Hey everyone, welcome to the first Patch Rundown of Season 2015. Preseason may be over but
still talking about strategic diversity. With me
again is Joshua "Jatt" Leesman and DJ Greg Street.
What's up y'all? It's good to be here again. Is
it? It was until just now. It was... I was... I
was being nice. Yeah. So let's kick things off
with kind of where we left off last time right?
It's been a month or so since Preseason has been
out and we have kind of some findings on where
we did well, where we didn't do well, things like
that so... so what do we got. Well we set out...
we really wanted players to focus on objectives more and they're definitely doing that and that's
working out well. We also wanted to make sure there
was more diversity of strategies, you know, in
the jungle and in lanes and we're not quite at
the level of champion diversity that we want to
see yet. There is supposed to be four ways to play
the jungle, maybe we are at one, one and a half
ways right now so we are still, you know, have
some changes we want to make now and for future
patches going into the new Season. Yeah, I don't
know about you guys, but I saw a lot of Warwick
over the break. Really, what game were you playing?
It's like, what is this? Well I saw him right in
the corner underneath the banned list. That's where
I saw Warwick. To be completely fair, when the
patch first came out I was having a ton of fun
experimenting with all these different junglers,
figuring out how I can make this guy work, I was
doing some wacky things like Crystalline Flask
on a few junglers. I still do that on Amumu and...
Jatt, please. It's too wacky. Take it away. Yeah,
I think it's actually really good and as far as
individual play since I'm not necessarily at a
pro level, I can get away with these slight different
optimizations and miss some power points in the
game, but I think those guys are really close to
being at the competitive level, it's just not there
yet and that's why we see Jarvin and Lee Sin every
game. Yeah, yeah, so we are buffing a lot of champions
this patch, we are really trying to focus on kind
of bringing some of these other guys up for once.
Totally, players are often asking us like, hey
why can't you buff a lot of people rather than
nerfing the couple of outliers, and here's an opportunity
where we are trying to do just that. Yeah, it really
seems like this is the case where... you know, we are willing to say Jarvin, Lee Sin, very strong,
but we don't actually think they're the best. They
might not be too strong I think is the main point,
because junglers by and large are still feeling a little underappreciated and there is a ton of
jungle buffs going in this patch that I think you're
going to guide us to later, but honestly I look
at the top Challenger players in every region it's
like, well yeah, there's a bunch of mid laners
and AD carries right there and maybe the Jungler and top laner thrown in there randomly, and maybe
the Jungler, it's time for a little bit of love.
Yeah, that's true. And the jungle, I thinkn it's
fair to say the jungle has just gotten a little harder since last Season, so I think we have room
to buff some of them. Yeah, it's definitely fair...
the number of people I've seen dying to Grompwould
also agree with you. They are like, yo, but Gromp
is strong though. I died to Gromp yesterday. Make
a t-shirt. Yeah, I died to Gromp and all I got
was this t-shirt. So, I'm going to kick it over
to you actually. So we have another big change coming to the jungle and that is there are
two charges of Smite. Yeah. I was just allowed to Smite
players, now I get to Smite twice. This is too
much for me to handle. What's going on? One of
the things we wanted to do was give players a lot
of things they could do with Smite. You can use
Smite to get buffs from the jungle, you can even
use Smite on enemy players. One of the problems we were seeing is that, you know Smite is still
powerful and needs a reasonably long cool down,
so we wanted to make sure that if you used Smite,
say in a team fight, you still had it available to actually go clear your objectives. So Jatt,
you had some pretty big concerns when we were looking
over this change specifically. Yeah. What's up?
Absolutely, because the biggest thing I noticed was that the recharge time, the Smite charge was
seventy-five seconds and the cool down of Smite
currently was sixty and there's all this talk about,
yeah you can use Smite on players and the jungle.
What if I just want to Smite the jungle, because
I like Ranger's Trailblazer? Which we told you,
you would be able to do. And this was like, well
I guess I couldn't do that anymore, but then I
talked to some of the designers and I got pretty
reassured actually, if it was just sixty seconds it's a unilateral buff across everything, because
you're never using it exactly on cool down. Right.
And there is always going to be downtime, and effectively
if it's two charges with sixty seconds you can
get three Smites really quickly with the waythat
chart system works and now it also gives me some
freedom to take like a blue buff and then Dragon
and still have it. Or if I want to take one Raptor
camp and then the other, I can still do that on
top of all the other jungle buffs that are happening
this patch. There's an experience thing, there's
more gold, and I think overall it will be strong,
even for Trailblazer if Chilling Smite still needs
to get nerfed later, probably I think that's going
to happen, but we'll end up seeing. Sure, right
so in the end, right, it's like just more options.
It's more freedom. Yeah, so let's start talking
about objectives. People are taking far more Dragons
then they were ever taking before and much earlier,
which I find interesting. People are just like,
more risky. They are like, I want to get the first
Dragon buff. We are almost dead, let's take it!
They are kind of losing their mind. Yeah. Yeah.
