Welcome, summoners, to the League of Legends Patch Preview! I’m Phreak and I’m joined here with Morello, Lead Champion Designer.
When Yorick came out, players seemed to find him underpowered. Do we have any plans for him in the coming patch?
We did anticipate him being stronger than he was when he released so we did a comprehensive set of buffs to most of his skills, base stats, things like that, to bring him up to the power of other champions.
You should see a nice wide range of Yorick buffs so any of you guys who got him last week or are about to try him on free week, give him a shot now, we feel he’s gonna be a lot more competitive.
We’ve seen a lot of Alistar players in different roles including AP caster and main tank. We’re nerfing the AP ratios on Alistar’s Pulverize, Headbutt, and Triumphant Roar. Why nerf AP ratios over anything else?
He acts like a big bully, knocks people around, trashes on people a little bit, but the damage associated with that is still too high on AP Alistar so we’re bringing those numbers down.
By doing that we can preserve his tank and initiation play completely.
We’re nerfing the cooldown and slow duration of Ashe’s ultimate, Enchanted Crystal Arrow. Why does Ashe need nerfing, and why this skill?
Pretty much since the dawn of time Ashe has been first pick, first ban in competitive play forever. She brings a lot of utility to the table, her damage is pretty good.
While we want to keep what’s unique and awesome about Ashe intact, we feel that power level needs to come down. This is the way we could do it the most effectively that’s least offensive to Ashe players.
We’re nerfing the heal amount on Warwick’s Hungering Strike. Is this because of the newly popular “LaneWick?” What about Warwick as a jungler?
He’s pretty much an unmovable object. He gets in lane and he is impossible to get out of there because of the healing amount on Hungering Strike in a lane.
We’ve done some testing on this and we feel the jungling safety on Warwick was high enough that this doesn’t impact how well he jungles much but it does impact the lane play.
Kog’Maw is getting a few buffs this patch, but they’re to his animations and ability durations and not damage numbers. Why are we buffing Kog’Maw here?
We kept finding this problem whenever Bio-Arcane Barrage was active and up you feel great, but that’s not very often.
The rest of the time you’re waiting for it to come back up, so we increased the cooldown by a couple seconds but we increased the duration by 4 seconds.
We also found his attack animation on a couple of his spells was not quite as crunchy as we’d like so we’ve cleaned up those animations so Kog’Maw should be a better experience.
We’ve seen many of our casters see a lot of play but almost every time they just rush Rabadon’s Deathcap. What exactly are we nerfing on it and why?
Casters have made a good appearance again and they’re viable on most teams now. We’re really happy about that and we feel that’s actually due to Rabadon’s addition.
What we also found out is it’s pushing their AP numbers a little bit higher than we wanted it so we took a tiny bit off, just 15 of the base AP on Rabadon’s to see if that brings it right in line.
We don’t think it’s that far off, we don’t anticipate further nerfs here, and we feel this should get casters right where they should be.
The question on a lot of minds right now is wards. Whether it's ganking with Summoner Teleport or jumping around as Lee Sin, Jax, and Katarina.Wards gives players some pretty cool moves, and they’ve been asking to get that back. Are they?
Even though it was kind of an interesting thing players found to counter certain characters like Blitzcrank hooks, it was kind of also a jerk move.
It made the characters on the receiving end feel really bad. So we removed the ability for wards to be interacted with at all.
We heard your feedback, we considered it heavily, and we’re returning the fun portion: You can use Shunpo, Leap Strike, and Safeguard to get to wards. You can still use Summoner Teleport to go to allied wards.
We also added one change to make the clarity a little better. We felt this was a good balance:
Now those wards will appear when you use Summoner Teleport or other abilities on them, so a guy doesn’t just appear out in the middle of a lane or next to Dragon from nowhere.
You’ll see that ward, you’ll see that teleport particle and that stuff will clearly communicate when somebody’s using that tactic. We didn’t want to remove it but we did want to make the players understood what was happening.
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