Lucian mid is on Riot's buff list for 26.19, and Lucian bot is on the nerf list right under it.
Riot's balance lead explained the split, defended Nasus being simple on purpose, and Riot's product director told a player why Lulu jungle got them kicked from champ select.
Red Post Roundup
September 10 to 15
Issue #6Lucian mid is on Riot's buff list for 26.19, and Lucian bot is on the nerf list right under it.
Riot's balance lead explained the split, defended Nasus being simple on purpose, and Riot's product director told a player why Lulu jungle got them kicked from champ select.
The short version
Every quote below is modern League. The one League Classic item this week is tagged where it appears.
- 26.19 buffs Lucian in mid and nerfs him in bot. Riot calls him very weak in mid at every skill level.
- The bot nerf may land on a passive he leans on with certain supports, and Riot is wary of pushing him into top lane.
- Nasus is still on the nerf list, even though Riot says simple champions should stay strong at every rank.
- Riot asked Master+ players which kind of uneven game they'd rather live with.
- An off-meta pick you've never played, plus reports, can end a lobby before it loads.
Want these as they happen?
Our League of Legends Red Tracker collects everything Riot devs say in public and refreshes every fifteen minutes. This roundup is the weekly read. The tracker is the one you leave open.
Open the Red TrackerThe big one: Lucian mid goes up, Lucian bot comes down
Modern LeagueRiot posts its patch preview as an image. This time it listed Lucian twice, once as Lucian (Mid) under buffs and once as Lucian (Bot) under nerfs. A few hours later Riot's lead gameplay designer posted the reasoning.
Context on Lucian Mid is that he's currently considered very weak in basically all skill brackets. (Anywhere between high 30s to low 40s in various skill brackets, with Gluttonous Greaves having selection bias for games where he's already dominating)
For people who enjoy playing him there, role quests have been a relative nerf to him and the Vigilance passive for bot is doing a lot to make him viable there.
There's an open thread to discuss either nerfing vigilance passive further to reduce his reliance on specific supports or removing it altogether but that still needs to be investigated.
Removing Vigilance passive wholesale is possible to run into Lucian top as well, which wouldn't be ideal due to more frustrations with ranged tops (though when he had that era he was usually running BPRK or Galeforce). Some amount of ranged tops is healthy for the game overall, but too much there probably tips it over.
Matt Leung-HarrisonLead gameplay designer, Leagueon X
What it means: a champion in the high 30s to low 40s is losing roughly six games in ten. Gluttonous Greaves are boots that stack omnivamp on takedowns, so they mostly get built once Lucian is already ahead, which makes their numbers look better than the champion is. BPRK is Blade of the Ruined King.
The bot half is the one to watch. Riot hasn't decided whether to trim that passive or cut it, because taking away what keeps him in bot might just send him top (where nobody's asking for more ranged champions).
I was surprised Riot put a number on how weak he is before putting one on the fix.
The rest of 26.19 is on our PBE page.
Every 26.19 change, in one place
Riot's preview gives you the names. Our PBE Changes page lists every buff and nerf Riot announced, then fills in the values as they're read out of the game files on the test server, with each entry marked as announced by Riot or found on the PBE only.
See what's on the PBENasus is simple on purpose, and he's still getting nerfed
Modern LeagueThe longest post of the week, and by a wide margin the most read, was Leung-Harrison's case for champions with easy kits. It opens with the principle.
Nerfing simple champions until complex champions are always better again is not a healthier state.
Matt Leung-HarrisonLead gameplay designer, Leagueon X
His best argument is about how fast a champion pays off.
With Yasuo, Riven, Qiyana, Azir, etc., most players aren’t extracting anything close to the champion’s full power. Even a main with thousands of games often isn’t that far up the mastery curve because these champions are so difficult and the curves are so long.
Matt Leung-HarrisonLead gameplay designer, Leagueon X
What it means: the mastery curve is how many games it takes to play a champion near their best. A new Nasus gets most of his power in a few games, so when he's overtuned, almost every Nasus shows it.
