[ Update #4: Delayed until 3.11/3.12 ] Xypherous on Upcoming Jayce PBE Changes

Continue reading for a lengthy discussion on the Defender of Tomorrow.

Here is Xypherous's initial post, highlighting the problems with chase and potential solutions that are going to be tested soon on the PBE.

"A quick heads up here - There is some fairly experimental stuff on Jayce that's going into the outgoing PBE build. You guys won't have access to this for a little while as PBE builds timing and pushes, while regular - are always on a 'as soon as we can' basis. 

You may see some craziness in the next few days from Data Scrapers but this content is really ridiculously rough. 

1. Jayce should not ignore resistances.
Yes, I know no one levels up 'R' anyway at the moment - but for the moment, let's pretend that Jayce theoretically shouldn't ignore your resistances. 

2. Jayce's poke pattern is fairly unhealthy.
Mostly from a fog of war, long range Q+E standpoint. 

3. Jayce's burst shouldn't hyperscale and his damage shouldn't be dependent on optimizing really weird obtuse use cases.
This mostly pertains to the 'W' functionality changes - where people are 'rolling' W charges to string together a 6 shot hyper charge. Also, Hyper Charge probably shouldn't deal 260% damage on a critical strike - or 325% damage on an IE crit strike. 

4. No, seriously. A lot of Jayce's power is locked up in really obtuse cases.
A little bit of why Jayce is so powerful in competitive play and not so much in regular play is the sheer amount of edge cases you have to abuse to get mileage out of Jayce. While some could argue this is mechanical mastery of the champion - a lot of it is simply unintuitive fodder that we should clean up so that his actual intuitive combos are powerful. 

So what's going on?
We're testing a fairly experimental series of changes designed to shift power away from these three cases and into the rest of his abilities - as well as streamlining some of Jayce's muddier patterns. In general, Jayce is a decent character to have in the game but the vast majority of his power is locked up in extreme abuse cases at the moment - especially with end game super burst scenarios or long range poke scenarios. 

I'll have some more specifics as we start to refine what we have - but here is a rough list of the major changes: 

1. Transform no longer has a shred effect on it. Transform now always simply causes the first attack after Transform to deal bonus damage based on character level.
Almost every fighter needed some form of resist shredding in Season 2 to help them deal damage in the late game. This is no longer true. 

2. You may no longer level Transform. Your abilities have 6 ranks. Armor and Magic Resistance, as well as Proc Damage of Transform is based on character level.
Mostly clean up at this portion of the game. His abilities should be the highlight of the character - not random passive statistics on Transform. 

3. To the Skies! now deals magic damage and scales off Ability Power and has vastly increased base damages.
To the Skies! being physical damage and having a Attack Damage ratio created a very uneven power curve for Jayce - early on, the spike case was heavy due to the prevalence of Attack Damage or Armor Penetration - while late game, his traditional AD / Penetration build makes To the Skies! extremely spikey. 

Cleaning this up allows the Hammer form to deal primary magic damage - which allows some other builds to be played if Jayce can't use his normal glass hypercarry build - like Pen / Off-Tank. 

4. Static Field no longer recovers mana on hit and damage generally reduced. It instead gives you an on-hit magic damage proc while the Static Field is active. The cooldown also goes down with rank.
This creates some Gun / Hammer synergies as both form's 'W' can be used in the other form for damage. 

We removed the mana on hit as it simply unnecessarily added to Jayce's snowball potential and increased his base MP/5 and MP/5 growth to provide a better curve. 

5. Hyper Charge no longer scales to 130% - but stops at 100% instead.
This is a change mostly aimed at tuning down super-high end Jayce potential. 

6. Accelerated Shock Blasts' movement speeds decay down to 1550. In general, this means that regardless of where the Acceleration Gate is, Q + E will roughly get to your destination at the same speed.
This is a change mostly aimed at toning down Jayce's poke cases from fog of war and at long range, while still maintaining adequate ranged threat at mid-range. 

