Spideraxe30

Hey Axes do you think this trend is applicable to other non-traditional matchups in other lanes, like Seraphine and Ziggs bot or Vayne going top?

Certainly for at least some of them, but not necessarily with the same implications for game balance. Bot carry very likely has a related pattern with the set of mages who tend to counter ADCs, for example, since nearly every matchup is vs an ADC.

Using Pantheon as an example, his mid lane win rate appears to (and there are LARGE caveats on this analysis, so I emphasize "appears to") be inflated because he is both sharp in terms of who he counters and is countered by AND because the things he sharply counters are so much more popular than the things he is countered by. If every champion was exactly equally popular, his average win rate would very likely fall quite a bit in that position even with no gameplay changes.

(The inverse pattern is found on Akshan - his mid lane win rate is depressed by the fact that Yasuo is very strong counter to him, which gives him the appearance of being better top lane sometimes)

Reshir

My favorite takeaway from this video is that some champions' win rates are skewed by how they fare into Yasuo, Zed, and Katarina because of how popular those three champions are

I did some digging on this right before the holidays. Zed, Yasuo, Katarina, Yone, Sylas, Akali are all top tier popularity champions in mid lane and there've been patches where at least one of them is in something like 30-40% of all games as a mid (it varies - but not as much by win rate as you might think, the patches where these go down tend to be when there's a new mage midscope, or Viktor got a huge and permanent playrate spike from Arcane, that sort of thing, not necessarily the patches where they're relatively weaker or stronger).

The thing that makes this hard is that they all have weaknesses to a specific profile - durable stat checkers with a reliable CC. It's pretty hard to get reliable data on true toplane bruisers midlane because they're so unpopular there, but aggregating the data from patches 12.17 through 12.21, we were able to get a decent dataset on Renekton, Riven, and Sett. I looked at Pantheon as well because even though he's played mid lane, he fits the predicted...

ploki122

Isn't that simply because it's the only good/reliable GW item?

• Morellonomicon is 110% gold efficient, but requires the enemy to be <50% HP for full GW effect (and gives no AH).
• Chainsword is 116% gold efficient , but requires the enemy to be <50% HP for full GW effect (and gives no AS or Crit).
• Thornmail is 80% gold efficient, and requires immobilizing effects to get the full GW effect (and gives no MR).
• Putrifier is 102% gold efficient, and requires healing or shielding an ally for full GW effect (and gives no heal/shield boost).
• Mortal Reminder is 118% gold efficient, and requires attacking a champion 3 times (ish) for full GW effect (and gives everything an ADC wants).

I'd say there's a clear line of Reminder > Putrifier > Morello > Thornmail > Chainsword.

Otherwise, the fact that all 4 other items have baby versions for much cheaper, whereas Putrifier shares Morello's component (which means 0 benefits on heal/shield) is probably a reason that Putrifier is completed a lot more.

EDIT : Ironically, I forgot Reminder.

Isn't that simply because it's the only good/reliable GW item?

I think that's a contributing factor but not the main one. Gold is extremely multiplicative in League of Legends. If you know you need a given team utility effect that isn't going to multiply out the rest of your fantasy, its an optimization for teams to put that option on the already low econ player. We've seen that in the past with the aura Aegis of the Legion being assigned to either supports or junglers years ago (depending on the meta).

The answer here about being a solved solution is also relevant, though those things will move over time based on changes. We've found players are really slow to respond to patches when we're talking about adjusting behavior over weeks, but actually pretty effective at responding to a new meta over a period of months, to my totally-not-scientifically-accurate understanding.

Don't expect to resolve the Enchanter item particular pain point with this patch, but I'm hopeful that the si...

ThisIsSnake

/u/RiotAxes, thank you for the candid and to the point responses. Feel like we really benefit whenever your team comes in and addresses these things.

Could I ask about the anti-heal item work, directionally what you're currently considering? Something like a stacking effect or Debuff over time?

What would be really cool about that work is it also presents an opportunity to make chainsword/morello more interesting items, right now they're not very satisfying to buy and the effect isn't too visible.

We're not massively reworking the Grievous Wounds mechanic. Frankly, it has flaws, but the alternatives also have flaws (including "just delete it").

