LoL Red Tracker

Lillia

• Lillia's changes last patch were a good start, but we feel we can go a bit further on the Sleep changes
• Overall, we want to do a better job of balancing Lillia between skill levels and Lillia typically struggles at the higher skill brackets, especially after we made her early clears a lot weaker
• Average play Lillias often don't get the most out of her Sleep duration, whereas higher skill players are much better at coordinating around it

Diana JG

• Diana mid is in a mostly fine spot, but Diana Jungle, which plays more like a bruiser and builds a lot more health needs a little more help
• Overall, we're not looking to add a ton of power to Diana as she does get a bit statchecky when strong

Neeko

• Neeko support (and Mid) have been a bit worse for wear
• Neeko support has become a lot weaker, especially at the higher levels of play after we made adjustments to her Clone and its interaction with vision
• We think Neeko could use a little more power as a result

Smolder

• Smolder has also been on the weaker side after we made a bunch of adjustments to Black Cleaver and Deathfire Touch several months ago
• We're continuing to add more power to him, but into his Crit builds as his Bruiser builds have worse counterplay given his scaling profile

Vayne

• With the nerfs to experimental Hexplate this patch (for her Top lane), we feel like we can give Vayne a little power in bot lane
• She still has builds in Top that don't build Hexplate, but we're more OK with those as she isn't as durable while dishing out a lot of damage

Yunara Ashe

• We've added an Ashe nerf into the patch as she is one of the dominant pairings on the patch, even with the Hurricane nerf (as a lot of her builds don't build it)
• We're also adding a moderate nerf in for Yunara as her level 1 laning is a bit too strong given how well she scales
• We expect after this and the Lucian buffs for the bot meta to be in a much better spot

Pulled Changes (Varus, Sylas)

• We pulled Varus and Sylas from the patch
• Varus because we feel like we need larger work on him to make his builds more satisfying and make sense
• Sylas, because we don't feel comfortable changing him overall without messing up his role balance, especially given the Protobelt changes in the patch

It mostly results in Mage champions having minimal weaknesses in the highest levels of play while also making them need to be nerfed for regular players (see Orianna's winrate)

That said, there are some "go in" Ranged champions that we expect this to be power neutral on (eg. Annie, Neeko) that their player bases still love this item on, it should just take a larger tradeoff on damage repeatability

2. We're further nerfing Experimental Hexplate to allow us to buff up some champions that have been balanced around it (Vayne top). This will also allow us to give Vayne bot a buff

3. Hurricane was a little overbuffed and so we're pulling back the buff ever so slightly (not by a huge amount here). We're also featuring a Yunara nerf in the patch, but we're being careful not to overdo it there in combination

Stale Pro Champs

• Some champs like Ambessa, Cassio, K'Sante have been stale for a while and our Cassio nerfs recently undershot a bit for Pro Play
• However, they've been pretty effective at moving her power budget around in regular play to higher AP builds
• As mentioned above, some of the safer scaling hyper carries are a bit too strong, even with the slight Hurricane tapdown we're planning and given Lucian's large nerf in organized play

Lucian

• Lucian's best pairings (eg. Enchanters like Milio) have received a large nerf as a result of the 26.19 changes and so we're returning some power back to Lucian in generic power
• In combination with the Support laning changes from last patch, Lucian's early kill threat has gone down significantly and so we think we can buff him up a bit

Vayne

• Vayne also received a nerf recently due to her strength in Top lane in both Pro Play and high level SoloQ
• We're being very careful about adding more Ranged tops back into the meta as that has been something players have been complaining about, but think that a generic buff + a nerf to Hexplate will make her neutral there (or at least have to go for squishier builds) while buffing Vayne bot back up

Sylas

• We're making an adjustment to Sylas, to give him a slight buff in Mid, while keeping his Jungle steady overall
• Overall, this will be a bit of a reshape to Sylas to make him more powerful in the matchups he's good in, while not having much change in matchups he's already bad in

More on other champs tomorrow

Therefore he needs other things to supplement that. Most other assassins become significantly more dangerous at level 6 in terms of top end burst, but ekko doesn't really (and that's awesome because he's unique and is still powerful despite that!) but that does mean he's allowed to have different strengths (Eg. Waveclear)

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Previous post for reference:

(For champs that are giving up certain things that turn into core weaknesses, they're allowed to have other things that can make them powerful to the point of frustrating in those other aspects (eg. Viktor for laning, because no dashes or demand hard CC, Ekko waveclear because non-damaging Ult, etc.)

That removes a core weakness of being bursted for him, that I don't think is overall good, given his escapability profile (stealth and dash). If he gets caught, he should have a higher chance of dying, especially given that he has so much agency to snowball the game.

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Re: Gameplay

Agree that the gameplay is balanced, but for high skill players might be a bit stale. That said, satisfaction and enjoyment for the vast majority of players seems very high given how popular the game is right now.

So we're being careful about how much we change, because we feel (and have heard feedback) that gameplay is in a good state right now overall and the types of changes we could make through to the end of the year aren't the types of changes that would actually resolve the staleness adequately (mostly balance changes)

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Re: Ranked Stuff

Agree that the state of Apex in EU needs improvement and we're thinking about how we can deliver durable improvements here for next season. We don't really want to mess with things as they are right now as it risks further instability.

1. EUW for example has the same number of Challenger and Grandmaster slots as many smaller regions and that exacerbates things like the amount of LP we're seeing for the higher players

2. We acknowledge that the state of Aegis currently doesn't create great incentives and overly advantages certain role combinations. While we wanted to reward being able to play flexibly and be proficient in playing multiple roles, it's clear that changes are needed

3. I think there is a reasonable debate on having negative LP gains at the top of the ladder. On one hand, you're saying you like it. On the other hand, many players point at negative LP gains at the top of the ladder as being unfair and the ladder being degraded

4. Agree on the length of the ladder being demoralizing; we're discussing potential approaches here