Welcome everybody to the Patch Preview for League of Legends. I’m Phreak and I’m here with Morello and we’re gonna talk about some of the changes coming up in the next patch.
First off, we’re taking some really big changes to Annie. What are the goals with that whole overhaul?
Annie at level 6 is one of the biggest nightmares in our game. From level 6 on she gets weaker until she is regulated into a stun bot.
We did the typical “make it better lategame” changes, which is lower the bases and up the AP ratios.
Annie has outdated mana costs so we wanted to take those costs down so that if you do manage to live through some of the fight and can contribute longer, you’re rewarded by being able to continue to pump out damage.
Tibbers has always been a giant AoE nuke that also kind of gives you this pet, so we really wanted to make Tibbers feel impactful. We buffed his numbers, especially as you rank him up. His survivability and damage are being improved.
Alistar’s been a hot topic since his remake a few weeks back. What are we doing with him this time?
While we’re happy with the direction of having a little more offensive punch, some damage and feeling heroic, we just gave him way too much damage.
So we have to take those AP ratios down; they’re really overpowered. The base damage on Headbutt is contributing to some of the early game burst he has.
So we need to also take a little on the base there. Originally Alistar was an initiation, CC, and support tank.
And while he still has some of that flavor, now that he has some meaningful damage and damage scaling, that health per level is unnecessary power that’s not providing a lot of gameplay for him.
So we’re gonna take that down more to what you’d see in a standard tank.
Irelia’s also been a really common topic of discussion. What are we changing with her exactly?
Since she is still highly sustainable we’re gonna push some of the damage on Bladesurge down, which is contributing up-front burst.
If she’s going to stay in there, heal up, sustain, have some tankiness, have that CC reduction, burst is just not acceptable so we needed to take the burst down. We did a lot of work on Transcendent Blades:
We want you to build offense, but there are a couple of different build paths, so we wanted to make you feel good for using either of those for AP or AD.
So now it’s additive and takes your AP and AD together to add to the damage.
We didn’t like how much Irelia could essentially get into a combat, harass you, get you pretty low, and she could use her ultimate to farm a minion wave to get back to full health.
Transcendent Blades now does half healing vs. minions. It should do the full damage so you can still farm with it, you can still use it to hit champions just as well, you can still heal off of champions.
We just don’t want you farming health off of minions. We think that’s an interaction that’s not terribly fun and is causing a lot of power problems.
When you’re fighting Irelia and you’re going “man, she’s really killing me” you don’t know what items you should be building.
We wanted to fix that by taking the magic damage on Transcendent Blades and turning it into physical so that armor should be the obvious answer against Irelia.
Hextech Revolver is getting changed this patch as well. What’s our goal with that?
We decided to go with Unique Passive instead of nerfing the number on it. It’s hard to make a stacked version of that item not feel overpowered and make a single version of that item satisfying as well.
It keeps us from making Hextech Revolver feel good on a caster and we’d like to do that.
Kog’Maw’s getting some really cool buffs this patch. What are we aiming at with these?
How people are actually playing Kog’Maw effectively, is they’re using proc and attack speed and heavy magic damage builds on him.
So we have this armor shred on Caustic Spittle which isn’t helping him, so let that shred MR instead.
We increased the range because Kog’Maw is a very unsafe long-range champion and as soon as you’re close enough to use it, you’re probably going to die.
We gave him a shorter cooldown on Bio-Arcane Barrage which is core to his kit. He’s reliant on it to deal meaningful damage, so we wanted to make that available more often.
We widened Void Ooze quite a bit. Since he doesn’t have an escape he has to rely on that slow for champions that are on the way to come get him before they get there. This should let you use it reactively a little bit better.
The newest champion, Vayne, is getting quite a lot of changes to her. What are we aiming at with these nerfs?
First let’s talk about Tumble’s mana cost. Right now she can Tumble in, shoot people, and harass exceptionally well, but because of that low mana cost, she’s not using the resources other people are.
It’s hopefully going to feel really minor for Vayne players but it’s going to be noticeable over the course of 5-10 minutes of back and forth lane play.
We wanted to lower the true damage on Silver Bolts. True damage percentage health I don’t actually think is a conceptual problem.
But I think the number might have been a little too high and it’s making it so the midgame and the late laning phase, Vayne is actually pumping out a lot of damage.
And with the safety of being able to stealth, roll around, and be a slippery character, she was bursting harder than we wanted her to, so that was another place we could shave damage.
For Condemn, there’s a lot of “shoot at the dude and do damage” and this skill should be about that pinning to wall play, so to encourage that, we’re removing a little bit of damage.
These nerfs together should make Vayne’s overall burst lower and since her sustain is already very good, I think that’s acceptable.
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