ArshanGamer

Is Hwei intended to use all his spells equally? I understand that certain spells might be weaker than others, but would there ever be a time where you might intentionally keep an ability weaker than the rest? Not just situational, but weak even in its ideal scenario?

Hwei's spells need to have a niche reason to cast one compared to the others, otherwise only the strongest output or most reliable output will matter every time the cooldown is used. That means there will be cases where a spell's niche comes up way more often in a short period or over the course of a game, or a spell's niche doesn't show up frequently or at all in a specific match. That's totally fine as long when that spell's niche appears players are using it and recognize it was the right choice.

When a spell isn't being used even for its niche case, there's a good chance that specific spell needs to be buffed. The opposite can also be true, with a specific spell being too strong and crowding out its competitors forcing them not to be used in favor of the "best spell". Funnily enough with all of the community feedback about EW being low priority for the E spells, for the longest time it was the highest priority E spell due to it having too much reliability. We seemed to have overn...

Spideraxe30

Are you also able to share what you're looking at for his second round of hotfix buffs?

Just for you Spideraxe!

Base Stats:

• [BUFF] Base Health :: 550 >>> 580
• [BUFF] Base Mana :: 445 >>> 480
• [BUFF] Base Movement Speed :: 325 >>> 330

WW:

• [BUFF] Shields arrive instantly instead of on cast finish
• [BUFF] Shields :: 90/110/130/150/170 >>> 100/125/150/175/200

EW:

• [BUFF] Setup Delay :: 0.7s >>> 0.65s
• [BUFF] Fire Delay :: 0.35s >>> 0.3s
• [BUFF] Chase Range :: 500 >>> 600
• [BUFF] Linger Duration :: 1.35-3s based on travel distance >>> 3s

DogbrainedGoat

Why did you do it?

You know why.

a_brick_canvas

Does the Dev team think he skews more like a control mage or artillery? I know that the suggested champs were more control, but after playing him, it really felt like his play pattern felt very artillery-like, where a large percentage of kills came from off-screen. Is that intended?

Internally, we nicknamed Hwei's mage class as a "versatillery mage" as a bit of a joke that he doesn't fit neatly into any category. That said, he functions both as a control mage and an artillery mage, but his reliability as either is lower relative to his more focused mage competitors. We didn't want Hwei to be a "jack of all trades, master of none" and make his tools weaker than competitors so we decided to focus his weakness on reliability of hitting spells or controlling areas over raw outputs being much lower to compensate his versatility.

LeagueAltAccount

How did Hwei’s design change from when he was originally conceived to now? Were there any major changes that were found necessary after some testing, such as decreasing the amount of spells he has, or was his original design similar to his current state? Additionally, was he conceived around the idea of 3, or did that come about when developing his background with Jhin?

We played around a lot with the numbers 3 and 4, having between 9-16 spells in different versions of his kit. I knew early on that giving him a similar obsession to Jhin would be a nice parallel, and that the Rule of Thirds from the art world would make sense for a painter to have a preference for.

Spideraxe30

For Emizery, can you share any cool scrapped Hwei spells tested in development and was it hard to make 10 different spells gel into a single kit

For any art folks, what were the art goals with Hwei and how did you guys determine his color palette, since Ionia doesnt really have any unifying colors among champs

For Riru, with Hwei having 10 different spells, shall I look for 10x more typos when he shows up in the patch notes

Answered the scrapped spells question in another reply!

Was it hard to make 10 spells gel into a single kit? Absolutely, it was an insane challenge. Every spell needs to be thematically obvious individually, thematically cohesive for its subject, mechanically cohesive for its subject, have a niche use case making it clear when to use it, have reasons not to use it, and on top of that Hwei is still a mage that can't have just any mechanic he wants. Additionally because he does comboing no spell should be a targeted spell - he needs to cast on the ground or cast a missile. This was why early on I pushed for the "Cast at Max Range" option to be added, which I hope will be improved in quality over time as well.

