AmWhaleIRL

I think it's mostly just your use of the word "Significant". There's been plenty of Valid Criticism that's gone "seemingly" unnoticed. So when people see your use of "Significant" in this particular instance it makes them think "Did he even see all the other Valid Criticisms??" It can come across as Deflection to see a Rioter address a problem that's out of their reach as "Significant" while not addressing other Valid problems that were brought up. Perhaps my use of the word "problem" is problematic in itself. I can't think of a different way to word it right now though. I like your awareness of Societal Anti-Femininity that can run deep in Online World's though. I hope to hear more from you, even if I may not agree always. Communication from Devs is always awesome to see.

That's a reasonable perspective.

I'm wondering, what exactly are you advocating that I do otherwise? Agree with the original person's point about femininity, but also hijack it to go through a comprehensive list of all other negative feedback about Seraphine and...say something the validity of each of them?

blissfullybleak

We see you over at r/seraphinemains. Hope the teams knows how loved the champion is in all her unapologetic expression. I’ll continue “screeching” along to her ult.

I know the champion is very loved by a lot of people. :) I'm proud of the SeraphineMains community and I support you all.

The fact that people are taking my statement and arguing against a bizarrely altered version of it (which I think they parsed as "that is the ENTIRE reason people have issues with Seraphine") is a testament to how absurd the Reddit discourse around Seraphine has become.

blissfullybleak

Why is this sub obsessed her? Is the hyper femininity making everyone uncomfortable?

I think that's a significant part of it.

Choad_Warrior

Actually yeah, he said it not you. I assumed it's just an excerpt for people who are not using twitter, but now I opened it and saw it's not even remotely close. Apologies for that.

On the other hand, what the issue I see is that while you clearly detail in your post on twitter what you see the problematic points are you still do nothing to outliers for patches now.

Also, can we just appreciate how Seraphine got to the point where she's banned for being obnoxious gameplay-wise (and generally broken) instead of literally everything else? What exactly was the idea there? You were the designer, you must have already gotten all the feedback. I really think that release was likely the biggest learning experience in the last like 5 years or so for you guys, since she was probably the only champ ever that was received in such an overwhelmingly negative way and also the only one that was hated for non-gameplay reasons. I'm actually curious about this and since you popped up here I might as well ask.

The Reddit community is infamously toxic and not particularly representative of our player base. There are few examples where this is more pronounced than Seraphine.

Hellioning

I'd also want to complain about it on ARAM. You can get a takedown on every single champion fairly easily there, especially if you have some sort of buff or heal spell you can cast on allies, and it is very annoying. It also doesn't help that most champions don't buy active items and the out of combat move speed matter less there, so there's really only two choices on that row.

Yeah I can see ARAM-specific tuning in place for Ravenous for sure.

1. 100% agree that Sustain should be a tradeoff. We explored Goredrinker retaining the big heal and losing more combat stats, but felt like it also just was overtuned. In general, we think most sustain items are definitely giving up meaningful damage (Immortal Shielbow is a prime example), and we shipped changes to sharpen that.
2. Agree that's the danger there.
3. I think one of League's premier selling points is a lot of direct conflict, often through frequent exchange of ability usage and trading. I'd say this area is similarly an issue of balance, not principles - rune sustain should still be correctly costed, but it can exist in the system.

Choad_Warrior

One of the good changes this season is reducing the accessibility of AH and Mana. League's secret sauce is in the strategy not it's mindless spamming of abilities.

Then proceeds to release champs that have NO MANA and occasionally get AH from attack speed. Makes total sense! Except it fucking doesn't....

in 2020 and 2021, total of 6 new champs were released and 3 of them has no mana, and one of those has AS into AH scaling as well, so to clarify, getting rid of items that give mana nerfs a certain number of champions for sure, but definitely not the darlings like Yasuo, Yone, Riven, Sett or more recently Viego.

That's what the OP said, not what I said.

zUkUu

Ravenous Hunter gives MORE OMNIVAMP than most items in the game. Just compare how insane that is with other stats. That's like Alacrity giving 40% AS or Eyeball Collection 60 AD.

Want to nerf healing? Just remove ravenous hunter and make people have to ACTIVELY invest into omnivamp.

Ravenous is definitely powerful, but it also has the correct type of backloaded gating (getting a takedown on everyone) that lets us feel it is structurally healthy.

That said, there's some merit to the notion that it's just better than it's alternatives in that row. We're keeping an eye on it.