This also is a change directly at shifting Jayce's Acceleration Gate combo away from always being best used directly on himself - opening up more of a range of possible Acceleration Gate positions."

Regarding Thundering Blow's damage, he noted:

"Have not yet decided on if / what Thunder Blow needs to have changed, although with six possible ranks, it seems likely that we can rescale the damage such that per skill point, you are getting less power.

Unsure if he needs it exactly at the moment - as we're doing quite a bit at once here."

Continuing the Thundering Blow discussion:

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Part of my frustration comes from the fact that his Thundering Blow does absolutely insane amounts of magic damage that is not only percent of max health, but scaled 1-to-1 with bonus AD. Do you have any concerns that the further shift of To-the-Skies magic damage with 'vastly increased base damages' will be an unnecessary buff? I am afraid that while I will see a Jayce with some lower damage on his truly problematic abilities, I will also see a Jayce that will be impossible to defend against in top lane and thus still difficult to deal with.

I suspect that this is true somewhat - though lane tests right now seem to indicate that Jayce really needs to use all his abilities well in order to do well. We have a couple of other minor changes as well such as reducing his health regeneration in favor of more mana regeneration as he should really win the lane by using his abilities on you a bunch.
I'm not sure I have a whole lot to assuage your fears, other than the fact that I just ripped off 1.0 Bonus AD scaling from his Q, reduced the levelups on his 'W' TAD scaling, roughly 5% armor shred in his early game. While I'm sure that Jayce will have a great deal of magic damage punch to him in his Hammer form - I'm not sure that his first couple of purchases will actually cause the lane to be unconquerable.

Essentially - I do think he will be harder to itemize against but most of the changes are targetted at limiting abuse cases when he's ahead and figuring out where the balance lies in that paradigm."

He continued, discussing various points of these proposed changes:

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so at rank 6 in a skill it will do more damage than most other champs rank 5 skills? because if that isnt the case you cant reach your true rank 5 damage till lvl 10.

We'll see based on tuning - no guarantees yet here.

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So is distributing the power through 6 levels of skill a solution for that weird power curve?

Not particularly. In this case, it's just a simple recognition that there was no amount of passive power that we could put on Jayce's Transform level ups to actually make it feel worthwhile to rank up unless we went to ridiculous overpowered passive stat land.

He also didn't need any *more* complicated mechanics to get him through - so the simplest solution here was to simply stop trying to make Transform a compelling level up and just rebalance his spells around assuming people simply weren't going to put points in Transform anyway."

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AP Melee Jayce gonna be any good now? :P

If anything, possibly Magic Pen / Off-Tank Jayce?

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My friend who plays fotm Jayce is just a bit sad though ^^

The FoTM Jayce is a good playstyle - it just needs a bit more counterplay - which is why we opted to really target some of the more esoteric high end abuse cases like 'W' priming.

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I just wanted to add that I understand your viewpoint that you are leveling 2 different skills at the same time and that doing that in comparison to other champs should take slightly longer. in that way it makes some sense, the overall playerbase may not see it that way no matter how well you describe it though.

No - you're right. It's still important that each level-up still feel good, regardless of what form you're in. When you hit rank 6 and have the same base damages as other people's rank 5's - it just means that those level-ups you got along the way were awful. You would level up 'E' on Karma and get 40 shield compared to Janna's 55 and seriously question why you are putting points in skills. :P

For example, Acceleration Gate right now feels like M'eh with a side of Blah - even if it definitely needed the longer cooldown. Still thinking on that though - as Acceleration Gate just doesn't have anything that it seems we can make scale up to the extent that it should."

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Are you worried about Jayce maxing his W second instead of his Q and ignoring E entirely?

I suspect that's kind of what you should do on Live right now, given the Acceleration Gate changes in 3.9. 

