I just think that tank junglers are a little stronger than they should be in comparison
to the others now.
Zirene the prophet was truly ahead of his time. Hello everyone, welcome
to Patch Rundown 5.9. If you haven't yet, somewhere look at the patch notes it's probably
important, you'll need it for this discussion for sure. I have with me now, Bradford "CertainlyT"
Wenban Champion Designer and Riot Jag A.K.A. Jeevun Sidhu to talk over the changes. Guys,
thank you. So brief me, I've been in a time capsule since 5.6, they don't let me leave
here, how has the outside world been with Cinderhulk? So we like what Cinderhulk has
done for the League of Legends meta overall. Now that you can have tanks in the jungle,
it's had spiraling effects on all the other lanes. Now you have different classes with
ADCs that are really powerful. Graves has kind of given way to Lucian for example to
some extent, because he has better sustain damage against tanks. Top laners can be fighters,
can have damage, they can be Vladimir. The entire game is more interesting now I'd say
as a result of having different options in the jungle. The issue with this is that we
think that instead of being another option to, say warrior, Cinderhulk is now just THE
option. It has a lot of things on the item that we like. We like the scaling tankiness,
that's cool. We like the clear speed, that's great. Burning nerds while you're invulnerable,
not as good. We think the PvP damage is a little askew on this item and we probably
don't think that's appropriate for a tank class and I think, Brad's talked a lot about
how that seems to be a mismatched strength. Yeah, definitely. I think the cost you pay
from having the much more reliable late game scaling on Cinderhulk vis-a-vis an item like
Warrior is out of whack. You really have to take advantage of a very small window to
make Warrior work right now. With these changes, all of that changes. I also think that, you
talk about how the changes cascade through the game, you're probably going to see with
this, still the great structured fights that a tank focused meta game yields, but the damage
payoff is going to come more from protecting back liners, you know, squishier damage dealers
rather than just relying on sort of running over them with Sunfire effects. I'm really
happy to play... I mean, we've been playing with it internally and I'm really enjoying
it. Right, yeah, I mean tanks will actually be in the front of the line tanking damage
not the back of the line being the damage threat, the "tanky assassin" guy in the back
line. Yeah, and the damage dealing tanks like Sejuani still deal a lot of damage right?
That's just on her kit. Right, yeah I mean I think when the Balance team needed to look
at Cinderhulk we saw that while it was being used by Sejuani and Gragas a lot, it was also
being used be Nautilus or Sion or Zac. It was even being used by Vi or Rek'Sai sometimes,
which to us, that says that the major common problem here is Cinderhulk, that the item
is probably a little too general purpose and overall a little too strong for what it does.
We could have taken the opposite approach, which is to say, ok let's look at Sejuani
and Gragas and bring those guys down a little bit, but I think it would have been inevitable
that we would look at Cinderhulk and then the bottom line for those guys is they get
double nerfed if we look at them first. So we wanted to kind of normalize the baseline
for what a jungler can do a little bit, bring back Cinderhulk down to say Warrior level.
We might need to do some work to bring up Magus and Devourer and then we could really
evaluate if Sejuani, who is banned in 90% of our games, is the actual problem or if
she just uses that item really well. Right, so another instance of people kind of being
burned down as you say, top lane Smite right? We are seeing a lot of people take Cinderhulk
and Skirmisher's Saber. It's pretty new, a lot of people out there think it's pretty
interesting. What are your viewings on it Brad? I think it feels novel and it generates
a lane with a completely different flow to it. It's more or less a dead summoner's spell
for the early parts of the game in a 1v1 scenario, but it offers the player using it a lot of
ability to control Scuttle Crab to leave the lane and farm. At the same time, you know
Skirmisher's so dominant once you get it, once it turns online. There's really no opportunity
to fight that Champion, because of the ammo count nature of Smite and just the duration
of Skirmisher's, what is it? 6 seconds? Yeah, 6 seconds. Two charges, 15 second cool down,
6 seconds each. I think it's really cool that players found a way to innovate the game.
