Changes to Ranked play, Shaco, Olaf and Master Yi in this episode of the Patch Preview.
Tamat: Hello everybody and welcome to the Patch Preview.
We’re going to be talking about the changes coming in the next update for League of Legends and though this video won’t cover every change in the patch,
we have selected a few of the more delicate ones to guide you through our thought process.
I’m Tamat, and with me this week I have two special guests joining me:
Lead Content Designer, Morello and Senior Game Designer, Yegg. How’s it going guys?
Yegg: It’s going well. Glad to be here.
Morello: Hey Tamat, glad to be back!
Tamat: Yegg, let’s start with you.
You’ve been hard at work on the new League System which is going to drastically change progression in ranked games.
Give us the elevator pitch, how does it work?
Yegg: Sure, so in Season 3, ranked solo & duo players as well as 3v3 & 5v5 teams can now rise above their competition with the new League System.
This system’s going to completely replace your Elo rating and ladder rank.
Basically instead of being rank 100,000 on an enormous ladder, you’ll compete in a league containing 250 similarly skilled opponents.
The leagues will be associated with one of six skill tiers, each of which contains five divisions.
To progress to higher tiers and divisions you’ll need to win ranked games and earn league points.
Rack up 100 ranked points, and you’ll trigger an event called an “advancement series.”
The series is essentially like a playoff match.
If you’re at the top of your division, your next three games will be part of a best-of-three Division Series.
If you’re at the top of your tier, you’ll have to play a best-of-five Promotion Series. Win and you earn the right to move up.
The best players in each region will eventually reach the Challenger tier, the highest tier of competition.
If you’re on a top 5v5 team, you’ll have an ongoing chance to go pro in the League of Legends Championship Series.
Tamat: This is all exciting news for our players, but I think one question that they’ll have is why we’re moving away from the current Elo system.
Yegg: Right, and this is definitely something that we want to address.
We’re switching to Leagues for several reasons: first, we wanted to move away from having a single ladder containing all ranked players.
Moving up one spot when you’re in 23,000th place doesn't mean much, but moving up a spot when you’re ranked 3rd in your Gold Division II league feels great.
Second, since the system attempts to put you in Leagues with your friends, it makes it easier to develop rivalries with players that you care about.
Finally, we came up with the idea of the Promotion Series to let you experience the feeling of being in the finals of a tournament as you advance through the ladder.
We think that this system gives players achievable goals, and frequent milestones that they can hit as they compete on the ranked ladders,
and should help to develop a more competitive and vibrant ranked scene.
If you want to know more about the League System,
we’re going to include a link to the FAQ that we've prepared for you.
Alright, let’s move on to our next topic.
Morello, Shaco is one of those Champions who constantly require tuning, and he’s back on the balance board for this patch.
What’s going on with him this time, and why does he continue to be problematic?
Morello: The Season 3 leashing changes to the jungle,
made it so that Shaco’s Jack-in-the-Boxes could effectively tank the monsters for him, and really buffed his jungle.
While Shaco is all about those early game ganks, we think he can still be great at that without being completely out of control like we see right now.
One thing we are doing, is reducing, not removing, the passive slow on Two-Shiv Poison’s auto-attack.
This should have some effect on Shaco, but what this really does, is make him more reliant on Blessing of the Lizard Elder when he goes to gank.
Tamat: Now we’re also going to be tweaking Deceive. What’s going on there?
Morello: While Deceive's range is going down to what Flash is currently,
the one thing I want to note about that is that you’re still be able to do the cool tricks you're used to doing with Shaco:
like jumping over walls, brush juking, closing for a gank, things like that.
Now, enemy wards are going to be a bit more effective unless you’re really clever about gank locations,
which add some cool counter play for people being ganked by Shaco.
Tamat: We’ve recently seen a rise in the number of players that build a ton of AP on Master Yi to take advantage of the high AP ratios on Meditate.
This is extremely difficult to play against, and most of our players have to, find it really annoying. Let’s talk about the changes to address this.
Morello: While we’re really happy to see AP Yi get some mainstream popularity, the ratio on Meditate is pretty out of control, and needed to be tuned down.
We’re toning down that AP ratio, but we’re also buffing the base back up.
What this means, is that you’re going to see some ability to kill AP Master Yi when he Medi-tanks,
but AD Yi is also going to get more use out of the skill than he has previously.
Our intention isn’t to destroy AP Yi here; it’s just to make it so you can kill him if you do enough focus fire while he’s Medi-tanking.
It still has a 2.0 AP ratio, it’s still really strong.
Tamat: Our live designers have been suspicious that Olaf might be a bit too strong after the Preseason balance changes,
but after witnessing Voyboy destroy with Olaf during the LCS qualifiers, I think those suspicions are confirmed now.
Morello: The Preseason item changes brought a big spike in Olaf’s power.
Mostly because health, the stat he wants to buy all the time, is better, and the stats he gets for free costs everyone else more gold.
And like you said, Tamat, you just saw Voyboy, and a lot of the other competitive players just wreck face with Olaf.
He’s pretty over the top right now, so we felt the best way to hit him was to give him windows of vulnerability, and remove some of that free power that he gets.
Specifically, Ragnarok’s armor penetration is only going to be up while the spell is active,
and we’ve increased the cool-downs on Undertow and Vicious Strikes making it so that when those spells are down, you have a chance to fight Olaf directly.
Tamat: When we released the S3 patch last month,
we made a commitment to our players that we would be iterating on the item changes until we felt like they were in a good place.
What are we doing to further itemization balance in this patch?
Morello: There are a couple of things that I really want to highlight in this patch about items.
One of these is the addition of Seeker's Armguard, a new armor / ability power item for Mages.
This item is designed to give Mages a realistic option against physical damage mid-laners, and also replaces the Chain Vest on Zhonya’s Hourglass Hourglass.
Perhaps most important though, this gives Mages the option to go Cloth Armor and 5 health potions against really tough physical damage mid-lanes.
The other change that I really want to talk about here is that we’ve reduced the health on Giant’s Belt.
As we mentioned before, health has become a more powerful in the Preseason item changes, and Giant’s Belt is one of the worst offenders in this case.
It has great gold efficiency, you can get it early enough in the game to really bog the lane down, and it has a great number of late game items that it builds into.
We’ve also upped the gold cost on the other two big offenders: Warmog’s Armor and Sunfire Cape.
The other items that build out of Giant’s Belt are largely unaffected, they’re going to cost the same gold and give the same stats.
Tamat: Alright, thanks guys!
That’s it for this episode of the League of Legends Patch Preview.
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