So.. not particularly, as it can't be worse than the current optimal Jayce style.

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That idea somewhat terrifies me, since I am imagining that the trade-off for single-target damage will involve increasing the damage significantly. Imagine a mid-late game Jayce Q that hits your ADC for 50% of his life instead of just 20-30% of the AOE. With the amount of spam that Jayce gets and the range, Jayce with concentrated single-target Accelerated Q sounds more and more like a 1000 MPH Nidalee Spear.

It is terrifying notion - but the benefits are that it opens up space for both unempowered Q and empowered Q to be satisfying without one drastically outclassing the other.
It would also mean that then we have additional space to play around with Acceleration Gate duration / cooldown to open up some space as right now Gun Q isn't actually a spell, since it's Gun Q + E that is the actual spell and thus the cooldown / conditions of 'E' tie directly into Q's satisfaction level.

For example, if Q by itself was satisfying - you could put an absolutely ridiculous cooldown and duration on Acceleration Gate. You could make the Gate last 12 seconds and have a 40 second cooldown - because now normal Q's and empowered Q's have a purpose - which would actually open up a lot of interesting team cases without making Jayce 'Team Speed Up all the Time' guy - but rather Jayce brings 'Giant Semi-Perma Zone Control in a Team Fight' guy - or you could set up a siege and start peppering multiple empowered Q's forward - but as soon as that Gate drops, you know you can rush Jayce, etc."

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Have you considered giving his shockblast combo similar treatment as Sejuani's ulti.
IE if you don't hit a target it doesn't deal damage. Right now if you're close to max distance of his shockblast it's hard to dodge it, since it blows up next to you then, and then you're hit by explosion.

I have not currently tinkered with that - that might be an interesting change if we deem it necessary, although at the moment I want to tackle the fog of war reaction issue first."

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So any plans to change/rework Jayce's current passive? Why the flat speed boost?

I have no idea why the flat speed boost is there - but I suspect it's there to actually cover a bit for the mind-share it takes to transform mid-fight. 

As in - it does take more planning and execution to perform swap combos as Jayce - thus the additional movement speed and ghost allows for a bit of grace in terms of mental mind share allowing you to focus on the combo, rather than mouse moving while doing so. 

It also has some way additional side benefits in making the transform "feel" right from a visual perspective. Because Jayce changes his walking posture - intuitively, you think that Jayce has slowed down because his center changes. 

Agreed that the ghost effect is probably superfluous - but there doesn't seem to be any real reason to remove it. I also agree that the shifting to lane case is a bit odd but outside of it feeling silly I don't see negative implications to it.

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In order for the bare Q to farm creeps like Jayce does currently with his Accelerated Q, Q alone is going to have to do a lot more damage and probably have a higher particle speed. That means that his new Accelerated Q could even have a reduction in damage and still do as much damage as it does currently. Having a skill that reduces your damage so directly seems odd, so that single target damage will probably have to stay just as strong in order to make it worthwhile. As a result, the new rocket Q remains terrifying.

There are really straightforward ways to solve that: 100% bonus damage to minions.

Or potentially, massive AoE spread - with falloff near the edges."

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We've already seen that the 6 system is really, really bad for a lot of reasons. The biggest I can point out is that if your 6th rank isn't better than it reasonably should be, you're in a situation where you feel like **** for having that system. But if your level 6 IS better it's like a bunch of miniults. Ugh- That creates edge cases that I imagine could be just as bad as he is right now- That's a no win situation.

Going to be really really blunt here - extrapolating feel from Karma's design is absurd.

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Other minor things: I don't think trading one itemization issue for another is good- ie you want to remove his shred, but give him magic damage on Q. These create a really similar end result, in that in lane he suddenly starts to feel -even weirder or less clear-.

Since the hyper shred happened at level 16 - trading the physical damage out for magical damage won't have as much of an impact here as you think - mostly because early lane penetration comes from flat penetration. Essentially, regardless if Q did physical or magical damage early in lane - he's still attacking a weak resistance you have due to the prevalence of flat penetration.