Jragon713

I always like seeing the test clips of old/scrapped spell ideas; anything like that for Hwei?

Not sure what we can share just any clips of old stuff, but there was this amazing and horrible bug where QE and R didn't have the "One passive proc per cast" rule yet and would insta-kill anyone caught in them together. In these old VFX explorations, QE was a blizzard spell.

https://imgur.com/DNIbCGB

MenAt

How is Hwei balanced to be played by lower skill players while keeping him not broken for the super good players? Or should he not be played by low skill players? I’m not very good at the game but still would like to play him some day…

Hwei is intended for all skill levels, not only for high level players. That said, getting good at Hwei likely means you're able to answer more problems in the game will help you climb.

A few places are intended to help new or low skill players, namely his spam spells (QQ, WW, EE) all being pretty good buttons. QQ is also the most generic damage spell on his kit and good for poking while not terrible for wave clear, EE being in a similar space. EW can also guarantee a QW hit, so if you aren't good at landing QW but your opponents don't position well then an EW can secure you kills. If there's one spell I think a new player who's scared of the champion's complexity should learn to use early, it's WE to manage your mana pool. Everything else comes with time.

SilentShadowss

Was Hwei problematic with a lower mana cost, I feel like at the moment he cost too much but that might make up as a intentional weakness for him, I was wondering.

Great champ design and feel, he feels so well to play and very smooth. Thanks Riot.

Mana costs are meant to relate to WE mana refund. For a new Hwei player, they might find his mana pool is severely punishing and limiting. But one of the aspects of mastering Hwei is knowing how to use your W cooldown wisely, spending it for damage and mana greedily, early and often but also recognizing when it's time to hold the cooldown for a defensive or movement cast. In testing we found Hwei was nearly ungankable when he didn't have a reason to use his W outside of WQ and WW; asking him to use WE helped give enemies opportunities to aggress on him.

OtherAyachi

Do you have any plans to make Hwei viable as an APC bot carry like Swain, Karthus, Ziggs and Seraphine? I don't play mid lane, but I love the character and his gameplay. Currently however, it is difficult to play him bot as he tends to get bullied by anyone pretty much. I don't mind lowering his scaling to compensate for some early game buffs.

Hwei is intended to be midlane primarily, but viable as a support. We don't intend to purposefully support APC Hwei, but assuming that its winrate and playrate aren't negatively impacting midlane Hwei we won't act to remove it either.

Guij2

Given the unique nature of Hwei's kit, with a total of 9 spells that perform simple effects, would you ever consider buffing him by replacing a spell that proved to be underwhelming with a different spell? Or even the othet way around if he's too strong? Or do you think number adjustments should be enough to balance him properly.

The goal is to never replace a spell although tweaks to make things more usable, niche, or broad may happen as a result of low spell prioritization. It is expected that some spells may be used more or less moment to moment and game to game, but if something is universally underutilized or overutilized we'll act on that spell. You'll see this later today in buffs for WW - Pool of Reflection and EW - Gaze of the Abyss focused on reliability.

QwwwwwwwwwQ

Does Hwei’s kit revolve around the number 3, similar to how Jhin revolves around 4. To me it the number seems to occur a lot not only in his kit but in the lore as well ie (3 teachers.) Was this done on purpose and if so can you explain is their a deeper meaning to it?

Hwei's kit does use the number 3 quite a lot intentionally, most specifically in the 3 x 3 composition of his spells (3 subjects with 3 spells each). This reflects Hwei's interest in the Rule of Thirds that governs composition. There's a secondary aspect to this related to lore, as 3 is just shy of 4.

Caenen_

I'm curious if you can share a little bit of the (design) approach that lead to Hwei in the first place:

• I know a "Paint Mage" has been floating about in development for a long time. Was this prototype what eventually became Hwei or did Hwei just take up their theme after being thought up as "hey lets make a control mage with spell options for days"?

• How did you land with the "cast an ability 1-3 then cast an ability 1-3 again" cast paradigm? Did you try any other approaches to make the champion "feel" good when casting, did you try any that failed (and why)?

