Quick Gameplay Thoughts: March 28
Meddler (NA) submitted in Dev Corner
Morning all!
Some thoughts below. Next time (Thursday?) should be ready to take a look at what some more of the things we'll be working on in 7.8.
Magic Damage Shield UI
During Galio's development we identified that on tanky targets it was too difficult to tell how much damage they were taking if they had a long duration magic damage shield up, because of the similarities in color and tone between the enemy healthbar red and magic damage shield purple. As one of the steps to improving that we tweaked the magic damage shield bar color. Internal feedback on that change was that it read better. PBE feedback, as is often the case for changes that go out mid PBE cycle, was minimal. After the patch went live however we started seeing a lot of feedback from players who felt that the new color was too close to the regular shield UI, resulting in a different mislead instead. We'll be adjusting magic damage shield color use again as a result, both to find a point that avoids overlapping enemy health bars/regular shields and to put in some specific tunings for colorblind mode.
Things moving to 7.8
A couple of things that have been in testing during 7.7 will be moving to the 7.8 patch cycle instead:
Lissandra - Testing a new passive (tear style mana stacking and enhanced auto attacks post spell cast). We'll either ship that or, if it's not working out, the backup changes (Q AP ratio, maybe something else) next patch. Needed more time to test that passive properly.
Shen - We've been looking at making some adjustments to Shen's kit to make him more balanceable in organized play versus regular match made games (if balanced for one ends up pretty unbalanced in the other, a long running Shen problem unfortunately). Those won't be ready for 7.7 as originally targeted though.
Bard - Changes to Bard's passive (adjusting which rewards at which Chime counts, more possible meeps) look promising. We've got some concerns the numbers in testing are too strong a power boost however, so we'll probably be taking another patch to look into those too (chance this does still ship in 7.7 though depending on how testing goes).
Unusual Playstyles Update
For anyone that hasn't already seen it we posted a runthrough yesterday on how we'll be approaching unusual playstyles like Smite Support Nunu that come to player support's attention going forwards. From the gameplay side most important thing there is that trying to win is what counts. Link below which is well worth a read, we'll be talking more about how we distinguish between intent to win and trolling soonish too/