It will create counter-itemization issues, undoubtedly in lane - but it will define what you should build against him late game based on his item build, which is the point of counter-itemization."

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It sounds like a good direction for jayce and I'm happy to hear you are unwinding some of his mechanical bloat finally.

Keep in mind, chances are all of this could fail horribly and fall on its face and we'll have to revert!

Definitely an option on the table. Again - purpose of this post is to inform about highly experimental changes that we want to heavily iterate on.

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Why would you make his W max out at 100% and make you rank it up 6x? That seems like a completely useless skill to rank up at all

Currently testing at 75%/80%/85%/90%/95%/100% and cooldown from 13/11/9/7/5/3.
Essentially - max rank 'W' right now is 'You have roughly 2.5 Attack Speed while you are in Cannon form'

And.. oddly enough, as ridiculous as that sounds - still far weaker than live due to the priming use case."

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If his ult no longer gives him resistances in hammer mode, then why would magic pen off-tank Jayce be a thing? Remember that the main two things he has always brought to the table are the Q + E combo and his W's scaling. If he goes magic pen tanky, how is he supposed to do anything with his ranged form?

His ultimate still gives him resistances passively. It's just based on character level rather than ultimate level.

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which by the way just got butchered. seriously, acceleration gate + shock blast AND 30% off of his W? He's losing .9 off of a single w - that's a nearly 33% decrease in damage. 1.8 off a rolled W. On top of everything else, and on top of nerfing his early game by putting his sklil ranks to 6 levels.

Hammer 'W' adds on-hit magic damage regardless of what form he is in, so Static Field --> Switch --> Hyper Charge makes up for quite a bit of missing damage due to the swap combos (either direction.)"

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At least let this current patch play out with the acceleration gate cd increase before you olaf jayce.......

The acceleration gate change will definitely nerf Jayce's win rate below what he is right now in 3.9 - and roughly above where Olaf is for most players. 

And what is left will be a Jayce that is only good if you take advantage of all his abuse cases - which means that no one actually gets to play as Jayce other than the highest levels. I'm not sure how much I can stress that. 

The current Jayce in 3.9 is mostly likely too weak to be played except by competitive players.

Essentially, this is what we should've done for Olaf in the first place - instead of raw nerfs, shifting up patterns and powers such that the power is actually usable by the vast majority of the players rather than only a small subset and then nerfing it to be balanced for that small subset."

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Where are you "shifting the power so that is usable for the vast majority of players"? I just don't see it unless there are other changes you didn't list.

While I'm not listing all of the numerical rebalancing because frankly, it's going to flux - from the original post there are these following comments: 

- Hammer form simply gives free resistances without needing points put into it.
- Hammer 'Q' has drastically increased base damage
- Hammer 'W' has a magic on-hit proc that can be used in either form
- Hammer 'W' has reduced cooldown per level 

From the followup posts in this thread, I've talked about: 

- Gun 'W' having drastically reduced cooldown per level - but cooldown starting when you consume the procs.
- Shock Blasts 'Q+E' combo is agnostic of gate location. 

You're absolutely right that I'm not talking about quite a few numbers that matter at the end of the day to see whether these are nerfs or buffs - because in the end, those will be tuning points we'll have to use.

Agreed that it's far far easier to notice what is coming down because they're the factors currently seeing abuse.

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Sorry Xypherous, but why is Jayce keeping his resistance /lv while you guys ripped of that from Nid and Elise? I'm not complaining about this change on Elise or Nid, but I think Jayce shouldn't have them either, he already has that annoying disengage from his E that just blow you away with out any option to answer back.

I don't have a great answer for you here other than I think Jayce needs it far more than Nidalee or Elise."

