Hello, designer for the tank here.

I understand the concerns here; high skill generally translates to high agency (semi pro-skewed), and tanks in general tend to be pro skewed as well. One thing I want to clear up is that 'high skill' isn't really a mechanic that has too much game impact. Its more a consideration of audience. The current roster of tanks tend to have fairly easy to figure out patterns and approach fights in similar ways. Our goal with this character is to create a tank who appeals to players who like deep mastery curves and characters who really test your ability to approach fights in clever ways. I don't believe we'd ever cut that aspect of the character, since that was the whole impetus for making them.

We have a couple things we're working on to mitigate the balance concerns. I don't want to get into specifics since we're still pretty far out and not everything is sorted yet, but generally we're looking at making sure they're more gold reliant than other tanks, w...

UNOvven

Does that mean you expect Gwen to be a champion with perfectly average difficulty, since youre aiming for 50%?

No, we use 50% as the target for her long term resting win rate average. Mains of a champ tend to be above the average.

JumboFister

Hmm hot fix buffing a champ literally a day after release when people haven’t figured how to play her? Getting Volibear and Yummi and Akali flashbacks

The way we determine wether or not to hot fix comes down to our estimated win rate growth and where we expect them to be for players with zero experience in the champ. In Gwen’s case, we estimated that she’d grow a little under 10 percent given her fragility and high mechanical burden. Her win rate on launch plus our estimate still put her under 50%, so we did a cautious buff in order to try and get her more in line.

Yuumi was actually a learning experience for us, that we should be factoring larger growth estimates for weirder champs. That’s why these buffs are so minor. We could buff her to be 50% right now, but the goal is to buff her to be long term balanced. Like everything we do, the live environment is much different from our testing one, so we monitor the champ closely as the players grow to learn the new one.

Cashmiir

Lillia is a sweet bb angel and I would die for her (as an aside, /u/riotmaxw3ll also worked on her).

But similar to Neeko, her amazement is less new-to-life and more blooming confidence.

I don't want to speak on behalf of that team, so I can't really say more with confidence.

Luo would have a better answer, but my read on the differences are that Gwen is amazed at everything because it's new to her. Neeko has a curiosity because she has an ethos that already exists (the connections between people and their shoma) and is reconciling that with our world view. Lillia is a much more withdrawn character who, as she blooms, becomes excited specifically about the human dreams and what they mean for their dreamers and her.

bibbibob2

My guess is it just "morde ults" herself in the shadow? So skillshots/projectiles stemming from outside the mist aren't interacting with her but spawning from inside the mist they are.

Localized Morde ult was the first implementation of that ability :D

bz6

/u/RiotMaxw3ll

Sucks that you moved away from the champions team. Lillia is such a unique take on a jungler and Gwen looks interesting from the looks of it.

Well... I may be coming back shortly :D

ToTheNintieth

Whatever Lillia is, she's one of the best champion designs in years. Just thought you should know :)

But yeah, I think it's not that crucial to have every last champion in a neat little box. Lillia is a naturally squishy DPS/DoT AP fightery-magey champion with no dashes but a ton of mobility via MS and no inherent defensive tools -- and she works fantastically, all with nothing in the way of completely unique mechanics. It's a total slam dunk of a design.

Thank you so much. That means a lot.

Djinn_in_Tonic

She definitely feels more like a battlemage to me, as she lacks the strong personal defense that basically every other skirmisher in the game possesses, and her damage tends to be almost entirely area-of-effect.

Her stacking MS is a pretty powerful defensive tool, allowing her to dodge a lot of skill shots + kite backwards in ways that let her choose her fights more than most battlemages ever get to. I can see the argument though for sure.

Caenen_

So this is the real AP Xin Zhao everyone was talking about lately...

^{:^)}

:^D

Soundvx

Bit confused how she will deal with fighters that 100-0's squishies in one rotation, supposedly she's squishy too. Looking forward to the kit regardless

She's got a few in built defenses that will help her out, but getting bursted is definitely a weakness of hers.

anialater45

I don't want to get into too many specifics

Why not? Gotta wait till the official ability reveal?

She plays around it a little like Wind Wall, protecting her from enemies outside it, but if they cross the threshold, they're in there with her able to fight.

That seems more like Xins ult than wind wall.

Is there a plan in place for if it becomes an issue? I'd be more willing to be optimistic if I knew we wouldn't have to wait months for it to be taken care of if it turns out to be an issue.

Yeah, I want to give the comms team time to roll out their stuff. They make a lot of awesome things and I don't want to scoop them.

The mechanics of the zone are more similar to Xin ult, but where he has the tools to dive on you and lock you down, Gwen is much worse about being able to choose her fights. Gwen is still very dangerous in melee range, so it plays a little bit more like fighting against yasuo where he's protecting himself from a fight but can definitely fight you if you try and go in on him.

ToTheNintieth

Lillia is kind of a "we don't have anywhere else to put her in" case, but yeah.

skirmishers are a subclass riot hasn't made that many champions for until recently, much less AP ones which is just sylas pretty sure

yeah lillia was hard to classify. I put her as a hybrid skirmisher/mage, but I think battlemage could be a reasonable argument.

