We’ve got changes to Rengar, Vladimir, Yorick, the Tribunal and more covered in this episode of the Patch Overview.
Hey everybody, we’re back again this week with designer FeralPony, who’ll walk us through this patch, which is also being used for the Season Two World Championship.
While this video doesn’t cover every single change it will explain the thought process behind some of our decisions.
Let’s start with Rengar. He’s one of the newest champions in the League, but he came out a little bit weaker than we had hoped.
What are we doing this patch to give him more of that predatory punch?
Rengar wasn’t quite the ultimate predator we wanted him to be, so we’re beefing up his chasing and ambushing potential.
We’re making a couple of quality-of-life improvements to Unseen Predator that should make it a little easier for him to use this skill effectively.
Leaping between targets from the brush should now be a lot smoother, and Renger will now automatically start to attack any champion he’s pounced on.
We’re removing the cast time on Battle Roar, which will allow him to cast it while moving.
So he won’t just stop in place and angrily yell at people; he’ll be able to continue chasing them down and killing them.
There are two main reasons we made Thrill of the Hunt faster: One, this is his initiation move.
We want him to excel at this. The other is for hunting people down.
If there’s a straggler, you want to be able to go into stealth mode and catch and kill that person.
Overall this should make Rengar way more awesome and fulfill that Rengar ultimate predator fantasy.
Vladimir changes are always a bit controversial, but we have some changes in store for him this patch. What are we doing to the Crimson Reaper?
In a previous patch we reduced the health cost on Tides of Blood.
And now players are able to keep it up at max stacks whenever they want, which is effectively doubling the damage of the spell.
As a result of this, a lot of Vladimir players are stacking Magic Penetration and wrecking team fights in the mid game.
We really want Vladimir to be this late game AP carry, but because of the earlier Tides of Blood change, he’s just peaking too early.
So to compensate for the reduced risk involved in stacking Tides of Blood, we’re going to be pulling back the damage on higher ranks of the skill.
This should soften some of that mid game punch, but still allow Vladimir to do some impressive damage late game after he builds some AP.
Ziggs is also getting an interesting change to his Satchel Charge ability. Take us through it.
Satchel Charge is already a really amazing and fun ability on Ziggs, but it just didn’t have the impact we wanted.
As a result, we’re increasing the knock back distance for Ziggs’s opponents, as well as increasing how far he flies when using that ability.
This should allow him to use it as a more reliable escape method as well as allow him to get over walls he couldn’t previously.
Yorick has always excelled at bullying other champions in lane. What do we have in store for the Gravedigger this patch?
Yorick’s ability to harass his opponents with ghouls and not allow them any counter-play is really frustrating to play against.
So we’re increasing the mana cost on Omen of Pestilence.
This should bring his early game power down a little bit, as well as make him think more carefully about when and where to use his ghouls.
We’re reducing the base movement speed of Yorick’s ghouls and making it so they no longer block pathing.
This will allow Yorick’s opponents to kite the ghouls easier early game unless Yorick commits and lands that Omen of Pestilence first.
The ghoul will return to their full movement speed around level 12, so this shouldn’t impact him outside of the laning phase.
Miss Fortune and Caitlyn are two carries that have pretty much disappeared in competitive play.
What are we doing this patch to give them a real role?
For Caitlyn, due to her long range and sniper persona, she was a very strong poke champion.
But Piltover Peacemaker wasn’t really fulfilling its job, especially when firing through minions.
The damage falloff was just too steep, which caused her to underperform in lane.
Miss Fortune was never a bad AD carry to pick, but she lacked that niche or special sauce that gave her a really solid pick in a team comp.
So the first thing we’re doing is we’re adjusting Strut.
We’re decreasing the amount of time it takes for Strut to come back up, and we’re decreasing the amount of time it takes to reach maximum movement speed.
This will increase her map mobility quite a lot and allow her to see a lot of that fun lane switching and roaming gameplay a lot of the pro teams are doing right now.
The last thing we’re doing is removing the wind-up time on her ultimate.
This will allow her to lay down that heavy area-of-effect damage faster and more reliably than before.
Thanks, FeralPony! Now, changing pace a little bit, we’re gonna have Dr. Lyte, Game Design Specialist, take over the mic.
So Lyte, we’ve got some changes coming in for the Tribunal. What are they and why are we making them?
We’re really happy with the impact the Tribunal’s had on good sportsmanship and behavior in League of Legends so far, but we think there are always ways we can improve.
This past summer, we experimented with Reform Cards, which gave punished users much more feedback as to why the community voted to punish them.
However, we want to extend this additional feedback to Tribunal voters as well, and we’re adding two new features to honor their contributions to our community.
First, we’ve added the Justice Review. Here you can go over your previous cases – including the ones you skipped – to see the results.
You can also view stats on your level of accuracy, including the number of toxic players you helped remove, the number of toxic days of gameplay you helped prevent, and your longest correct streak.
We’re also adding the Halls of Justice – This is a new ladder for Tribunal users to see how their contributions compare to their peers. Players will get bonus points for getting streaks of correct cases and we’re excited to see and highlight the most positive contributors to our community.
Lastly, we did some research and found that the vast majority of Tribunal voters don’t come to the Tribunal for the IP rewards
They’re actually motivated by the opportunity to improve the community.
In addition, we discovered that the group of players who were motivated purely by IP, these players were actually the least accurate voters in the tribunal.
In light of this evidence, we’ve decided to run a large-scale experiment to replace IP rewards with these two new features.
We believe this change will improve Tribunal accuracy overall.
That’s it for us for this episode of the Patch Overview.
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