Syndra's Throw, SolCrushed on Twitch & Viktor, Melee AD Carries, S2 Champ Icon, and more Mastery pages!

Syndra's Force of Will has the ability to grab and throw enemy minions, jungle creeps, and much more!

With all the excitement around Syndra's PBE release, Summoners have taken to the forum to ask all sorts of questions about her and her kit. One of the most prominent is what Synda's W, Force of Will, can and can not throw. We've known since Gamescom that she can freely move around Red and Blue buff, but what else? Luckfor us, Meddler provided a pretty lengthy list.

"Add 'That isn't a clone' and this is pretty good as a general rule of thumb, can't immediately think of any cases it's not accurate for. Syndra's currently undergoing final balancing though so that could change of course if we find some champion specific interactions that are too strong a counter or run into other as yet unidentified issues.

To answer some of the specific examples raised:

Can be thrown:
- Yorick Ghouls
- Tibbers (though he'll continue to burn you so you'll want to throw him fast!)
- Shaco Jack in the Boxes (you'll still get feared though!)
- Malz Voidlings

Can't be thrown:
- Jarvan's Flag
- Anivia's Wall/Trundle's Pillar
- Teemo Shrooms
- Wards
- Teemo (I desperately wish we could, but according to the live balance team apparently even Teemo deserves to be treated fairly. Ludicrous I'm sure you'll agree...)"

He continued on in later posts, mentioning that Zyra's Plants ( hatched, not seeds ) and Heimer Turrets are also able to be grabbed and thrown with Force of Will. Also mentioned is the sort of funky interactions this ability has spawned, such as "Lee Sin Q's an enemy minion, Syndra throws it, Lee Sin activates Q a second time to follow it to its new location". Looks like you guys are going to have your hands full!

An example of the quirky Lee Sin + Syndra interaction, taken from this video.

Solcrushed, one of the Live Game Designers, has taken to the forums to discuss the state of Twitch after his recent rework. He opened a thread for Twitch players and critics to discuss how they feel about Twitch and proposed some ideas he has floating around in his head. BE AWARE these aren't confirmed or slated changes, just a designer thinking aloud about the Plague Rat.

The post is very long, but I'll break it into the two most relevant parts, although I encourage you give the whole thing a read if you are interested in this stinky rat of a champion.

Here is his preface and ideology behind why Twitch needs some attention:

"Internal testing and metrics suggest that his balance is around where we think he should be. (I will also state again that I was ultimately in charge of 'balancing' him, so I MAY be biased).

However, this balance is almost entirely carried by his ultimate which is ungodly strong when used right. (It has my vote for best AD carry ult and the vote is not close, ECA is a distant second for me). This has resulted in each of his other skills feeling largely unsatisfying, which, coupled with the need to keep his early game weak (since he has such a great late game) has led to a champion that does not feel as fun as he should"

Secondly, here are the two major changes that Solcrushed is playing with:

"Ambush: No longer gives attack speed. Now deals bonus magic damage on hit coming out of stealth and places 2 extra poison stacks."

"Spray and Pray: loses AD, gains AS that Ambush lost. Slight less cd late game"

As I said before, if you navigate to his thread you while find more detailed explanations behind these proposed changes and you will also be able to provide Solcrushed with your own input on the matter.

Speaking of Solcrushed, a while back he mentioned he was taking a look at Viktor and trying to get him into a good place by addressing his problematic Augments. He gave a small update to this today by addressing the claim that "if he is working on Twitch, he must be done with Viktor!". He says:

"Not really, Twitch is less a remake and more of a balancing thing. Viktor on the other hand not only needs an extensive overhaul from the scripting side but also on particles and whatnot."

He also followed up on this mentioning that Viktor's Augments are still his main focus.

"Currently I think the base skills are more or less fine. (They can be tweaked a bit)
The augments is where most of my work is going into atm."

Classick, another Game Designer at Riot, responded to an inquiry about possible changes to Master Yi by explaining why Melee AD carries, such as Fiora, Master Yi, or Tryndamere, have such a hard time finding a proper place in the game.

"So this is a very... complicated problem, melee DPS have generally had a rough experience in LoL since the very beginning. This problem is not exclusive to just Master Yi it's a problem with his archetype.

Some problems I've noticed with melee DPS:

- The prevalence of disengages + flash + walls in the game makes windows of engagement for melee champions incredibly small, and often too small for a melee dps to do an effective amount of damage to someone. If they do an effective amount of damage in such a short window they are just assassins, not melee DPS . This works better for fighters because they are much tankier so their window of engagement is a lot longer because they can afford to push forward and stay in fight. In addition to this towers are relatively close together so in areas like the bot lane it does not take much to get under the safety of a tower where melee DPS cannot attack, while ranged DPS can keep poking until they are under the tower.

- Exhaust shuts down melee DPS entirely, once a melee dps hard engages and gets hit by an exhaust they are sitting ducks.

- Melee DPS and Ranged DPS don't really have much of a difference as far as most statistics go, and late game they do relatively the same amount of damage.

- Melee DPS need effective tools that essentially "buy them time" to get out the damage they need to do to be useful in a team fight, a great example of this is Tryndamere.

There's some solutions we have thought about on how to fix the problem, but it's a VERY difficult issue. I think it will require a combination of changes that will slowly inch them closer to having a much better place in the game. The key here is finding ways to increase their engagement windows, and finding a way to differentiate them from Ranged DPS. Right now they are nearly identical except one is ranged, and one is melee meaning one has a very large advantage here :P."

Magus, an eSports manager, talked a little bit about the upcoming Season Two Championship Riven commemorative summoner icon. This icon was first mentioned a week or so ago when Riot started to put up their finals information and mentioned that it they "will be broadcasting a code during the event that you can redeem to unlock this commemorative summoner icon." This was confusing for some so he laid down a better explanation, saying: 

"Hey there - during the broadcast, we'll be putting up a code so that anyone can claim the Riven summoner icon! It will be available to anyone."

He also commented that this icon code will not be following the "traditional client/store path". This probably means Riot will have a special redemption page on their webpage some where, but that is just speculation. Look for more details closer October 13th when the finals are scheduled to be conducted.

The current amount of pre-customized Mastery pages is limited 10

RiotKiddington posted an update on the much demanded increase to available mastery pages, saying:

"I just wrote the code to enable additional mastery pages. I will conduct the load test in a few days."

He later went on to confirm that if the load test goes well, we could very well see the maximum amount of Mastery Pages increase to 20.


There you have it! If you are still hungry for more red posts, I encourage you to check out my previous recap of everything Hippalus, Riot's new eCommerce director, has been talking about. IP reductions, new bundle options, and so much more!