Changes to Nasus, Akali, Riven and item balance in this episode of the Patch Preview.
Tamat: Hello Summoners and welcome to the Patch Preview.
This week I’m joined by Game Designer FeralPony who is going to be talking about the changes coming up in the next update for League of Legends.
While this video won’t cover every single change in the patch,
we did want to take some time to explain the thought process that went into a few of them.
Tamat: Let’s start with Nasus.
He’s receiving a bug fix along with some buffs to Siphoning Strike and his ultimate, Fury of the Sands. Walk us through that.
FeralPony: Sure, I’ll start with the bug fix.
We recently discovered a problem with Nasus where his Siphoning Strike critical hits were dealing more damage than intended.
We fixed the bug, but while we were looking at Nasus, we also decided to address some core Nasus problems by buffing a couple of his abilities.
First, the mana cost for Siphoning Strikes is now the same across all ranks to help players with their laning efficiency.
Second, Nasus has a lot of trouble when it comes to catching fleeing opponents,
so we wanted to give him some more tools while still allowing for some form of counter play.
In the end, we landed on Fury of the Sands as the best way to do this.
Now, Nasus grows visually and strategically when he uses his ultimate,
as we’ve given him an attack range bonus, and a cast range bonus on Wither, while in his ultimate form.
We’ve also lowered the mana cost of Fury of the Sands, but the key thing is the extended range.
This change should give Nasus some help where he needs it while also making him feel more unique from a gameplay perspective.
Tamat: Let’s go ahead and move on to Akali, who is getting a quality-of-life change for her complicated passive, Twin Disciplines.
FeralPony: The problem with Twin Disciplines is that players were forced to use specific masteries and rune pages in order to meet Akali’s minimum bonus requirements.
We felt this was a little restrictive, so by removing the minimum requirements for her passive to trigger,
Akali players should have a little more freedom in their opening runes and masteries.
More specifically, Akali players can now run matchup-specific runes and masteries for better reactive play depending on whom her opponents are.
Tamat: Riven is a champion of extremes who can turn a small lead into a huge one thanks to how much she benefits from buying high attack damage items early in the game.
When she gets behind, however, it can be hard to catch up to the curve. What are we doing to smooth this experience out?
FeralPony: Right now, the only thing we’re changing is Riven’s passive, Runic Blade. It's a pretty minor change, but a little bit complicated.
Instead of a scaling off of a combination of Riven’s bonus attack damage and a flat attack damage bonus, Runic Blade will scale entirely off of her total attack damage.
FeralPony: What this change should do is help Riven players on both ends of the spectrum, especially during her very important mid-game phase.
She’ll still be strong if she’s ahead, but not overwhelmingly so.
If she’s behind, her passive will continue to get stronger with levels, which will help her get back into the game.
An added benefit of this change is that Riven will have an easier time transitioning into late game, as her passive will now scale higher as she gets to her full build.
Tamat: We’re tweaking the cooldown reduction on a number of items such as Glacial Shroud, Athene’s Unholy Grail and Zeke’s Herald, just to name a few.
What are the goals associated with these changes?
FeralPony: The key thing we wanted to do with this item rebalance was to better differentiate between high cooldown reduction items and low cooldown reduction items.
Currently, a lot of popular items have some form of cooldown reduction built in, and players are maxing out on this stat without much thought.
With these changes, we wanted to push players to be more conscious of their item builds.
If you want maximum cooldown reduction, you should be actively pursuing it, not just falling into it.
As an example, you don’t really buy a Deathfire Grasp for the cooldown reduction – you buy it for the powerful active nuke.
Alternatively, items like Athene’s Unholy Grail or Morellonomicon have fantastic synergy with high cooldown reduction, so we want to make that choice more clear.
For Zeke’s Herald and Spirit Visage, we felt that these items were conditional upon whether or not you could take advantage of their secondary effects,
so we wanted to make them big cooldown reduction items for those characters.
Now these items will stand out more amongst the other Kindlegem upgrades.
Tamat: One of our Season 3 items, Ohmwrecker, is also receiving a significant rework. What were our motivations behind this?
FeralPony: So Ohmwrecker initially started out as a niche item made for aggressive tanky champions who loved to tower dive.
Rather than building an Ohmwrecker, however, smart players just bought more armor and HP in order to tank towers.
With these new changes, we’re repositioning Ohmwrecker as a strategic purchase for squishier champions
who still want to play aggressive by having it build out of Philosopher's Stone.
Tamat: Alright, thanks FeralPony. That’s going to wrap it up for this episode of the League of Legends Patch Preview.
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