The direction will be something much closer to the pre-Items Update system - components with 40% grievous wounds so that you can access a counter when you need it, growing into stat sticks that make more sense within builds, but not specifically upgrading the GW amount. For example, Mortal Reminder will once again trade off against Lord Dominik's Regards - will have armor penetration and grievous (vs armor pen and giant slayer). I'm aware that this won't fully solve the issue - we're looking at healing soon as well.

hellosaidhello

Follow up question for you /u/RiotAxes:

1) Do you think the state of Ability Haste is overturned for bruisers and undertuned for tanks/mages ATM? Noticed its hard to get 40% CDR on the latter but easy to get 55% on the former

2) Are you guys aware of the growing problem of AD being cheaper than AP? You can now easily get 400-500AD by end game and only 500-600 AP by end game unless you go Horizon Focus (AP Mages with high AP ratios indirectly getting nerfed - cough Orianna)

To (1) - they're very different spaces, don't think decisions on one necessarily tell us what the optimal decision on the other is.

For a bruiser, assuming we're going to tune them to about the same spot (...somewhat lower than how they're doing today, but not that much lower), if they have less repeatable output, we either have to make them even more durable, or make them burst harder, or sustain harder or find something else for them to be good at. Think repeatable outputs are closer to the fantasy and closer to being fair than the alternatives. I realize some folks are going to disagree.

For many mages, I think we get a different answer as to what the right tradeoffs are. But mages are such a diverse group that I suspect we just need to better support the differences within the class. AD being cheaper than AP is weird... it's not intrinsically a problem (we tune ratios around the items that exist, if we added a lot more AP you'd probably see your ratios go down to match), but I t...

Spideraxe30

Is 13.1 going to receive more changes once you guys get back from break (outside of current highlights like Jax)

That is the current plan, yes.

bz6

I have a few questions /u/RiotAxes:

1) Are you guys concerned at how bruisers are tankier than actual tanks?

2) Can't mention tanky brusiers without healing. What are your thoughts on the state of healing? Considering we had targeted changes to address said issue.

3) Any worry of ability haste creep?

4) What is the teams analysis on the Durability Update? Since we are obviously entering a stage where patch changes are adding more damage.

(1) Think this is hyperbolic for most tanks vs bruisers, except the big sustain bruisers (more in point 2).

(2) Not in a good spot, too much healing in the game. Currently working on grievous wounds items and likely to also take a swing at healing values.

(3) Yes but the problem is difficult and the game isn't necessarily terrible when champions cast a lot of spells, so it's a bit further down the priorities list.

(4) Highly successful, still a major factor that we actively consider for patch changes. It's going to fluctuate. More damage was added in 12.23 than removed. More damage is being removed in this micropatch than added.

JustJohnItalia

I thought they said the jaksho changes were neutral for tanks, where's the neutral part?

We're micropatch nerfing it while working to get it back to a similar balance state for tanks (considering tactics like making it stack percent bonus resists instead of flat resists, for example).

We have few tools to reshape an item in a micropatch since it can't change any client data, including the text of tooltips, unfortunately.

kanated

Wit's End was an issue of being TOO good first item

It's basically the same story for all the items on that list.

Riot has never said they nerfed legendary items because "OMG how dare you not build a Mythic first". It's such a ridiculous thing to even suggest. Especially in a thread about BotRK, which has been built first by several champs ever since Mythics came out.

Everytime there's a comment in this sub saying some variation of "Riot said/did X, but now they're doing the opposite" it's always either misleading or flat out bullshit.

Riot has never said they nerfed legendary items

Just to be clear, this does represent a shift in our approach to Mythic items. (I don't remember offhand everything we've ever said about them, but internally it's a thing we've been changing recently)

J-Colio

Shred vs pen? I think everything is pen now, yes? There's only pen and lethality.

Black Cleaver, various champion spells

TrAseraan

Its probably just put there cuz players kept building it on fighters just like how is ashe listed on the support list now even tho how garbage ashe support it.

It's there because it's an important piece of the Fighter item space. It's not an accident.

ToTheNintieth

It's funny because for years we only had a bare handful of skirmishers (like, Yi, Yasuo, Trynd, Jax, Riven, Fiora) and then at some point someone at Riot realized that holy shit people love playing melee carries and opened the floodgates.

Something like that. They’ve always been extremely popular, but 4 or 5 years ago we felt we finally had a good handle on how to best serve that audience, and it had been significantly underserved for a while.

That said, this year ended up unusually dense on them for some scheduling shenanigans reasons and we’re looking to cool it off a bit - I don’t believe there’s one on the schedule next year, and if one is added onto the schedule next year it’d be because we had a VGU that made sense opportunistically (say, Trynd or Jax), not a new champion. I don’t think there’s currently one on the schedule for 2024 either but schedules are extremely fluid that far in advance so very much subject to change.

