Quick Gameplay Thoughts: April 25
Meddler (NA) submitted in Dev Corner
Morning all,
We're just a couple of days away from finishing the mid-season patch, so busy times on our parts right now. Bunch of mid-season related thoughts below as a result, once 7.9 is out and we've got whatever balance changes are needed underway we'll also start talking a little bit about future plans again too.
Mid-Season watch list
We'll be assessing the game as a whole post mid-season patch of course, with enough stuff changing that there are arguments a lot of different things, whether they were touched directly or not, might need follow up work. There are some things we'll be keeping a particularly close eye on though, as things more likely to need tuning than others. Examples include:
- Rift Herald, and whether it benefits early teams too much, generates the desired interesting siege/defense gameplay, how easy/difficult it is to defend against etc.
- Ancient Coin, particularly the revised pattern's impact on Enchanters and other really mana hungry champs.
- Adaptive Helm and its effectiveness against champs who rely on repeated spell casts for the bulk of their power
- Garygoyle Stoneplate and whether it's leaving champs that deal true damage and/or scale damage off HP too threatening
- Etc
Rakan and Xaya
Seem to be in a reasonable at least for now power wise, so the only likely changes in 7.9 are a few bugfixes. Will definitely need to assess again in a couple of weeks though, see whether their performance stabilizes around an appropriate power level or whether when the average player on them has enough experience they're too weak or too strong. It's also very possible that Coin changes, or AD item changes, have a meaningful effect on them in 7.9. too.
CC Tracking Stat
One of the new end of game stats we've been working on for mid-season is CC contribution. Based off some testing while that's been on PBE it looks like there are a couple of issues with it we'll need to work out though. We'll almost certainly be delaying that to 7.10 as a result, given amongst other things there's some possible impact on server performance there.
Updated Sub-Class List
Something we've been working on for a little while is an update to the sub-class list we posted last year (link to the previous version below). As mentioned we've always expected that would be an evolving set of guidelines/assumptions, rather than a definitive set of rules, a way of looking at/talking about champions rather than a set of requirements. We're now at a point where we think an update's appropriate, should be able to post that sometime in May. Nothing too major, mainly shifting a number of champions around and some changes to one of the sub classes' definition.