I don't want to get into too many specifics, but her Hallowed Mist essentially provides her with an area of safety from enemies outside it. She plays around it a little like Wind Wall, protecting her from enemies outside it, but if they cross the threshold, they're in there with her able to fight.

She's not designed to fight ranged champions; her target access isn't that great. She just wants some safety while she snips up the frontline.

raphelmadeira

Lillia is unironically one of Riot’s best releases in the past 15 champions. Her kit is simple and unique, yet has deep skill expression without paragraphs of text explaining her spells.

AND SUPER FUN!

cc u/RiotMaxw3ll

<3

I have incredible news for you.

TobiasX2k

Glorious. Please revert the change that removed this.

you think you hate yuumi now.... Jesus.

She could auto attack while attached for exactly one playtest. Meddler played her that game and built RFC

F0RGERY

I'm going to use an example of what you're talking about: Zac right after his rework.

Zac pre-rework was a bit of an ap bruiser. He had decent damage, could spam abilities in a side lane, and generally had a bit more to his kit that was damage leaning vs being cc. Riot decided that they needed 3 tanks to rework when they were doing a "Tank update", and alongside Maokai and Sejuani, Zac was chosen.

Now, Zac's rework was exactly what you described. He lost a ton of reliable damage in his q, w, and even ult in order to get more cc, bringing him down from being roughly top 30 jungle champs in terms of damage to the worst damage dealer in the jungle, below Ivern and Nunu in terms of dps per game. In exchange, Zac's cc was boosted to great levels, making his e + ult a full team root and displacement, and his q made his ganks even better.

Do you know what happened to Zac's playerbase right after this rework? It dropped, heavily, despite him already not being that popular of a champion. It turns out that despite getting more cc in exchange for less damage, Zac just didn't appeal to as many people after the rework. Without damage, he lost clear speed, he lost the ability to win duel well, and he became reliant on his team being able to follow up on combos rather than having any self-sufficiency. To the general playerbase, Zac just wasn't as fun after the rework, despite being tanky and cc heavy.

But the worst of it wasn't that Zac was just less good solo and relied on his team more. Its that this sort of champion could never see good buffs. Right after Zac's rework, he saw a surge in pro play because of his cc and tankiness. It didn't matter in pro play that he lost damage, because pros are reliable teams who can make better use of their champions strengths when it comes to needing follow up. Because of this, an already struggling Zac saw nerfs that made him even worse than before, just so that pro play didn't have him dominate their meta.

This isn't exclusive to Zac; pro play abuses tanks that have decent cc or abilities to the point that Riot makes the champs functionally unviable outside of pro play. We saw this with the 40% winrate Sejuani who saw pro play after her rework. We saw this with Tahm Kench, who is still picked in pro play despite being hot garbage in solo queue. And we saw this with Zac after his rework, when despite having a lower winrate and playerbase, Riot couldn't give him effective buffs without fear of pro play dominance.

In the end, Riot reverted Zac's ult in order to give him damage back into his kit, and that's kinda the nature of these "CC heavy, damage light" champions. They get changed so that damage can be added without fear of ruining pro play, and because cc heavy, damage light isn't appealing to the majority of the playerbase. Its why Sejuani lost cc to gain damage in order to get her out of pro play. Its why Tahm Kench saw a rework to put him top lane, and now that that rework showed he was still just as toxic, Tahm Kench is getting another rework to be less problematic. Its harder for pure tanks to carry games. Its harder to have an impact on games, and to farm, and to not be at the mercy of the enemy team, and that doesn't appeal to as many people as impactful champions.

TL;DR: High CC, Low Damage Tanks don't appeal to the playerbase as well, and they are problematic to balance due to the power they have with coordinated teams like in pro play. Tanks with less cc but more damage are easier to balance and have more people who play them.

Hijacking top comment to say: I was the one who did the most recent Zac revert, and this is more or less correct. No damage characters have very little agency in fights since they rely on teammates which make them 1. Pro play problems and 2. Incredibly unpopular with the player base.

Man I read that title and got baited hard. Fucking love you Flowers.

ImNotYeti

That doesn't answer the question though. Why when you turn on extended tooltip do you lose information? You can see damage with it off but not with it on. It makes playing with it always on (like I and many others do) very difficult to quickly determine things like Karthus R damage for example, instead you have to do the math yourself. Why does every employee outside of Reinboom that's replying here and on twitter completely ignore the question and answer something else instead?

Sorry I didn't get the answer in the first one. Its a matter, like you said, of being able to find that information quickly. The formula we have to write to include the total and the ratios and the amount from each stat becomes very cumbersome in many spells with multiple scalars. It becomes very hard to scan for the information you actually want when some of these formulas can take a whole line. Advanced only tooltip users will have the option of quickly finding that damage by using shift to swap their tooltip back to the simple one temporarily given that they know the information they're looking for. I agree in this case it isn't the ideal way to get that particular information, but it is fast and it helps us show more information.