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Normalizing his Q speed to be the same regardless of where the gate is placed is the same thing as homogenizing and I'm not a fan. If this game is in dire need of something, it's mechanics that allow for players to differentiate skill from one another. Watering everything down for the sake of simplicity is not the way to go.

Placing Gate mid-flight is actually the strongest way to use a deccelerating shock blast because of the telegraph time. 

We're making the Q speed to be roughly agnostic to where the gate is placed doesn't mean that casting gate after Q is worse. In fact, this case still gives the opponent less time to react to Q's speed. 

Making the position of the gate agnostic creates a trade-off here that takes more skill to appreciate. Currently, the best use of gate is to cast it right atJayce's feet. This means that acceleration gate has very little trade-offs for Jayce - you get both the super fast poke and the burst of movement speed to reposition. By making the gate position agnostic of travel time but making it so that there is less telegraphing by casting the gate forward - there should be a tension between how dodgeable you want that Q to be and how much you want to retreat.

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Why butcher a champion's kit before allowing some time to pass to see if the last number tweaks did their job? Sorry, but these changes make no sense to me. I watch all the pro streams and nearly all of them are in agreement that the latest Jayce nerfs that just hit live were substantial (40% longer gate CD, 25% longer to complete his core item Muramana).

Yes - those nerfs were substantial band-aid hits to his most powerful build. Considering that Jayce already has a below average win rate for most players - it means that the only Jayce players that will be successful now are the ones who can best abuse Jayce's obtuse strengths. 

Which means that if we let the nerfs settle in without changing his kit - only the highest end players will be able to use Jayce. Consider the fact that we haven't given power back to Jayce anywhere - but only took away power from his best build. Were his other builds viable or playable? General win rate seems to suggest that isn't so - but currently you'd be crazy to amplify any part of Jayce given that it'll be a straight buff to the competitive Jayce build."

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i just have a bad feeling that if its kit is changed that much he will probably just end up being forgotten.

You are actually fairly spot on about this. Change will cause people to leave. That's pretty much guaranteed. The question here is what the alternative is - because I don't see it as being better. :x"

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Are you trying to shift Jayce away from being the AD caster or second AD carry he was previously and turn his playstyle more into how he was played at release with Trinity Force Jayce?

To a certain extent, yes.

Currently, the glass DPS form of Jayce doesn't seem to be providing a ton of healthy gameplay overall - regardless of how strong or weak it is at various brackets, because it seems to emphasize excessive amounts of physical burst, coupled with an inability to build Armor to resist it - with team mobility."

Xypherous also replied to someone who commented "honestly, pro's are ruining the game for normal players", implying that pro levle Jayce play is the reason behind all these Jayce changes:

"No - pro's definitely are not ruining this game for normal players. What pros do in most cases is highlight the fact that the best way to play a character is something that is either completely accessible or highly abusive. 

They highlight design flaws in the champion that says 'Hey, your character is ridiculously overpowered in this one particular manner' and then they are very good about using that manner to its fullest. 

But the key thing is the pros are the messenger - not the message.

And that message is 'Hey guys, you screwed up on this champion or this interaction or this abuse case.' 

And our job with reworks is to make sure that Jayce's power isn't wrapped up in things that no one wants to do as Jayce like priming 'W' - like continuous poke, or hyper armor penetration. Our job with reworks is that people can play Jayce not in the most abusive manner possible that can be done - but in the most Jayce-like manner possible. You should play Jayce like he is hammer and gun transform guy - and our job is to ensure that you can play that character we promised and not 'try to learn to abuse him as the pros do' guy.

At the end of the day, I don't even care if these changes possibly buff Jayce. Just so long as people playing as or against him fight against Jayce and feel like he's fine, fun to play as, fun to play against because right now - that's not true"

Someone also took at stab by asking "Why be creative when you are going to take it all away anyways?", Xypherous replied:

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Why be creative when you are going to take it all away anyways?

