bz6

Mastery system has so much potential to unlock champion-specific customization the further you level it up. I am hoping further levels inject some merit into the system.

On a completely different subject, I also feel there is an opportunity to show-off Challenges Titles in game no?

Candidly, we ran a bunch of tests around titles in game and no one liked them in playtests. They got in the way pretty badly. We tried having them fade in combat, but them coming in and out became distracting unto itself. Ended up being a bit of a cursed problem.

We did once explore being able to equip challenge tokens as emotes which was pretty sweet, but on reflection they didn't have as much emotional significance as we wanted.

Hey friends, BarackProbama here. Wanted to clarify a few things about our multi-disenchant feature.

Why does it only let me select 1 category and 50 shards at a time?
Main reason is service load concerns. The loot service was built with the expectation of folks disenchanting things one at a time sporadically. We designed this feature to handle many many players hitting the service all at once. The scripts/tools you mind find out in the wild are fine when one person uses them, but if everyone used them on large inventories there would be chaos. Snakes and Mongooses settling down together and such.

Long term, with further improvements to the service and fewer large inventories, our intent is 100% to allow larger amounts of items to be 1-click disenchanted with less hassle.

Why doesn't it respect the shards I am saving for Champion Mastery?

Why can't I unselect shards?

These essentially have the same answer: Time. We really wanted this feature to land before the Essence Empor...

zaviex

I dare you. Give her a 40% tAD ratio on q, and r and ill build it every game lol

40% tAD on those spells just takes AP Lux into the stratosphere and AD Lux becomes garbage.

What you'd need to do is make the passive procs explode and the radius scales with bonus AD and it can crit.

toxic-banana

Maybe it's similar to Quick Shot's situation. He was an analyst originally, but his switch to pbp was, in my view, a revelation. The guy is absolutely elite. Talent is talent - just got to find the best way to use it.

Trevor was always a PBP. He just started as color in EULCS when they already had Joe Miller and Deman so he just filled the role while they needed him to. Dude's always been great at his real job :)

Hellioning

I misunderstood the champion names underneath "Durability pass on old Immortal Shieldbow users" as being the champions getting a durability pass because they bought shieldbow. It took until Lux before I realized I was wrong, because I somehow thought Elise and Gnar were old Shieldbow users.

Oh, no you're totally right. We're buffing AD Lux.

Actually_Godlike

Can we add Zyra to that? Would actually love it if she felt better to play midlane, and people would be very happy to see her less in support I think :)

FWIW Zyra pretty much instantly took to support. She was stronger mid by ~1.5% win rate on release but people played her support instead.

Brand, Xerath, and Vel'Koz were much slower adoptions. I'm not going to opine on why, just merely comment on trends.

spazzxxcc12

mark has never pbp casted in his whole career

Correct.

As someone that loves Mark and believes in his drive and talent in every way he should not be allowed to pbp LOL

Jandromon

If jungle isn't turbobusted, no one plays it.

Jungle and Supp are the 2 roles that have to be extra-busted for queues not to get too long.

Not really true. Jungle has had a fairly similar level of powerful for the last three years running and has steadily climbed in pick rate.

AtreusIsBack

They don't want junglers to play PvE. They want action because of esports.

Not exactly. It’s important that jungle ganks are a threat otherwise you get darius level 1 starting behind your minion line. (It’s more complex than that)

You want some degree of ambiguity: is the threat top side? Can I be ganked? Just not the level of actual power we have now.

corywyn

the studio is at the old Tempelhof airport in Berlin, so there's a lot of free space around it

The studio is located at Studio Berlin in Adlershof— not Tempelhof! We've gotten some grassy areas around the studio lot, as behind us in that direction are some train tracks.

FriendlyGhostLady

Can u tell us how hard the creature marksman will be? Will he be hard or easier? 2) will u make a new AP toplaner in the future?

Stay tuned for the next roadmap!

FruitfulRogue

Hi mentioning midscopes, can we get an update on them at all?

We haven't been given any info on if there are any new ones in production or if they've been paused for the time being.

I think midscopes have been/are some of the best things the team have done in the last few years, and as far as track record go I'd say about 90% of them have landed really well.

Itd just be nice to get some info on them, since we haven't heard anything since Rells landed (crashed?).

We tend to pick midscopes up when design team has the free cycles. Between helping out on modes and other projects, I don’t think there were alot of free cycles lately. I think we were exploring 2 pretty recently but they may or may not work out. We tend to do them pretty opportunistically. Try something and if it doesn’t work we will just not ship it.

Zarathielis

Is there a champion concept you or the team is really excited about but you can't quite make it right and have to pause it?