Annoying isn't enough on its own. Riot is "likely to leave it as it is (eg. Viktor)" when a simple champion frustrates people without being too strong. Nasus doesn't get that pass.
So while we think this shape of Nasus is broadly correct, it does warrant sitting at a slightly lower resting power level due to these considerations
Matt Leung-HarrisonLead gameplay designer, Leagueon X
Riot asked Master+ which uneven games it can live with
Modern LeagueDrew Levin, Riot's product director, turned weeks of top-rank matchmaking complaints into a question. Every rule that makes a game fairer makes it slower to find, so which unfairness do Apex players prefer?
If we match autofills and heavily constrain MMR, we create two different sources of variance: for Challengers, it may be "who gets the weakest Master player after waiting 20 or 30 minutes for the MMR constraints to widen"; while for Diamond players, it may be "who gets the Challenger on their alt who's unwilling to wait 20-30 minutes for a game."
Drew LevinDirector of Product and Strategyon X
What it means: Apex means Master and above, where there aren't enough players to make every game tight. Autofill is being put in a role you didn't queue for. Tighten every rule and Challengers wait half an hour, or the rules loosen and a much lower player slips in.
Lulu jungle can end your lobby, and here's why
Modern LeagueA player said they got ejected from champion select for picking Lulu jungle. Levin's second reply explained how Riot sorts unusual picks.
generally we encounter people who play unorthodox strategies to sit in one of two broad categories. the first one is “people trying to hostage their lobby”. they tend to not be playing to win, and they tend to pick strategies that are deeply unviable and that they are typically not practiced in. we look for a combination of non-viability AND personal inexperience AND player reports when terminating lobbies for this.
the second is off-meta players. our experience here is that the vast vast vast majority of these players have played the given champ in some context before, and so we can rely on that play experience in assessing the player reports.
Drew LevinDirector of Product and Strategyon X
What it means: hostaging a lobby is locking in something you've no plan to win with. Riot needs all three signals together, so off-meta on a champion you actually play is safe.
His advice was "play Lulu for a while and you’ll be fine". Asked why none of this is written down, he gave a reason and an admission.
If we listed every single way our inting detections function, they would detect fewer inters while those inters carefully study how to toe the line. [...] I agree with your point that our stance on looking for weird champ select behavior isn’t well-supported by our existing public documentation
Drew LevinDirector of Product and Strategyon X
Everything else Riot cleared up
Honor penalties shouldn't multiply across alts
Modern LeagueLinked accounts are meant to share one restriction, Levin said: "Intention is to have the 10 game honor restriction shared". A player serving it separately on each account is hitting a bug.
on XPost-game friend request bots are being banned faster
Modern LeagueAsked about bots that add you after a game, Levin said Riot has been banning them more often and is "working on some harsher guardrails to come in the near future".
on XPlayer Support won't hand back lost LP
Modern LeagueA player lost LP in a broken game and asked why Support couldn't refund it. Levin: "We do not have support agents refund LP because it is not a matter of discretion."
on XRanked 5s with scouting is running in North America
Modern LeagueThe current Ranked 5s run has scouting switched on. In NA it's open 2pm to midnight Pacific (5pm to 3am Eastern).
on XYour report ticket went to a different database
Modern LeagueReports filed as tickets leave your history because Riot gets "millions of those kinds of reports per month" and stores them separately.
on X
Old Demacia is back in League Classic
League ClassicLeague's official account announced the original versions of Poppy, Xin Zhao, Shyvana, Galio and Fiora, calling back to the old Diplomatic Immunity event.
on XNext week
26.19 is due Wednesday 23 September. Watch for Lucian's numbers, and for whether that bot lane passive gets trimmed or cut. Until then, our PBE Changes page tracks what's landed on the test server.
Don't wait a week
The Red Tracker carries every one of these within minutes of Riot posting it, plus everything that didn't make the cut here. Filter by subject, search the archive, check it whenever a patch drops.
Open the Red Tracker
No comments:
Post a Comment
Feel free to comment or leave a message :)