I've seen a lot of stuff about Dragon actually having a large impact. Like, whoever get's the
first Dragon, they are winning the game a whole
bunch of the time. Yeah. And I'm not sold on the
power of Dragon one and two necessarily completely swinging the game. Yeah. What I am sold on is the
fact that people are going crazy and suiciding for Dragons one and two. I've had so many games
where the team has no business taking Dragon. They
got like a level four Jarvin who just ganked and
he is at half health and they like, took the Support
down and then there's three people that can throw
like an Orianna ball in there and get a triple kill and then, yeah they get the first Dragon,
they just got a triple kill and they are going to win the game, but none of that would have happened
if the team wasn't overly committing to Dragon. Yeah. We really wanted players to be thinking
about Dragon and teams to be like, is now the right time?
Do we need to worry about what the other team is
doing? And that is clearly happening now. Is it
swinging things too far, I know there's arguments
on both sides we are just going to have to keep
an eye on that. We definitely don't want it to
be the case that whoever gets first Dragon wins.
Yeah, so there is another statistic though that
I think is important to bring up, which is gametime
has actually increased a little bit. Yeah and that's
not something we are trying to... we think League
is long enough as it is. We are not entirely sure
yet if it's... are players still trying to figure
it out? Are they playing a little conservatively?
We think there is this phenomenon where it's the
end of the game and you could probably close it
out, but if you got one more Dragon stack it would
be a little less risky. I can kind of combo off
of that, I've talked to a lot of people and experienced
a bit myself, a lot of people just don't know what
to do at a certain point in the game, twenty-five, thirty minutes. They are like, yeah even if
they are going well, they've gotten three Dragons max,
they are probably sitting at two, they don't want
to do Baron because it will literally kill you
unless you have your whole team, and if you do
then the team will come back and take Baron off
you and the base turrets with the lasers are really
hard to take without Baron, so they're in this
murky space where they're just trying to farm and
I think that's one of the big reasons games are
long. Yeah and so... That's a good transition,
because part of the problem is, it is hard to take
Baron now and it's a little risky. We see teams
just kind of neglecting it when that's supposed to be an answer to how do I crack that base
open as I get this powerful siege buff in Baron. Yeah,
I mean when we were here last we were talking about
Baron and all of its strength for sieging down,
but when you can't really take it 'til like fifty,
sixty minutes in the game anyways when you're probably
already firmly in the driver's seat, it's probably
not going to do a whole lot for you to close the
game out earlier than that so we do have changes
for Baron now that right at his spawn at twenty minutes, much, much weaker. Maybe a little too
weak. I've seen some of these changes. I know it's
bad to go too far. This is on the line of going
too far. I think Baron is much easier to take early
on, which I think will definitely make games faster
in my opinion. I think that's part of what we're
kind of going for here, which is... right now we're
not really seeing any Baron's taken. Yeah. We're,
you know... they are kind of this thing... It's
just not worth it. You know, before the season, you were seeing Baron taken as almost the
last thing before the game ended, right? There was a
Baron throw, or there was a Baron take and either
you win on that fight or you win on that recall, where now it's more tame, and its more strategic,
right? But you want to get it earlier and probably
get it in that zone where you start trading objectives
for it. Yeah, I mean when Dragon is a bigger affect
on the game, almost by definition Baron is going
to be less important, but we still want it to be
there. We don't want... you know, we don't want
Baron Nashor to just totally be ignored in every
game, that's weird. Yeah, he would be sad, we gave
him all that new, cool modeling... he looks good
finally. People just let him over there, Dragon
looks awesome too. The last thing I want to talk
about here is also pretty big, maybe a little bigger
than we're going to sell it here, but base gates,
we have them. There's holes in the base now. Yes.
And people can run out of them. Only your own team
though, that is the mechanic. Blue side and red
side have two gates in-between their base walls,
only they can go in and out, the enemy team can't...
you can still dash over, you can still do anything
you want. So with so much talk of, you know, kind
of games going longer, people really not feeling like they know what to do, where does this sit?
I mean, we think League is most fun, whether you're
playing or spectating, when there are these exciting
moments and so we are just opening up more options.
If you're trapped inside your base and you feel
like there's nothing you can do to kind of hold
off the inevitable, well now there is something
you can do. It's not necessarily going to turn
things around and win a game if you are down twenty
thousand gold or something, but if you want to
get out and try to flank or try to do something
else, you don't just kind of have to wait for the
enemy to come all in. Yeah, I like that, its like,
yeah that LeBlanc is sixteen and one, but I got
him with the base gate. I got to have the base
gate. I'm going for the flank... oh god, I'm dead.
Yeah, no, that's the... no, I imagine there is
going to be some of that, but guys, thank you for
coming back and talking shop with me about all
the changes that we are doing. That's it for the
Patch Rundown. We'll be back to tackle 5.2 like
always. For myself, Jatt, Greg and the entire Rundown
crew, we hope you have an amazing start to the
new Season. Good luck, have fun.