Posts by Reinboom

Rasmus0008

Was there a reason you removed Malphite ult from the pool?

Malphite R excels (or is even best in class) at number of things: Catching. AoE CC. Escapes. Damage output (high ratios). And so on.
This dampens the excitement and potential of other ultimates. Removing it effectively creates room for Vex, Akali, Xin Zhao, Orianna, and other ultimates to shine.

Hi! I'm Reina Sweet (aka Riot Reinboom), Lead Game Designer for Modes.

We're bringing back Ultimate Spellbook to the PBE soon. For this run, the mode will be active on PBE for only a couple days for patch 11.22 and then will be on for the full duration for patch 11.23 - the intended launch patch. This update will carry quite a few changes and many new ulternate summoner spells!

New Ulternate Summoners (with more to come with 11.23’s PBE cycle)

  • Akali
  • Blitzcrank
  • Camille
  • Dr. Mundo
  • Evelynn
  • Kindred
  • Orianna
  • Seraphine
  • Urgot
  • Vex
  • Viktor
  • Xin Zhao

No Longer Available Ulternate Summoners

  • Malphite

Ulternate Summoner Balance

All changes here are inherited from changes to the original spell, except the reduction of Bonus Ability Haste for Ashe R.

  • Ashe R:
    • 35 Bonus Ability Haste → 20 Bonus Ability Haste
    • 100s / 90s / 80s Cooldown → 100s / 80s / 60s Cooldown
  • Amumu R:
    • 1.5s / 1.75s / 2s Stun Duration → 1.5s Stun Duration
  • Jarvan IV R:
    • 150% Bonus AD Ratio → 180% Bonus AD Ratio
  • Jhin R:...
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puberty1

please remove jungle in ultimate spellbook and just make it like the other modes where you just go 2 people top. jungling in a fun mode feels so bad, it would be way better than trying to get smite as a third spell of some sorts

The existence of jungling on USB (Ultimate Spellbook) is a rough point to navigate. We explored versions with and without jungling, and different variations of what jungling could be throughout development. The mode without jungling is a pretttttyyyyy painful experience. :(

So, some things that set USB apart from URF and OFA: USB has an intentionally longer laning phase than either of those two modes. Or, it's more accurate to say, URF and OFA have a faster laning phase, intentionally. Those modes only have a faster laning phase because matchup differentials are extreme and if the laning phase doesn't break down quickly, then you get trapped in a pretty miserable experience in some matchups for MUCH too long.

But with USB, we don't hit that problem to the same degree. Even more so, we found that there was actually a lot of enjoyment to be had from getting to figure out how to use (and abuse) your extra ultimate in lane and - especially - pre-6. And there's other benefits to, sinc...

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cadaada

i dont understand how they think that horrible doombots is better than the original one, really...

And no ascension, they really did delete all dominion files from the game didnt they?

Ah, that was an mistake on our part with the article. Where we're referencing Doom Bots of Doom, that was intended to be just Doom Bots (incl. Doom Bots of Doom).

The original doom boots better fits our current understanding of what may make a mode continue to be engaging. Though, it has issues (cheesing the AI to such an extent that the mode is trivialized) that I also believe was correct in Doom Bots of Doom to try to address. I believe if we return to the Doom Bots space, we'd still need to readdress that issue.

Kaiern9

Why???

A number of abilities break with an extraordinarily high amount of Ability Haste. We've unfortunately not gotten to fixing all of them quite yet. :<

PhreakRiot

True! With that caveat I’m always right!

Well, it is all that was left

My Flash is on B.
Champion abilities on ASDF, summoner 1 on V, summoner 2 on B.
3 Finger setup, ring finger on A, mid on S or D, index on F or D. F also presses V. Thumb presses B, space, and Alt. Pinky on Ctrl.

Allows actions such as Level Ult (Ctrl + F) --> Flash (B) --> Ult (F) be one smooth set of inputs. Also, better matches my hands to where they are at for WASD games. And lets my index finger settle on the "bump" most keyboards have on the F, denoting home row.

Besides, "Flash" doesn't start with F in all languages. In Spanish, for example, it's "Destello". :P

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Thank you <3

komoset

Would it be possible to find out how spells are chosen? With you saying that I assume it's not completely random.

It's closer to pure random than not. But there's some protections in place to ensure you get at least something usable for your champion.

pehchi

I started doing this because I love podcasts/audiobooks and thought it'd be great to have the league patch notes to throw on in the background and listen to instead of reading through it all. I didn't find anything as simple and straight forward online so I decided to make it myself! I hope this is helpful to some of you!

This is great! Each section is very well paced.

Apologies for "Ult-ernate". :P

komoset

Sad that they didn't add 1 or 2 more spells to pick from in Ultimate Spellbook. Getting something like Bard, Zoe and Jarvan ult is not very fun when playing an ADC. It just becomes a normal game where everyone but you are having fun at that point.

You can never end up with that specific selection as an ADC. :)

HACEKOMAE

Well, makes sense, but strange that it is coded that way.

