Welcome to the League of Legends Patch Preview. I’m Phreak and I’m here with Morello, Lead Champion Designer.
This video will explain some of the gameplay changes coming into the next update for League of Legends.
While it does not cover every single change, it will explain the thought process behind some of our decisions.
We think Rammus is a little overpowered, specifically as a rapidly-ganking jungler.
To combat this, Rammus is getting a couple of nerfs to his base damage and base armor.
We’re also making a usability improvement to Powerball. Why these changes?
Base stats are the easiest thing to hit about a champion’s power without hitting how fun they are or hitting their gameplay.
This will allow us to hit his jungle speed while leaving him intact from a tank and initiator role.
What we are doing with Powerball is a little quality of life improvement.
Now when you right click on a target, you’ll go up and collide with them instead of spinning uselessly next to them.
Shaco’s early game damage is a little too high and it’s making it too hard for players to escape his ganks.
On the other hand, his late game scaling is really poor and makes him drop off when he should remain strong.
In this patch, we’re converting the 0.5 base AD ratio into a 1.0 bonus AD ratio and slightly increasing the base damage on Two-Shiv Poison. What’s going to happen to Shaco as a result?
Shaco’s very strong early game made it very risky to buff his damage scaling because he would just snowball out of control.
Now his damage scaling should be in a good spot and make him much more viable late game when he’s built a lot of damage items.
We think this is pretty important because Shaco’s an assassin; he’s the type of champion you pick if you want to kill people and do damage.
Buying damage and having it not be rewarding is just not very fun.
Since Jax’s remake, he’s had a lot of trouble staying alive in team fights and he’s been underpowered as a result.
To give him this durability, we’re changing the active portion on his ultimate, Grandmaster’s Might, to grant bonus armor and magic resist instead of bonus damage and ability power.
How’s this going to work out for Jax?
Jax really needs that burst survivability to function in a team fight.
Getting that survivability will require more skill and timing than the old pre-Jax remake passive that was just on all the time.
This has a couple of cool extra advantages as well: For example, Jax can go back to that full offense glass cannon build and it’s still viable based on this ultimate scaling on both AD and AP.
Since attack damage converts into armor and ability power converts into magic resist, Jax can tailor his offense based on what the enemy is using.
For example, he can now stack AP against a mage-heavy team to have the MR he needs to fight that team.
Irelia’s health sustain makes her immovable in lane and it results in her being a bit overpowered.
To lower this sustain, we have two changes coming: First, the passive health regain on Hiten Style is going down, but increases back to its current value while active.
Second, the cooldown on her ultimate, Transcendent Blades, is going up. What’s going to happen to Irelia?
This change specifically allows us to hit the lane sustain case when last hitting minions without affecting her ability to fight enemy champions.
Since you typically activate Hiten Style only when fighting champions, this lets you have similar power when fighting an enemy champion but it keeps the lane sustain down.
The cooldown change has a similar goal.
Now Irelia has to make a harder choice between using her ultimate to clear out a minion wave and get some health back or using it when fighting a champion straight up.
At the end of the day, we like how Irelia fights champions, but we just wanted to get her lane sustain down and these changes address that specifically
Life steal in the game is preventing a lot of action because champions are returning to full health through life steal too quickly.
As a result, we’re nerfing the life steal values on Vampiric Scepter, Wriggle’s Lantern, and the Bloodthirster. Why are we targeting these items?
Vampiric Scepter and Wriggle’s Lantern didn’t take a lot of investment to get a lot of lane sustain power and life steal early game alongside your normal build.
On the other hand, we’re not touching Doran’s Blade because it gives the right amount of life steal for the money you spend.
Bloodthirster nerf is addressing the same problem in the rest of the game.
Champions could disengage and find an errant jungle camp or minion wave and return to the fight at almost full health.
This is a problem because we want damage to last and be meaningful, even over the course of a long fight.
We’re also making the Bloodthirster only lose half its current stacks on death instead of all of them. Why?
We wanted to make it better for attack damage assassins like Talon and Pantheon.
With Bloodthirster being so important for them, losing 40 damage every time they died was really holding them back.
We also wanted to make action restart more quickly after a death so you’re not getting your stacks back and saying, “Hey team, let’s not fight until I’ve farmed 40 minions to recharge this thing.”
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