Changes to Rengar, Lee Sin, Talon, Riven and the Jungle in this episode of the Patch Preview.
Hello everybody! Welcome to the first Patch Preview coming to you in 2013.
As always, we’ll be talking about the changes coming in the next update for League of Legends and though this video won’t cover every single change in the patch,
we have selected a few of the more delicate ones to guide you through our thought process behind these decisions.
With me this week I have an awesome dude, who if you put in blue armor, would look just like Taric. What’s up, FeralPony?
Not too much.
Alright, lets dive into the patch notes and take a look at the changes to Talon.
Sure. So we’ve known Talon for a while has been dealing a little bit too much damage in teamfights, especially with his ultimate.
And with all the changes in Season 3 that have really helped out AD assassins and AD casters especially,
this has really pushed him over the edge, so we’re going to be taking that down a little bit.
So we’re reducing the based damage and the AD ratio of Shadow Assault.
While we were looking at Talon, we found this nasty bug with Cutthroat, where the damage amplification wasn’t actually applying.
So we fixed the bug, but this caused a huge spike in his late game damage output, so we’re also reducing the damage a bit on Noxian Diplomacy to account for this bug fix.
Now, I’ve always found Riven to be a lane bully, but with the Season 3 Patch, we've decided to make a few changes. What are we going to do to re-balance her?
Riven's always kind of been kind of borderline-overpowered in lane, and now with the Season 3 changes, one of the goals was to kind of help these characters,
help their mid game and help their late game, and this accomplished that goal.
But now she’s a little bit over the top in the laning phase, so we’re targeting a few nerfs specifically for her early game.
The first one we’re doing is we’re lowering her base health regeneration; this is to allow a little more counterplay in lane.
When an opponent actually is able to land some damage on Riven, it’s going to stick better than it used to.
She’s already a Champion that has a lot of really good tools: she has an on demand shield, she has an on demand stun, and she can hop all over the battlefield.
This gives a lot of control to Riven players, and we didn't take any of those tools away, we thought we’d chip away at the base stats instead.
I understand that we’re also changing the cooldown on her ultimate.
Sure, so we’re increasing the cooldown on the early ranks of her ultimate especially, because right now she’s just snowballing top lane too hard.
We actually like where it is - again - late game and mid game and her performance there, but the problem is, if she gets an early lead on you, and gets a little bit of an edge and gets a kill off,
by the time you respawn and get back to lane, her ultimate's already able to be cast again, and she’ll just kill you over and over and over again.
This is causing her to snowball a little bit too much out of control.
We’ve seen a lot of feedback from the community about some of the recent changes to Rengar and Diana.
Many feel that they went a little bit too far. How do we feel about where they’re at now?
We feel the changes were overall in the right direction, and actually contribute a lot to the healthy gameplay these characters can bring,
but we actually agree with you guys on this one, we went a little bit too far. So we’re scaling back the Diana and the Rengar nerfs for this patch.
Rengar specifically is also getting a few other changes as well.
The first is we’re changing the way his heal works on the Empowered Battle Roar.
Before it used to scale off of the percent of his maximum health. Now we’re changing it to a flat value based off of his character level.
This will keep the heal relevant, and not have it totally blow it out of control when Rengar only stacks health, and allow him to build some more damage items and still benefit from the ability.
The other change we’re doing is we’re buffing Bonetooth Necklace a little bit.
It’s sort of one of Rengar’s cool, unique things, he has this item that no other Champion can buy, and right now it’s feeling a little bit too useless.
We wanted to give it a little bit of that love back, so that way he could build it and still feel good.
Alright, so Evelynn is one of those Champions that we’ve had a really difficult time balancing, and she's back on the balance docket again.
So what are we going to be doing this patch?
Evelynn's always been a tricky Champion to balance because her role in League of Legends is so unique.
Right now we actually feel that her core gameplay is pretty good; the one thing that’s kind of out of line and causing her to snowball out of control is really her ultimate.
It’s a really strong initiation tool, it gives her the durability she needs and a lot of opening damage in a teamfight, and we actually like that a lot.
There’s two problems with it right now. The first problem is, the cast range is really, really long –
it’s far outside of her stealth detection radius, so therefore she can basically snipe people with it.
We’re not super happy with that, so we’re bringing down the cast range to better match her stealth range.
The other change we’re doing, is we’re changing it from percent maximum health to percent current health.
Right now it’s too often being used as an execute when it really should be used as an opening move.
Alright, so it’s been a long time since we’ve made any changes to Lee Sin, but we’re going to be doing something this patch. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
If you’ve been around the community for a while, you'll remember back to Phreak's April Fools' Champion Spotlight about Lee Sin, where he said this:
PHREAK: Lee Sin is a ranged melee tanky dps assassin mage tank support jungler. He excels at everything.
Unfortunately, that’s too true at the moment. He actually fulfills all of those roles relatively effectively.
So the first thing we’re doing on Lee Sin is we’re pulling the armor off of Iron Will.
This move is meant to be a sustain type of mechanic, you know, help him keep healthy in the jungle, it also doesn’t need to give him that kind of durability on top of it.
The second thing we’re doing is we’re looking at Cripple. The early ranks of Cripple, the slow percent is coming down - it's just giving him too much gank strength, especially in the early game.
Also, we’re reducing the cast range of Cripple from 800 down to 600. The reason for this is once he marks you, even if you’re able to use a Champion ability, Flash, or honestly just walk away,
he still has enough range on that ability to mark you, and then catch up to you with all the other awesome tools he has.
We made a ton of changes to the Jungle in our big pre-season patch last month, but we’re going to be doing some additional tweaking. What can you tell us about that?
You’re going to see a lot of lines in the patch notes about this, but they’re all geared around two different things.
The first being: We still think that Area of Effect junglers are a little bit too dominant over their single target counterparts.
So we’re taking a little bit more health out of the small monsters, and putting it into the big monsters to even this out a little bit.
The second change we’re doing is we're putting a bit more gold back into a couple of the camps.
This'll sort of give more of a trade-off between ganking and applying lane pressure, and farming the jungle repeatedly.
In addition, you’ll see some of these more of these carry junglers who are farming the jungle effectively, have a lot more gold, and contribute better to the late game.
Alright, that’s it for this episode of the League of Legends Patch Preview. Please subscribe to the Riot Games YouTube channel above and leave us your comments just below the video. Thanks for watching!