Hey everyone, welcome to the first episode of our patch notes preview series. Today weíre going to be talking about the first patch in 2011, coming in January 4th.
Our recent patches have all had themes associated with them. Whatís this patchís theme?
This patch is about buffing things. Weíve had a couple of patches previously where itís been some tough nerfs and some really what I like to call ìmedicine changes,î
where theyíre not necessarily the most popular changes on the surface, but they help fix the game a little bit. Weíve seen this with tanky DPS and AoE in the past so we had a little bit
of leeway with this patch, so we thought with the holidays coming up weíd do some nice long-awaited buffs to some items, champions, and game mechanics.
Coming up in this patch are the Ionian Boots of Lucidity, which are cooldown reduction boots, because of the lore match between Ionia and Noxus.
Whatís the whole design philosophy that came around behind those?
With the lore matches especially, you donít know what the outcomeís gonna be before you make the items, so you donít want to do a game essential item.
You want to do something thatís a little more tertiary. So we went with the cooldown reduction boots because thatís kind of a fun item,
kind of a new build option for a lot of different champions. We can see a lot of different characters finding those reasonably desirable.
Letís talk about champions. Cassiopeia is a new champion in the league, sheís really fun, has a unique play style. What are some of the things we can expect to see done to Cassiopeia this patch?
We identified a couple of problems with Cassiopeia. Generally those were usability problems and not generally power problems.
The second of those is late game scaling so the ways we fixed that is we fixed her late game scaling by giving her a little bit more AP ratio to encourage those items
to scale further into the late-game since she really doesnít bring a lot of utility other than her damage.
We thought that was really important and making it so her move speed on her combo goes up a little bit. When you land that Q you move a little faster.
That makes it you can get into that shorter range of that E a little quicker if you have to go around minions or if you land a really skillful Q on the run, which is hard to do,
we wanted to make sure that you could be rewarded by following up with that E a little better.
Zhonyaís Ring is getting re-imagined a little bit. Itís getting removed and weíre getting two items in its stead. Whatís the rationale for having two new items?
Zhonyaís Ring actually creates a lot of limitations for us to be able to make new caster items because Zhonyaís Ring is so powerful and so ubiquitous to a casterís build,
we canít make anything thatís really comparable without just sending power creep through the roof on all sorts of champions. So we wanted split those into two items:
One that provides armor, ability power, and then the Zhonyaís active that everybodyís used to now, and thatís the defensive caster option. The other one being the Infinity Edge of casters:
Complete AP, AP bonus is going up. If you want to hit as hard as you possibly can, this is the item you should be building.
One thing this is going to let us do is introduce new caster items in the future that complement both of these items and existing items so that we can buff casters more effectively going forward.
Also being the buff patch, weíre buffing some of the current live champions as well, specifically the ones that got nerfed last patch like Olaf and Garen.
Whatís the goal with all of these reverted changes that weíre making?
We tried a couple of things like the Udyr Tiger Stance change, some of the Olaf changesÖ They had some goals of pushing the champions into a specific direction,
trying them out having hundreds of thousands of players test these out for us, we found that these did not meet those goals and if itís not meeting those goals,
players arenít liking it, and itís not accomplishing what we want it to do, we are more than happy to revert it. Tiger Stance is being reverted more to its previous functionality.
Olaf is getting a bit of his power back. Garen also is getting a little bit of his scaling put back in to get him where he was before this change.
In the same vein, there were a lot of other things changed in the last patch. Wards I understand is one of them.
Can you talk through some of the changes that were changed and are now going back closer to how they were originally in this patch?
A big one is the wards change. We were trying to fix a specific problem where ranged carries were way better ward killers than everybody else, so give wards 1 health and thatís no longer the case.
That really creates a lot of problems with ward baiting, which is an interesting way to start team fights. So what weíre doing instead is all wards die in a certain amount of hits,
regardless of how hard they get hit. This should accomplish our previous goal and allow the emergent gameplay of ward baiting.
Another thing weíre doing with this patch is addressing the strength of the actual monsters dragon and baron. What were the objectives with those guys?
That should have very little effect in the late game situations where you see teams grouping up around dragon or grouping up around baron.
But it should stop some of the level 3 soloing of dragon or 15 minute Karthus Fiddlesticks instant baron ownage in one minute. We donít think those are good situations.
Those kinds of things are making people watch those areas and ward those areas constantly throughout the game and if they donít, they essentially start losing very quickly.
The changes are specifically to address soloing dragon very early or dualing baron very early.
One of the biggest changes this patch is actually an Exhaust remake. What is that and what are the goals with it?
Blind has been the type of mechanic in our game that weíve had a really hard time making it feel satisfying. It definitely does a goob job of shutting down auto-attackers,
but youíll blind somebody and then they use a bunch of physical abilities on you and youíre like ìWell, that was worthless.î Or if youíre Yi or Tryndamere,
you get blinded and you just stand there and canít do anything for 3 seconds. Weíre not a big fan of that, so what we did is we took down a giant auto-attack damage reduction on Exhaust
so you can still attack and do a little bit of stuff, and then a 33% reduction on the abilities of all characters,
so if somebody does use their ultimate ability or something it will do less damage and your Exhaust does have some effect.
Thatís going to make Pendragon happy when heís playing Yi.
Yeah thatís an unfortunate side effect of this change.
Thatís really an unfortunate side effect. Watch out for Pendragon.
We donít like making Pendragon happy.