Welcome to the League of Legends Patch Preview. I’m Phreak and I’m here with Morello, Lead Champion Designer.
Together we’ll be discussing some of the gameplay changes coming into the next update for League of Legends.
Note that this video does not cover every single change, but will explain the thought process behind some of our decisions.
Kayle is a hybrid carry and support champion that just isn’t strong enough to fill either of these roles well.
Divine Blessing’s haste, haste duration, heal, and mana cost are all going up. Why make these changes?
This buff is for defensive support Kayle. Diving Blessing is now more comparable with other burst heals in our game and really allows Kayle to save teammates much more effectively.
There’s a lot more flexibility here, too. For example, you can haste a tank to initiate a teamfight or haste another ally to speed up a gank.
The mana cost increase is a simple tuning fix with the increased heal amount.
This lets Kayle save teammates out of dangerous situations and feel really heroic without letting health sustain get too out of hand.
For players who want to use carry Kayle, this will help you get away from ganks and bad situations as well as help you chase down and finish off wounded enemies.
This should make Kayle better no matter how you choose to play her.
Teemo is getting a few buffs and bug fixes in the next patch, but I wanted to highlight one in particular:
Toxic Shot currently has a bug where if you attack too quickly, you’re delaying or actually preventing Toxic Shot’s damage over time effect from doing anything.
In this patch, we’re fixing it so that Toxic Shot will tick once per second as expected, regardless of how fast Teemo’s attacking.
Morello, what does this really mean for Teemo?
Fixing this bug means his damage is going to go up in every case.
Once your attack speed got above one attack per second, you started having Toxic Shot not tick at all for the damage over time component and this was costing Teemo a lot of damage.
Even if you weren’t building a ton of attack speed on Teemo, you were seeing a damage loss as early as level six.
At the end of the day, what this amounts to is Teemo’s damage has gone up.
We do have some improvements coming to his ultimate and to Move Quick as well, but we wanted to highlight this buff because it was the least clear on paper.
Ultimately, we think Teemo’s going to be a lot better with this set of changes, so go try him out, especially if you haven’t picked him up for a while, and tell us what you think.
We ran some analysis on the rune options for mages in mid and came to the same conclusions as our top players:
Building an offense-focused rune page is a waste of time because the most optimal rune page is to just stack magic resist and ignore everything else.
Even if you want to go for offense, there aren’t any interesting choices there either.
This patch, we’re tweaking a number of our runes: Flat magic resist marks, glyphs, and quintessences are getting nerfed.
Meanwhile, flat ability power glyphs, magic penetration glyphs, and magic penetration quintessences are getting buffed.
What are we hoping to achieve with these changes?
Whenever we do rune balance the goal is always to open up more options and more variety.
We want your rune pages to feel powerful and impactful and also be a customization of your playstyle.
Since magic resist was outclassing offense, it really just meant you couldn’t build and offensive rune book and we wanted to fix that.
For people who did choose to go offensive, there just weren’t enough viable options for good runes on the table.
By buffing these runes, mages now have more viable competitive offensive rune choices.
One thing we wanted to bring up is that your runes are not going to waste.
If you still build and entire magic resist focused book, you’re only going to lose about 4 magic resist total.
We’ve been watching tournaments matches and found that games tend to snowball out of control really quickly.
Specifically, one team gets a huge level advantage and even if the losing team wins a fight, they can’t regain their footing.
In the coming patch, we have a tweak to how champions gain experience when killing other champions.
In short, killing someone many levels above you will reward much more experience than before, while killing someone beneath your level will grant a lower reward.
What do we expect to see come out of this change?
Killing somebody way above your level is both difficult and takes a lot of skill.
Making you get a “giant-killer” bonus is much more rewarding and appropriate for what you just accomplished.
This means if a team turns around a losing game with a really epic team fight, now they’re back in the game.
They regained their footing and you’re gonna have that back and forth moment like they did before they got behind.
One thing we were really careful to do is to not allow teams to “rubber band” with this mechanic.
That means you’re not gonna win one team fight and shoot way ahead of the enemy team.
You still have to outplay a team consistently to achieve victory.
Support characters should really like this. When support characters are out warding the map and helping their team, they fall a little behind in levels.
Once they get into team fights and rack up assists, they’ll catch up to the rest of their team much more quickly.
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