Like as you were saying, it felt novel like, I figured something out. This isn't Preseason
1 where people don't really know how to play the game. Smite leaking into top lane felt
innovative and creative, right? So, we like that aspect of it and if it was really predominantly
picked for reasons like you are talking about, like Scuttle Crab control, neutral objective
control, enemy jungle control. If Smite was used for those types of purposes, I don't
think we'd be upset about it. But as it is, it's essentially devolved into the best
PvP option top lane, right? Smite is a mini ignite, mini exhaust and has a really, really
low windows of vulnerability, because of the cool down and duration and I think that's
the point where we're like, well I don't think this is really evolved into an interesting adaptation
of top lane but more a degenerate case of how you optimize it. So what do you think
we could do to push it in the direction of allowing it to live in more of this objective
control world, because it seems like that's what you're saying we're really in support
of maybe taking two Smites. There are ways that we could push it into being more objective
control-centric, I don't think that's our goal. I think we wanted to give interesting
PvP options to a jungler, and the tension between, do I Smite wolves for getting the
vision buff or do I save it for a gank, is an interesting choice for a jungler. In top
lane there is no choice behind it, right? You don't have a lot of burden to use Smite
on anything other than the enemy Champion and so I think to push it in that direction
we would have to put more of the value into objective control, but then that might be
at the expense of junglers who should rightly be taking it. Right, well so, we've pushed
the duration now to 4 seconds, right? Are junglers going to feel like this was just
nerf for top lane or was there an issue with the nature of Skirmisher's Saber in general
that we felt we needed to hit here. What is the story behind the nerf here specifically?
I think for a long time we didn't really see people take Skirmisher, because they weren't
sure the power of it aside from arguably somewhat degenerate cases like Warwick Smiting you
when he ults you and just wrecks you right? And now we've seen Skirmisher broadly adopted
by a lot of Champions, a lot of classes I should say. Tanks will take it, fighters will
take it. It's useful, and after seeing it used a lot in the game we can evaluate that
the combat window it has always provided is probably too long. 6 seconds of having very
low vulnerability to an enemy is probably just too long, right? Regardless, whether
it's on the jungler or on top laner. And we are aware it is going to decrease the power
of a jungler taking a Skirmisher, but we think it's appropriate in this situation as well.
Brad, turning over to you, I wanted to move a little into some of the patch changes themselves.
We have what I think are some pretty interesting changes for Akali coming up. When Akali last
appeared in the patch notes, things didn't look too great for her, but it seems like
we are giving her some tools right now that are maybe a little different than what players
might expect. Can you run me through and kind of break down what these are going to do?
These changes are super dangerous, but also super exciting. I think this gives Akali some
tools she's never had. It also gives her a lot of choice in gameplay she's never had,
which I think is something that Akali's needed for a really long time. Yeah. So, what we
see the live team doing is, you know, E goes down to this 1 second cool down, like you
mentioned. It's finally a true energy dump. It's something we've been lacking on our energy
Champions for a while, and that really requires that the player get a sense for how long the
encounter is going to go, particularly given how much energy the Q costs and then has the
refund, like if you dump all your energy you're not going to be able to use those Qs for a
while. So, I think that's really great decision making. At the same time, it let's her participate
in the game in different ways. She can farm side lanes in the mid game much more quickly
now. Jeevun was talking about donating her blue in mid game to let her push even more
effectively, so I think it opens up a lot of strategies for Akali, particularly against
teams against whom she really can't team fight very effectively, like double exhaust compositions
for example. Yeah, and like Brad says, the alternate sort of split pushing strategy,
maybe she rushes a Lich Bane instead of a Gunblade now, because she can clear waves,
you give her a blue buff and she works towers well. It's an alternate way to... succeeding
as Akali that doesn't just feel, I got ahead now I teleport to a team fight and reset on
everyone. And, like you mentioned, adds decision points, right? You can fail as Akali now,
you can mismanage your energy and that is... while to some people that is concerning, because
that might be a noob trap to dump your energy, it's a way to show people you've mastered
