Welcome to the League of Legends Patch Preview. I’m Phreak and I’m joined here with Morello, Lead Champion Designer.
This video is a preview of some of the major changes in the upcoming patch. For the full release notes, stay tuned to leagueoflegends.com.
Fiddlesticks has been tweaked in most of our recent patches. What’s in store for him this time?
We did the remake a little while ago and there was some ramp-up time on that. During that time we also did some more buffs to him.
Those buffs took him to a stronger spot than we were looking, especially as more players have figured out how to maximize Fiddlesticks.
We’re seeing this at a lot of different Elo ranges so we’re like:
Hey, those numbers are just a tiny bit too high, let’s take him down a small amount, and we think Fiddlesticks will be in a really good place.
Garen is getting a few buffs, but none of them are aimed at his damage. Why is that?
One of the problems with Garen is if you buff his damage, he just ends up being really binary where he tears through people and just kills them or he doesn’t do enough at all.
So we thought we would increase his utility instead.
You’ll find a slew of changes throughout his skills giving him increased utility, increased closing power, a little bit better defensiveness, things like that. These will really round Garen out.
Leona was unchanged last patch but is getting a few buffs now. What are we trying to do here?
We wanted to do a little bit to Leona. We actually think she’s pretty close right now. The big things with her were cooldowns and mana costs.
We wanted to give her just a little hair on those and improve those just by a little bit.
Leona is supposed to get into the middle of your team and just do stuff a lot.
This really helps her fulfill that role to where she can really be that tank that sits in the middle of your team and is disruptive and helps her own team out.
So we think this will get her in a really good spot.
Nasus is getting quite a few buffs, included the long-awaited buff to Wither’s interaction with “Tenacity.” What are the goals with the Nasus buffs?
We have heard your requests loud and clear. Wither will now always reach its full slow even if you have Tenacity. That’s been a long-awaited change so we got that in.
One other thing is we did make it possible through some lifesteal changes and some other little tweaks to make it so Nasus can actually jungle now.
Pantheon is getting a huge set of changes. What are we hoping to accomplish with the new Pantheon?
One of the long-requested features on Pantheon, and frankly it’s just cool, is his Spear Toss can now crit when below 15% from Certain Death.
It just feels great, you feel super heroic, you can just execute people. It’s awesome.
Heartseeker Strike has been a notoriously hard to balance skill.
If it does too much damage, you just burst a guy during a stun and if the damage is too low, the question comes up, “Why don’t I just auto attack?”
So what we decided to do instead is make it a little more consistent, make him more of a melee caster DPS over time.
So you’re seeing a little less burst on it, but the cooldown is dramatically reduced, the channel time is reduced, so you’re just gonna be able to stick on targets and constantly Heartseeker Strike them.
The final change is we have reduced the channel time pretty significantly on his Grand Skyfall.
So, now that the range is limited, you’ll be able to get those ganks and drop in on opponents much easier than you were able to previously.
We’re making a couple of changes to how death streaks and assists work. Can you shed some light on these changes?
If you got a bunch of assists and never got a kill you would continue to accrue a death streak.
A player like Soraka who’s doing really well is feeding her team kills, she has no kills, but keeps getting killed in teamfights.
Maybe a good Soraka game is 0/8/25. That’s a pretty good Soraka score.
That Soraka is actually worth 15 gold but she’s really valuable to kill because she’s a strong team component for that team.
So what we did do is assists don’t reset your death streaks, but enough assists will start getting to the point like you’re getting kills.
So for example the Soraka we just spoke about will be worth some gold as time goes on, it won’t be just worthless to kill her.
We think that’s really important.
We also made it so that if you suicide into towers or died to minions, you’re not resetting your kill streaks or incrementing death streaks.
We found some abuse cases where you could suicide over and over. It’s a cool trick people have figured out, but it’s also pretty bad gameplay for everybody else.
You should feel good when you kill a guy if he’s been actually doing well. So we figured we’d close that loophole up in the process, too.
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