• How did you decide to conceptually avoid the "burden of knowledge" anti-pattern that a kit with over twice the usual number of spells might fall into?

Very early on I pitched the 1-3 1-3 concept of casting primarily as a concept of mixing a color with a shape (red circle, blue line, etc), there was even a version of 1-4 1-4 with multiple ultimates! We found the color concept was too restricting and not exciting enough, so we went with complete subjects and final paintings instead of just a paint stroke. We tried many, many times to create fluid casting while also preventing bad inputs from user error, but in the end the solution we came to was not to protect players from themselves and let their own skill govern how fast they can cast back to back.

We were very concerned about the "burden of knowledge" issue from the start and aimed to create simple spells with recognizable themes and strong tells for opponents. This both helps players use colloquial names like "Fireball" to call out spells they saw as well as understand usage based off theme alone. We also avoided making too many super novel spells to avoid this kind of confusion ...

Spideraxe30

Hey Emizery is your name pronounced like emissary or e-misery

E-misery, although it's a play on words. Emizery is both like emissary and e misery (z for flavor and so it's not taken on most platforms). It's also short for Endless Mizery since most platforms don't support spaces.

Most are born into misery, and most die in misery. Endless misery encapsulates that concept, and reminds me to look for the non miserable things life brings between the end points.

Ckrest

Does using non quick cast still cast at location?

I quick cast most of my abilities, but sometimes I like to see the range or, be more precise, I hold shift to bring up the casting indicator.

It casts without walking even with non-quick cast with this setting on. You can still right click to cancel casting with cast on release or non-quick cast with this setting on. With the setting off, ability work no differently than they do now. This setting is defaulted off.

Basically, when the setting is on you won't walk when confirming a cast that targets a location. Unit targeting still needs to walk if you're outside the range because the target itself is not in range of the spell.

StrwbryAcaiPanda

Can there be an option for the opposite? Miss Fortune's e was changed to cast at max range, instead of walking into range back in 10.5. I would like the option to have my champion to walk into range to cast if my cursor is just barely outside the range, especially since I use quick cast w/o indicator.

Anything that casts at max range by default will still cast at max range without the setting on. This doesn't change any existing behavior. I hear you about your desire to walk to cast some abilities setup to cast at max range currently.

ssLoupyy

u/RiotEmizery is on the way of being a GOAT.

I just want to make the game better.

ssLoupyy

So we have to use one ability from each book (damage, utility and control) in a spell rotation and decide which one is damage and which one is utility right?

Each subject has its own shared cooldown.

If you use QQ, QW, or QE, it puts Q on cooldown locking out QQ, QW, and QE. W and E are not put on cooldown by using QW or QE.

DanielDKXD

I love you it's been forever since we had an actual mage, zoe was released 6 years ago. Vex a bit more recently, but she dives into melee on R.

Only thing i find a bit weird is his W+W (shield), while it certainly fits his theme as an ink mage it feels out of place as a control mage, i don't really see myself using it over the two others. Why would i shield myself when i can kite with speedup or deal more dmg.

Aesthetically he looks a bit too bland for my taste, would love to see his model get updated.

At the end of the day kit looks 9/10, so happy we finally get a new dps/control/burst mage

Glad you're excited!

Regarding WW, it has many uses. Sometimes you want to tank minion hits to hold the wave for a freeze. Sometimes it saves you from an ignite all in. Sometimes you use it when taking objectives to mitigate damage from pit monsters. Sometimes keeping someone else alive is more important than move speed or mana/damage.

Avar1cious

Ah, so just to confirm, basically the underlying spells formed from the q+w+e combinations don't have a cooldown, only his q, w, and e do correct?

So if you use a QE combination, do both Q and E go on cooldown? Or does only the Q go on cooldown? If it's the latter, do different combinations matter for CD - ie: is the CD the same for QQ, QW, and QE?

Yes that's right, QQ, QW, and QE share the cooldown of base Q.