this Champion and understand the energy flow of that Champion. And so, if that is a clear
differentiation point of skill, maybe we can play that up a little bit even more and say,
oh like we're going to give Akali some power an we're going to give it here, because you
have to be a player who's earned it to get this power, you know? Going forward to another
tuning point that we have, we also have Annie changes this patch, right? Her basic attack
is going down to 575. For a lot of people that's scary, right? That she's had 625 for
a very long time so Jeevun, start it off for me and tell me kind of, why are we taking
this change now? Right so, we felt like Annie's been a pretty strong Champion for several
patches now. She's seen some changes continuously over the past few months, and we think we
want to preserve the really cool highlight moment of Annie jumping into your team and
frying a squishy with her bear and AOE stunning you. And to preserve that we feel like we
need to take out some of her excess strength that she doesn't really need. So this is kind
of like the Morgana change here. In this case Annie's attack range is going down. We don't
really feel like she needs it to be the signature Annie player who really is a threat to burst
you, but it seems like it's very good at harassing enemy opponents out of lane, which is not
something we think she really needs. Same with Morgana in this case, we like that she
is a really strong CC machine, we like that she is a very interesting powerful pick in
champ select in terms of neutralizing powerful enemy CC teams. With Black Shield. Right, with
Black Shield yeah. We don't think it's cool that she just wins lane for you and endlessly
shoves the opponents at level 1, right? So we want to keep Champions strong and what
is cool about them and take away strengths that make it very hard to fight them. Right,
so I mean, in general Brad, what do you think the impact is of just lowering the basic attack
range on this Champion in general? I think it's pretty dramatic. It's probably mostly
going to affect side lane Annie, either top or support. In top lane I think when we felt
that she's abusive up there for a while, the player base hasn't seen her pick rate rise
really dramatically, but I'm happy that the team is being proactive, rather than waiting
until the problem sort of festers. What it does I think is it makes your interactions
with Annie more highly variable. She is going to be more reliant on using her Q, she's not
just going to sit on Pyromania stacks and that's really interesting to me, unlike mid
lane where, if Annie is just sitting on those stacks you can shove her in and force her
to use her spells. That's super risky in the top lane and often times not a viable option
in bot lane, because Champions are more single target based attack focused. Right, so we
have a whole bunch of changes this patch, right? But really, since about 5.5 with the
introduction of Cinderhulk we've been going pretty hard on the side of trying to make
a lot more changes to the game in general, right? Like, our kind of flagship buzz word
for this at the moment is Champion diversity, right? Are we still on this train? Where are
we going? Are we still getting there? We'd like to look at ways for keeping the game
interesting and having different choices about what Champions you play without necessarily
focusing too hard on, well this guy is really overpowered and we have to hit him hard. And
also as Jeevun mentioned, like viability is a really important part of actualizing the
diversity buzzwords that we sometimes talk about. It's irrelevant to give you options
if a few of those are just clearly safer than the rest and so the beginning of a Season
is a really fun time to be a player, everything is in flux and all of the strategies you developed
last Season you have to sort of throw out or at least revalidate. The middle of the
Season is a really fun time to be a designer, because things have sort of been solved and
your task is not to cast doubt on everything the player has come to know over the course
of the Season, but to inject little bits of disruption that create new potential optimizations
the player can sometimes run across or have to learn how to deal with. And I think a lot
of the changes in this patch, like Akali is back from the dead, changes to how Annie interacts
with you in lane, changes to how Kalista interacts with you in team fights go to that... Then
we'd like to say, bring Olaf back who hasn't had a chance to shine in a long time, and
you know the second we seen him on Voyboy's stream killing people we'll pop him back down.
That's... well yeah... things that Voyboy succeeds with is generally the barometer of
success for who we balance no longer. Yeah, no longer. Don't play Akali on stream either
Voyboy. Yeah, no, stay out of playing Akali. Alright guys, thank you so much for taking
time out of your day to discuss the patch. The band is beginning to play me off so for
myself, Jeevun, and Brad and everyone here at the Patch Rundown crew, thank you for watching
and we will see you next time.