What’s up guys it’s me Jeremy!
With pre-season 8 only a few months away, Riot has been hard at work figuring out the
perfect keystones to introduce with the upcoming rune update.
In the interest of gaining some early community feedback and suggestions, Riot Meddler opened
up a discussion on the official League boards to gather some ideas for the final keystone
in the Inspiration tree.
This lead to Meddler messing around with a bunch of keystone ideas, and also talking
a lot about the designs that they have tested.
Today we want to showcase some of these keystone concepts that Riot had been considering, but
were eventually rejected.
One player named Velzard of Koz came up with the idea of allowing a player to demolish
a small part of a wall, with the idea that it would be pretty niche based on whether
or not you had a gap closer on your champion.
Meddler responded that Riot actually tested a similar rune that worked on the same basis,
but had a different execution.
The rune actually gave you the ability to walk through thin walls, meaning some terrain
could basically be ignored while other parts could not be traversed.
During the testing, it was found that junglers were the only ones to really benefit from
it, although Meddler also noted that Velzard’s suggestion of allowing players to destroy
walls might actually be an improvement on that design, since it wouldn’t be so limiting.
He also mentioned that despite it being a cool idea, Riot cares a lot about making things
look good, and the art cost of doing so would be pretty out of scope right now.
They could always go for something closer to a mini Bard E to get the same practical
effect, but assuming the destruction was meant to be permanent, having a permanent Bard tunnel
on various parts of the map would probably not look that good in game.
A couple of players suggested what Riot call ‘post death effects,’ meaning they would
allow you to keep contributing to a fight even if you were picked off early on.
This would potentially be pretty broken on a lot of champions, but a player named Cannaletto
suggested it with a twist—make it so none of your attacks or abilities deal damage,
so you can only contribute utility or CC for a few seconds.
This would make it a pretty terrible keystone on carries, but that would keep it balanced
by turning it into a pretty cool tank or support oriented keystone.
Meddler commented that Riot had tested something similar with a Karthus passive-style effect,
but Riot’s twist was to make it so you could only cast abilities on allies.
The feedback from testing resulted in it being pretty underused, with people generally not
liking post-death abilities because the level of variance in their effectiveness is really
high—Meddler lists Sion, Zyra and Kog’s passives as examples.
That being said, Riot are still looking into ways to make it work, but they want to find
a way to give players some power that isn’t totally reliant on them dying to make it a
bit more reasonable.
One really cool suggestion from a player named DarkRitual was called the ‘Black Market
Access Card,’ that would give you the ability to buy stealth wards, mana potions, and assorted
other items that are otherwise unavailable.
He suggested that they could be rebalanced versions of removed items, or new unique items.
Meddler mentioned that he saw a lot of potential in the idea, and that they had actually tested
some similar ideas—although none quite like this.
Despite it being a pretty awesome concept, there are a lot of hurdles attached that Riot
would have to overcome.
To start with, despite offering a fair bit of power, it wouldn’t feel as satisfying
to use as other keystones.
It would also add a lot of complexity, since it can dramatically change the game for both
your team and the enemy team when you are using new exclusive items.
There’s also the drawback of heavy balance and maintenance—it takes a lot of time for
Riot to keep things balanced and bug free, and you could argue that they should spend
that time working on items for everyone, rather than items for an exclusive keystone shop.
The next suggestion came from Monado II, suggesting an ability to turn a friendly ward into a
trap that would be activated by anyone that gets too close.
Meddler responded that a very similar concept had been tested already, causing all wards
placed by the keystone wielder to shoot little lasers at nearby enemies.
These shots would slow them (and actually deal damage to them in some versions!).
Unfortunately it lead to some perversion of how the vision system was meant to function,
and depending on which version of the keystone was used, it would either be frustrating to
counterplay or would make your wards too easy to destroy.
However, Meddler noted that Monado’s approach of requiring it to be done to a specific ward
could actually mitigate some of those issues.
Riot would have to do some fine-tuning to the cooldown and mechanics, but it’s something
that may actually potentially be tested again thanks to Monado’s suggestion!
Player ‘Rovert DuBelmont’ inquired about the potential of tweaking vision as a possible
keystone route, maybe in the form of enhanced wards.
Meddler’s response was pretty straight forward.
Any vision dedicated keystone—assuming it was balanced and therefore a good choice—would
lead to a world where at least one person per team (probably the support) would have
to take that keystone, which would also bind them to a specific primary tree.
This removes the ability to choose your own playstyle for 20% of players, basically defeating
the point in the system.
On top of that, it’s likely a keystone that, despite its effectiveness, would be pretty
unsatisfying for most players.
After all, most players don’t enjoy buying wards, paying for a sightstone or playing
support in general, and a vision focused keystone would essentially be more of the same instead
of anything new and exciting.
Our next scrapped keystone was spotted by user Naalith, who asked about the alchemy
tab shown in the Summoner Specialist keystone’s example gif.
Meddler gave a little context, mentioning that the Alchemy tab was actually leftover
from a previous keystone test, and Riot simply reused the UI while prototyping Summoner Specialist.
When pressed about this previous keystone, Meddler revealed that Riot had been toying
with the idea of letting players buy from a set of unique elixirs that would give you
some stats and a unique effect.
You couldn’t buy them with gold, it would either be tied to a cooldown or a currency
unique to the keystone.
Apparently it had some interesting play, since you could gain bonuses like some AP and a
Luden’s style mini proc, but it was too complex and the end result was too stat driven
for Riot’s liking.
One suggestion based on the current Biscuit mastery was made by Vonler, who suggested
a way to affect potions with your rune choices.
His example was called Potion Dealer, giving players the ability to use health potions
on an allied champion.
Riot Stashu responded in a similar way to Meddler in the previous example; alchemy inspired
keystones just hadn’t worked the way Riot would have liked.
On the other hand, they hadn’t considered trying anything like Vonler’s Potion Dealer
concept, although it may run into the same issues as the vision-based keystone in that
it would become a must-pick for supports, forcing them to sink lots of gold into health
potions to gain the benefit from it.
Riot Meddler also added his own thoughts on a few rune concepts that haven’t been tested
until now.
One example was Hextech Multitool, another idea from DarkRitual, that would reduce hextech
item cooldowns by 5 seconds, and give them individual cooldowns rather than the current
shared system.
Meddler mentioned that although an item master keystone could have promise, it would also
become a trap for players if they shouldn’t really be stacking those items.
In that case, it would be important to add something more unique than the removal of
shared cooldowns, to make it both more fun and avoid any burst damage issues from stacked
hextech items.
A player named Jabalor also suggested two ideas that haven’t been tested yet, the
first of which was called Witch Skin, causing enemy spells having a chance to grant mana
or a shield if your mana bar is full.
He also suggested a keystone called Iron Bones, causing you to lose 10% of your movespeed
but also take 15% less damage.
Meddler noted that they were interesting ideas, especially the tradeoff of damage reduction
for a self slow, but apparently they would make better fits for regular runes rather
than keystones.
He mentioned that keystones need to have a certain power level and some kind of tactical
play to them, whereas these effects would be pretty passive.
Overall there were some really cool ideas coming out from the community, and it was
really cool to see Rioters actively reaching out to the players for suggestions, as well
as giving feedback and what would work and what wouldn’t.
Hopefully we see more of this type of thing from Riot in the future, and maybe we’ll
see a player suggestion actually become the third Inspiration tree keystone—although
it’s unlikely to be any of these, since most of them have been tested and scrapped.