Jumping on top comment for visibility. :)

It's not hitbox related. Cait's hitbox doesn't move during her ult. The issue is vision related.

The platform tower's vision range is 1200 and it only attacks units directly in its vision. But its attack range appears to be 1250. Caitlyn R explicitly gives vision to all units on the enemy team during her R ("link vision", it's very different from regular perception bubbles).

By providing vision via her R, she's effectively letting the laser tower have that last 50 units of range if she's standing exactly in that in-between zone.

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xMetix

Why the One For All game pacing instead of traditional Summoner's Rift? Do casual players prefer it that way? Seems like it makes the mode less complex and gets boring quicker for no reason.

OFA pacing was a short hand way of stating what the pacing is, but it's fairly different in a lot of ways. You do start at level 3, but levels 3, 4, and 5 take a bit longer to rank up leading to more of a laning phase than what OFA has.

You also get your summoner ultimate near immediately (~2:15s initial cooldown). So, before level 6, you're effectively playing your champion's base kit with someone else's ultimate. Which means you still have to very much think about how your lane matchup might go. Starting level 3 helps mitigate a lot of the worst cases that generates.

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Nikushaa

zoe ult is gonna be really good, imagine it on someone like skarner or leblanc

Skarner + ZoeR is so rude and hilarious.

I actually really enjoyed it on Vladimir. It amplifies his laning annoyingness up so much with having reliable empowered Qs.

Cenachii

Is attack speed still amped? If it is, won't lethal tempo achieve stupid levels of attack speed? (Please say yes)

Yes

Cenachii

I'm concerned that changing urf mechanics might ruin it, but at the same time, I'm hyped to see the changes

Any specific part of the change concerns you in particular? :)

Spideraxe30

Hey Reinboom can you share how you feel about Nexus Siege and Dark Star Singularity, I felt both modes had some potential with a lot of the uniqueness added from the newer elements

Nexus Siege is unlikely to ever return. It's a very high cost mode to upkeep. Mostly in part due to the "game reset" part of it. And it wasn't really that popular.

Dark Star... I can't say for sure. Personally, I loved Dark Star. But it definitely got old fast. And this reflected in play rate as well. It was effectively a 1-weekend mode, in terms of a supportable queue size. It will definitely not return anytime soon, but I would love to be able to capture some aspect of it again eventually.

Hidan213

For that same reason is it unlikely to see Butchers Bridge return?

IIRC, Butcher's Bridge was built on a new renderer, so it could return. I would need to see where it's at though.

Dhyzuma

On note of that, have you ever thought about bringing dominion map back only in customs though? Honestly it's an entirely selfish reason but I would love to play hide and seek again, it's just not the same on SR.

Crystal Scar is very unlikely to come back.

The Crystal Scar (and Twisted Treeline for that matter) were built for an old environment renderer that's no longer around. To return those maps, they will need to be rebuilt entirely. The only map so far that was built for the old renderer that was then rebuilt as-is for the new renderer has been Howling Abyss.

In turn, that old renderer also is unable to come back since utilizing it prevented League from adopting newer versions of DirectX. For maps, when things articles or comments mention the trade off between cost to keep around vs the popularity of the map or mode, most often that deprecation is one of the most significant costs we had to consider.

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Djinn_in_Tonic

That's interesting, as it suggests (based on just that statement, of course) that the popular game modes may be those that adhere the closest to normal League play. ARAM is teamfighting-focused, OFA is one champion, and URF is faster, but all three have fairly normal League play outside of those additions.

I'd be curious to see if that's an actual trend, and if, say, reducing the value of Nexus Blitz events and using them more like Dragon buff-level rewards instead of the (often) increased power they have now might actually increase player interest, since that would make the normal gameplay a bit more similar to the apparently winning formula of Normal Gameplay + secondary gimmick. Right now NB does feel a bit event-dominant conceptually, even if in practice events aren't as large a tipping point as actual gameplay. That might also be due to the fact that the warning about where/when an event takes place isn't as pronounced, so we don't really have the same sort of pre-objective macro-game we often find in Rift.

Just sort of pondering aloud, because of course that would mean losing some of the zaniness that can be very appealing, and I'm not sure that's to the mode's advantage. I just know that in some of my games it often feels like Event Blitz instead of Nexus Blitz until the very end.

"SR variation" would be an incomplete analysis. Some of the least popular game modes, Nemesis Draft being perhaps the most extreme example, are also SR variations.

I also strongly believe that "SR variation" doesn't really capture why URF isn't played.

Our current hypothesis is that modes that present a strong - positive - gameplay fantasy are the most widely appealing and with an element of "changes every game" causes interest to stick. That is to say, folks play URF because they imagine all the cool shit they do in URF. They keep playing URF because each game has all the rest of the champions also doing cool shit (and different cool shit than last time), and that makes each game different and exciting. Really, the same is true with OFA as well.

That is to say, it's really about the champions. Not about the environment those champions are in. The environment, though, can be altered to support such spaces. "What does my champion get to do if we need to team fight all the time" is b...

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