of coming out with a lower score regardless of your performance,
your score will start reflecting your contribution to your team.
One of the changes that looks smaller on paper that it acually is is ambient xp reduction.
We've reduced ambient XP by about 10% for all characters.
One thing we're seeing a lot on Dominion is hyper carries
and very rapidly scaling characters are seeing a lot of play and a lot of dominance on
Dominion and one of those things that is contributing to that is the inevitibility of a late game.
This XP nerf is going to reduce the inevitibility of that into closer
or longer games so when you take a hyper carry champion, instead of being like "I know I'll get to this point and then I will
dominate", you go, "If the game gets to this point, I know I'll be stronger"
so Im kind of betting on a long game. This allows teams to develop strategies
around these hyper carries and around that different game length.
We will be looking at this as a general balancing point in the future. We want to start
with the 10% XP reduction and we're going to continue to look at XP, gold,
and other factors that are determining game length and scaling of characters.
One mechanic in Dominion is that when you kill enemies, you reduce the enemy Nexus health.
This works up until the enemy Nexus is at 125 health or lower
in which kills stop counting against it. What this change aims to do is to make sure that the early game matters,
right now we're seeing a lot of teams get to the 125 to 125 state
regardless of the early game actions and we don't think that's a very good diferentiation of skill. We think; early game
should matter, mid game should matter, and late game should matter
and this changes one step in the direction of making that be completely balanced
and even. We'll be looking ar more adjustments as we go forward
but we think this is going to have a pretty major impact on making sure the most
skilled team wins every game on Dominion.
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