Caenen_

Unless I'm mistaken, Stachu (known as design lead for Qiyana, Aphelios, Rell) is taking on lead design for him.

Yeah I think Stash will be on it? Not 100% sure. But Champion team leadership saw this thread so they'll have all these ideas when they start work.

Good thread, ty.

This title format has become used for so many ridiculous (but genuine) requests that I had to check the content to be sure.

Thanks for the laugh. :)

Noice

Nice thread.

Badass.

phroxz0n

CertainlyT was unironically one of the greatest holistic Designers (not just champ designer) that League has had. I know this is going to get memed because people will say "yeah he just taught people how to make broken stuff or how to balance worse", but I don't think he did those things. Designers here are definitely good enough to have their own opinion and be able to defend it. He definitely pushed the boundaries in a way that is not everyone's cup of tea, but that's part of what makes him great. He also knew how to make simple champions (think WW update).

It's unfortunate, because players will never get to see behind the scenes of how he contributed, but one of his best attributes was that he truly passionately cares about League. He was always up to date with all the new builds (often as soon as they were popping up in KR soloQ) and he knew all the little details about the game inside-out. In his spare time, he was always prototyping stuff locally on his computer to make League better, whether it was little champion updates, new champions, ways to make spell queueing better, investigations on how to put in latency protections for champion combos, making sure unpopular/weak champions were thought about, etc.

He was amazing at pushing designers to think outside the box, to challenge their assumptions about their own world view, to have a good design process, the values of elegance, intuitiveness, feel, how a player failing on a champion leads on a path to mastery, even the purpose of games and how people consume them. Outside of that, he was an amazing mentor and would help you work through your design problems for hours after work (not just straight up giving you the solution, but helping you work through the problem the way a teacher would; unsurprising given his teaching background), often until 2am (I'm pretty sure he didn't sleep). He did have strong opinions, but that's par for the course for many accomplished people in their field.

Even outside of League, his designs were elegant and powerful (eg. TFT item system). It always pains me when people bash on CertainlyT in this sub (though of course you can have your opinion), but I think he has unironically done so much good for League over the years (at least for ~3 years for when our tenure has overlapped, his entire life was basically dedicated to making League better from waking to sleeping) and for that I'm eternally thankful.

EDIT: He's not dead, he just doesn't work on League anymore, so we don't see him as often :D

This. 100%.

Naerlyn

There's one thing that can't be forgotten in that whole topic, and it's pro play. The more CC and utility as opposed to damage, the more reliant on the team. The more reliant on the team, the more of a difference there'll be in the champion's performance among levels, peaking in pro play.

Many tanks have gone in the past through a problem of performing much better in competitive than in standard League, and the response to balance this (to try and make them adequate in both instead of alright in one / strong in the other, or alright in one / weak in the other) has been to tone down the team reliance, and to grant more ability to do things that don't depend on coordination, more agency.

Secondly, the core problem about this idea for mythics is wave clear. Tanks have low AA damage, obviously, and most of them have weak spells when it comes to AoE damage. Yet lots of them are solo laners. At some point in the game, it becomes extremely important to be able to clear a wave in a reasonable time, to be able to move on the map without this always resulting in conceding minions and wave control. This is where Sunfire comes in for the tanks that don't have good ways to deal with minions in their kit.

And through the entire history of League, Sunfire has always been considered as a first item for top lane tanks based on match-ups, predating any notions of damage creep.

So in the end, if you put one Sunfire mythic and the others being non-Sunfire, tanks with low waveclear will be nearly forced to buy the former or will make a big sacrifice in exchange, while the ones with waveclear will have full choice. And if you make Sunfire a legendary, then tanks with low waveclear will have to either buy it before their mythic or struggle with no waveclear (+ with no easy way to always have Grasp available), while the ones that can clear minions get to choose again.

(And as regards to your point on that, the reason why mythic items are rushed most of the time isn't because of the passive for legendary items, but because they're very strong items that give you something specific to play towards and to get advantages from.)

Very insightful.

Dahzi!

noice

Very nicely played. :)

Hey all, few tweaks coming in:

1) We altered Seraphine's animations to have more of them with her eyes open.

2) Increased the passive music volume since a lot of people were having trouble hearing it.

3) Fixed a lot of bugs; if you keep seeing them, please let us know and enclose a video if possible.

Thanks so much for testing her out on PBE!