Welcome to a special edition of the Patch Overview. I'm Jatt, here with Morello,
and we're in the Nocturne Theater at Riot Games to give you guys a sneak peek of the big changes we have coming up in Season Three.
What we wanted to do is come by personally and talk to you guys about what you can expect from a gameplay perspective so it doesn't blindside you
or take you by surprise when you log in to the game and see all these changes.
So before we get into anything, we have a new cool chapters menu to navigate this video. If you miss something and want to go back to it,
or if you're looking for a specific section, just check up there and it'll take you right to it.
Big thing at the start here. Items. We've done a lot of work on them.
What's the big goal we've had behind the item changes?
I think with items – honestly with everything, it's about variety, options, and lots of different ways to do things, right?
You kind of go to your favorite build site, whatever that might be,
look at the build and go okay ‘I memorized that' and then you just do that every game.
Not terribly interesting, not full of lots of cool decisions, right?
So, that's the kind of thing we want to fix so you can have multiple different ways you build.
One example of this on the new items is the new Manamune.
Manamune is very similar to what you kind of know and love about it right now, but it has a special caveat -
- That if you get the mana maxed out on that thing, it upgrades itself to the Muramana,
And what that does is it has a toggle on it that if you use it you dump mana on every auto attack
and it does additional damage based on how much mana you have.
So someone like Corki who really likes to spam spells and can get into mana trouble
can just build that item, spam away, and still do lots of damage.
Right, exactly, and now, think about the different combinations.
He can build more mana to get more damage out of his Manamune, or maybe he wants to combine it with some other multiplier –
All sorts of things like that. It makes for different types of decisions based on the way you want to play and the character you're using.
So, let's talk about supports a bit because they are someone who don't have much choice right now.
Yeah, not always the best.
Yeah, they go Heart of Gold, Philosopher's Stone, and then if they're lucky, they'll get an Aegis of the Legion, or like a Zeke's Herald or something.
We've mixed that up a bit; they have more choice now.
The best way to explain this, and follow me through this, give me a second,
Is we've removed Heart of Gold as one of the first changes we've done here.
Right, and that sounds really weird because how are supports supposed to get gold now that they don't have Heart of Gold?
Right, and we figured if they're buying the same items every game, and that's what's giving them gold,
why aren't we just giving them the gold through other methods so they can buy cool items, right?
So for example, we've removed some of the gold from farming –
- not Dominion levels or anything like that – and pushed it into ambient gold.
So now, supports are getting a greater percentage of the amount of gold you're getting on a team.
So supports weren't getting much gold, and they were having to build the same items to even get any gold,
but then all that gold they do get, they have to spend on wards.
So we've lessened the ward burden a little bit with a couple of interesting solutions,
One of which I'll talk about right here, which we affectionately call "Ward Dropper",
and it's an item, that every time you go back to base, it gives you four charges and...
You can drop wards with that item kind of like what you see on a Wriggle's Lantern, right?
The interesting thing though is while you get a bunch of free wards for this, you can only have two out from this item at a time.
So, you're not doing like, mass coverage like when it's time to like ward the whole map for a Baron, or something,
but when you're trying to ward your lane and build up some gold, definitely extremely gold efficient.
You talked about an AD Caster item months ago and we failed on delivering on it pretty much for a while.
Do we have that coming into Season 3? What do AD Casters got?
Yeah, so "AD Caster item where?" I think is this question right? And yes, we do. It was really hard for us to actually do kind of in our normal release cadence.
But in this kind of item overhaul we had a really good opportunity to take a look at a lot of these underserved kind of classes
that don't have good items for them. AD Casters is a great one.
Let me talk about one of the items we've done for them, which is Black Cleaver.
Black Cleaver's actually been changed to be an AD Caster item because it kind of sat in the same house with...
Infinity Edge and Bloodthirster and Black Cleaver and...
that's kind of like a Highlander of items. "Oh there can only be one of those guys that's gonna be the best." So
we just said “well Black Cleaver can go do a different thing. It can go be an AD Caster item.” So what you're gonna see from that from now on is...
It builds out of Brutalizer first of all. Which is instantly – you're on the right foot.
And it also has just AD, Health, and then all the stats you see on Brutalizer,
Plus an interesting unique passive that shreds armor on all of your physical abilities stacking up to a certain amount.
Can I still do the stuff I'm used to? Like we've changed a lot. Are my builds still going to work?
Right, and that's, and that's one thing we wanted to really be sensitive to.
There's a very careful balance of we want to add new stuff and new options – we want to fix the problems in the game –
but we don't want to make League of Legends feel like a totally different game.
We don't want to make it totally alien. We don't want you're old stuff to just be like ‘oh that sucks now', right?
So, there are situations on an AD Carry, for example, you'd still want to go Infinity Edge, Phantom Dancer. Very straightforward, it's very effective at what it does.
But now what we want is other equally attractive options that do different things other than just single target damage,
and that's how we're going to create choice for players and items.
So, everyone really getting a whole bunch of new options. I know what I really want to hear about though, it's the jungle.
Of course you want to hear about the jungle, Jatt.
I definitely want to hear about the jungle.
So, we do have some new items in the jungle, but we're doing a lot of jungle changes, and I want to talk about those changes,
and then I think the items make a little bit more sense.
The big thing I really want to do here is I think there's a problem right now where there's only a small subsection of jungler types that are usable
at high level or skilled play in League of Legends, you know the kind of fast AOE Wave clear
kind of knock through the camps really fast, camp lanes, and gank, right?