For the record, Zoe is absolutely as much an artillery mage as Sett is a juggernaut or Lillia is a skirmisher… which is to say not a pure one but definitely in the category.

Namulith94

It really seems like a 40% nerf on illaoi’s heal is completely over the top. I get that effective health on heals gets better when champions are tankier, but the nerf goes so far past that extra effective health to the point of absurdity. It doesn’t make sense to me to nerf her due to the gw nerf by essentially putting a constant unnerfed gw aura on her that stacks with actual gw. Do you have any context for why she’s seeing a 40% heal nerf while 90% of the roster is seeing it in more the 10-20% range that’s actually in line with durability increases?

It's intended to be a nerf from 5% to 4%, not 5% to 3%.

The target here is nerfing heals from around 10% at level 1 to around 25% at endgame; not all champion spells have the tools for us to nail that perfectly. She definitely should not be nerfed 40%. (We used a different target for shields, as heals are also accounting for Grievous changes)

NitronBiohazard

Iirc the durability changes were intended for preseason and ended up delayed. Was apparently explained on one of the devs streams about why it was delayed.

We started exploring them around when preseason shipped. This was the earliest patch we'd have been able to ship them since we started that investigation. They were never at any point intended for last preseason.

This is an absolute bloodbath of nerfs to compensate on the advantages champions get that prioritize on shielding and healing after the whole champion durability buffs.

I want to really emphasize the bolded part here. If we don't act on healing and shielding, their relative power levels go up quite significantly and champions with them end up much more powerful relative to champions without them, so we've applied an across the board (with only a small handful of exceptions) approximate nerf on all of them. We additionally elected to go slightly further on healing in order to allow us to nerf grievous wounds, which we feel has been tuned inappropriately too high for a while now (but which requires something like this amount of retuning when we nerf it, so has been difficult to get traction on).

Some nerfs are clear placebos however

These numbers changes are not intended to get you thinking differently about which champion you ought to pick, they're intended to offset the natural...

PersonalSycophant

Unironically might make for an amusing April Fools mode. Just the reverse of everything that's URF--less damage, longer cooldowns, lower maximum level, with an evil counterpart to Urf the Manitee as mascot.

Probably wouldn't catch on past April Fools, but Urf wasn't supposed to catch on either.

We made the joke some years ago (talked about it, did not ship anything). I promise it's not an amusing mode though - it's funny to read, but the novelty lasts much less than the duration of a single playthrough. It's miserable enough that I'd hate to see it even as an april fool's joke. Or at very least we'd need to allow players to disconnect without penalties or something.

I won't rest until we've turned Summoner's Rift into NURF mode.

Spideraxe30

Are you able to share what you think will happen with burst mages then? Seems like the changes may benefit drain or dot mages a bit

Mixed signals. If I had to guess I'd expect them mostly to be similar or weaker, but very low confidence.

Basically they're worse at one-shotting you themselves, but most of them have a long range CC spell optimized for generating picks and picking an enemy when you have teammates around is still lethal; increased champion durability potentially gives them more chances to generate that pick.

The uncertainty is why we're not attempting any pre-balancing here.

Mundane-Historian-57

I've always wanted to ask, what does balance team think about the idea of balancing AD assassins through lethality scalings?

Then they can have less base damage and AD scalings, since damage with lethality items will stay the same and at the same time probably-nerfed lethality items can't be as effectively used by someone else (ghostblade riven as example). Similar things were aready done to Pyke (lethality), Viego and Zeri (crit) to encourage their intended build paths. Senna also has lethality scalings, so concept of just having them isn't new either.

what does balance team think about the idea of balancing AD assassins through lethality scalings?

Open to it, haven't felt we needed it very often. Could be a useful tool if necessary after these changes if we're seeking new balance approaches.

Zancibar

But even if assassins are balanced after the changes their winrates will most definitely plummet anyway at first because they've had 3/4 years of getting consistently easier kills, how long will you take to make sure it's a balance issue rather than a player issue, how will you determine that?

Imprecisely. We'll be using the best data we can get access to as well as our judgment but the reality is this game is too complicated to get perfect confidence in stuff like this, and some situations are going to look extreme enough that we feel we need to act when in retrospect it'll turn out we didn't have to, or even did the wrong thing.

For example, you mention a learning curve for assassins around their burst thresholds; there's also going to be a learning curve for ADCs around the appropriate safe distance for them to position at, and there'll be teams that lose games because their ADCs played too safe while the opponent's ADC judged it better. Will this be a larger effect than Assassin learning? It's hard to measure and we won't have perfect context.

It is going to take time for balance to settle back down - there's no way around it.