Yes! There was a project that involve heavy AI that we just don’t have the tech to do yet :)

bingbongzingzongz

btw Lexi thanks alot for your replies both here and twitter, sucks that you became lead producer of champs in troublesome times

I want to ask if older/recent VGUs are kind of considered as risky projects and that's why the team moved resources from them and into ASUs meaning they don't always have positive outcomes, yes they always have the benefit of modernizing the roster but it is kind of apparent that they won't always increase the playrate of the champion compared to ASUs:

Udyr has same playrate he had before his VGU 1 year ago, Mundo has almost same playrate as before his VGU

. (I don't mean to criticize the awesome peeps who worked on them, just an observation and I believe you were still in LoR back then)

ASUs on the other hand are always a success, Ahri's playrate increased by 50% after her ASU earlier this year and she retained that playerbase

So my question is Did you guys shift priorities away from VGUs due to that? Small increase in a champion's playrate at the cost of so much resources wasn't worth the effort?

Also this applies to "newer" champions, Renata for example has been bottom 5 pickrate champ for months despite a positive winrate

Playrate is often tied to winrate I know but there are many champions old and new who retained high playrate even with negative winrates (Lee, Kai'sa, wind bros, etc.)

TLDR: Do you consider new champions /VGUs who failed to retain the playrate to be not successful projects? Is it the reason why VGUs and new champs resources were diverted to other projects (ASUs and modes)?

ASUs are done by the Skins team so we generally have nothing to do with those projects aside from supporting them on the QA, design, game clarity side.
Personally, I think there are still good reasons to maintain the cast of league roster with updates to have them brought up to modern standards. Playrates are not necessarily the highest priority we have. Sometimes depth, players who mains and deeply care about a champion, is also important. If we keep pursuing playrate, we will end up making a lot of similar champions. We haven’t diverted any resources to other projects besides helping out on modes. Udyr was just an extra large project in a turbulent time. It will take time to catch backup.

N30NWH173

What item should poor little gnar build phreak senpai

He’s really good with Trinity

daswef2

Is the intention with the phage in the build path to make it a lot more attractive to laners?

It’s a nice side benefit but wasn’t the primary reason: I wanted to even out its stat line on both the finished item and component front. Phage was a thematic fit with Goredrinker so it was an easy choice.

brodhi

FWIW Goredrinker is the most-built item for jungle fighters

Aren't they just wrong though? Pound-for-pound Stride is generally better on junglers: gives better clear, has better dps against Epic monsters, don't really need the Omnivamp because you heal a lot off camps, and Stride helps a lot more with ganks than Gore.

Lee, Xin, Jarvan; all jungle champs you would assume SHOULD be building Gore are instead having more success with Stride because its stats are just flatout better for doing damage.

So the above comment is still true: people shouldn't be building Gore because it just doesn't do enough damage--even the other Whip item is better.

Generally, yeah, Stride is just better by a lot.

bz6

Hey /u/neolexical

I heard a couple of times that August will take a break or leave the champs team after Briar. That being said, I wanted to ask you a question, do you think the current champions team is the “weakest” it’s ever been? I feel with all this help the team has been doing (with Modes and shit), the team has lost many many important members. It’s evident that losing designers like that affects the team, I mean CertainlyT was a huge loss. Are new champions still gathering sizeable audiences when it comes to depth and breadth? I also do feel champions are more miss than hit these days, which sucks.

I don’t think so! August is still around. We are probably the only team that had the most staffed disciplines. Thus it makes sense for us to be the ones that pitch in to help the other teams to start up again. We are taking some highly ambitious projects though Naafiri with her dogs was a lot of tech work. Some future ones are also super ambitious. Will go into it in the next roadmap.

Disloyaltee

Is there a champ that has been in development ever since you joined?

Strictly speaking, yes. But it’s also because we cancel, pause and bring things back all the time.

Cassian_J

But this goredrinker change makes it worse overall for the champions that want to use it and if it’s already built on few champions in few situations and you’re saying it should be built LESS that makes no sense. This is going to make it built less for sure and it’s already not a popular item. Maybe im completely wrong but are you able to provide more insight on why this change is being made to the item? Who are the target champions that you want to be using this item? And in what situations?

FWIW Goredrinker is the most-built item for jungle fighters. It scores much worse in top lane, to be fair, but the item actually has a decent cohort of users.

The intent is for the Ironspike Whip items to be aimed at heavier fighters who are meant to quite literally be in melee range on top of as many people as possible. The shape of the actives pretty much beg you to be surrounded. In my mind, an item like that shouldn't have only 300 HP. They're also not critically underpowered, so while this is a buff overall, it's not just pure +150 HP.

Could be that we're just meant to take it more slowly with changes and players adapt to these stronger items over time.