The problem with that, that's elbowing a lot of other jungler types and a lot of characters out of the picture.
So what we're going to do is we want to open up that variety back closer to what it was like in between Season 1 and 2,
and how we're going to do that is by changing kind of the health on the jungle camps and the power in the jungle camps.
So, for example, you know the Wraith's Camp, is, right now it's, you can kill all four of those guys pretty quickly, right?
What I would like to do – take health and power from those little monsters and put them on the big one.
So, that's going to make it so we can open up some more options for different types of junglers.
So that way, a single target jungler like Trundle or Warwick can just clear that camp out faster, but an AOE jungler might take a little bit more time to do it.
Than they do currently yeah, we're not trying to like marginalize AOE junglers, right? But...
We're going to have to find a good equilibrium there to make sure you can have single target, sustain, high gank, high farm, you know, AOE,
All these different types of junglers have different strategies, different uses, and your playstyle and preference, or
the way you want to impact your team can be different based on some of those decisions.
So in Season Two, when we first changed around the jungle, one of the big things was to make ganking and farming kind of and equal trade-off.
But what happens if you just sit in the jungle and farm all the time is you tend to fall pretty much hopelessly far behind by the end of the game.
That's getting changed up in Season Three.
That's a big problem right now because it means that you're kind of all-or-nothing, and all you're doing is ganking the whole game.
If that falls flat, or the other team outplays you at one point, you fall even further behind, and it gets really out of control really fast,
and it also means there's only one strategy for jungling.
What we'd like to do is increase the rewards as the game goes on, so that they get higher and higher,
so that by the end of the game, you're going to be able to actually convert that into real gold for real items,
while kind of managing ‘do I gank now or do I farm more?' and that actually becomes more of a real decision than I think it is currently.
Okay, so with ganking, a lot of times early on in the jungle now, a jungler will take the red buff or the blue buff,
then go straight to a lane, and pretty much decide it for whoever is in that lane.
That's not really something we're okay with, is it?
It's okay to have early ganks, but I think the extent we see the lane pressure early right now, is like you said, it's deciding lanes,
and it's taking power away from the people who have to play in those lanes for the next twenty minutes, right?
We want to make it so there's a little bit more choice there as well by making the jungle a little harder. Making it a little bit more dangerous.
They're going to hit harder, there's going to be some changing to leashing rules, things like that that are going to affect this,
but to kind of smooth this out a little bit so you can still use a lot of junglers,
we're adding a new item that's kind of a starter jungle item
that does a lot of things that help you get better clear times and safer jungle clears.
Now, the choice there is you can either do that, take on a more farming approach and gank later, get to the levels you want to earlier,
or you can go for that rush gambit of 'get the boots early' like you do now,
and go for that lane and just see what happens and if it works out, hey great you're going to be ahead,
if it doesn't work out, you're going to have to lick your wounds a little bit.
So it sounds like jungle pressure is actually down a little bit early,
but then later in the game, once they've farmed up, once they've really powered up in their jungle, they'll have cool items and be kind of a carry.
Right now junglers have a massive effect early game and are deciding the game kind of disproportionately.
But then later in the game, all those cool actions they're doing aren't paying off for them; they're just kind of setting up the rest of their team to do it.
We want that jungler to be able to stay relevant late game, but we do want to remove some of that early pressure.
But we have more change even - the masteries have been moved around; there's a lot of change there.
The defensive tree is an example of this really.
You take armor and magic resist on almost every character no matter what tree you just put the early points in there.
Is that too much power to be giving from the early parts of the tree? We don't like that.
What we want to happen is if you really outplay your opponent in lane, you should be able to kill that opponent.
I think a combination of a number of defensive factors including those early masteries is making that a lot less able to happen.
We also want to make it so that if you want to get tanky and you want to get defensive, dive into that defensive tree, don't just dip your toe in, go all-in.
And then, that's kind of an interesting trade off.
Another thing with the masteries is a lot of times, the offensive and defensive trees were kind of the only ones that got used.
Nine twenty one, twenty-one zero, and back and forth between those. The utility tree was kind of neglected. We spiced that up a lot.
There's a new mastery I'd really like to talk about which is every time you attack an enemy champion, you get a little bit of gold,
and then if you do melee you get more gold just cause that makes sense right.
My little shout out to support players because that's very much a support mastery in a lot of ways,
especially with the amount of poke and harass they do in lane as opposed to last hitting.
So there's some stuff like that you can look forward to seeing, and if you go deep into that utility tree, you're going to get some interesting and unique effects.
So that's a lot of change that I'm really excited for, but the question's going to be asked:
This is really disruptive; this is going to be really hard to balance. What do we say to that?
The Preseason, in between Two and Three or in between whatever seasons is the time to do these types of changes, right?
They need to be done, our players have been asking for these things, and we agree,
It's just we need to do it when it's not going to disrupt the tournament season,
When we have an opportunity to let players try it out and iterate rapidly on it on a live environment, right?
And that's what we're going to do with this right now, we have some time until Season Three starts.
Our goal is to get all this kind of like...
‘Okay, let's throw it all up in the air, let's get all this exciting stuff out there,
and now let's get it really kind of understood and balanced before Season Three actually starts' and we're going to be watching this stuff like a hawk to make sure that happens.
Sounds like a plan.
Yeah.
So for you guys, if you want to get more details on everything we've just talked about – we barely scratched the surface –
we have online resources you guys can check out, as well as just give your feedback on what you think.
Other than that, we're done here, thanks for watching.
Thanks!