Sure I can answer this. Firstly, Your feeling of creativity is not worth more than people having fun in the game. If you feeling clever leads to everyone fighting against you feeling awful - that is not worth the trade in this case. Top Lane Lulu is certainly a 'clever' thing to do - except that fighting Top Lane Lulu is absolute misery and pain and shouldn't exist. 

Secondly, when you do small nerfs or tweaks - you typically can only remove. When nerfs or tweaks come in small amounts - you cannot change the character such that he actually can lane in multiple lanes or is fun and healthy in multiple. You can only destroy with small changes. You cannot create with small changes. 

You can stop things that you dislike - but you cannot create things that people like. You have to change things at larger levels in order to both removeand preserve things.

Think about Vi or Xin for a second - and now think that you can only change 1 thing about them. You must stop the abuse cases - but can you actually preserve the fun lane cases? Is it possible? What about if you could make 2 changes? What about 3? What can you do to preserve fun while stopping abuse? What scale do you have to tackle the problem at?"

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Update #1: Xypherous has followed up the discussion with some new thoughts after reading all the feedback.

"Feedback! Awesome.
Again - still not sure when you're going to get this on the PBE but hopefully we can really hammer on this until Jayce reaches a state where people are comfortable with his style.
Let me talk about some of the points raised here and my initial responses to the changelist proposed: 

To The Skies!
I'm running into two problems here - his additional AD ratio on To the Skies! early is creating a large early game spike due to how much flat AD you can stack early - and his AD ratio on To the Skies! late is creating a bigger later-game spike after his full penetration / AD build becomes. 

If To The Skies! is supposed to be a good way to melee all-in - having the ability so heavily dependent on the AD ratio for the damage seems odd as it means that Jayce is effective when he's ahead but fairly poor when he's behind. 

Jayce's AD ratios late game are fairly ridiculous at the moment - we have to tone this down somehow but there are alternate solutions here.

Okay, so listening to reason here, simply toning down the AD ratio and give it higher base damages, especially with later ranks while keeping it physical damage should accomplish what I want it to do - while trying to attack both of the problems listed. 

Great - This is why I talk to you guys early because I'm being reckless. Moving on. 

Transform Abilities and the oddities of level 6
One of the problems with transform character is that their power level at 6 / 9 get heavily out of sync with other champions. 

Hextech Capacitor will add magic damage on changing to either form - and that Hammer will provide passive resistanecs - but with non-linear scaling I can probably add a spike here in resistances / proc damage that will help curb some of the level 6 power here.
Removing the shred will tackle a lot of his abusive power - which means that the Capacitor can hopefully inherit this power. 

We'll also need to remove some of the early level 1 to 3 power - so the curve on Hextech Capacitor should probably spike at 4/6/9 - so I'm going to try something like 5/5/5/20/20/20/40/40/40/65/65/65/95/95/95/130/130/130 magic damage first. 

Hextech Capacitor and Hammer Form Resistances will get a spike in power at level 6 and 9 to help smooth out this curve. 

Hyper Charge
Starting with 75%/80%/85%/90%/95%/100% may be too drastic for an initial pass - However, the goal here is to really put some power into hammer form as well - rather than a complete hyperscale form based on how many ratios you have.
It's hard to gauge how much of the power here in lane is from the heavy level-ups on the skill combined with the increase in AD - I'll try a smoother curve for the first iteration.

The problem case with Hyper Charge is how powerful the lane poke can be and how powerful the late game power can be - however, with 6 ranks in the skill and the new CD formula, I can actually change the levelups on this quite a fact.

Hyper Charge adjusted to - 70/80/90/100/110/120%. 

Hyper Charge now deals 100% bonus damage on critical strike, rather than multiplying the whole attack.

Hyper Charge CD adjusted to 13/11/9/7/5/3 - CD starts after the cast finishes.
Let me update the initial post with the key points."

He then started answering more questions and replying to more comments:

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EDIT: Changed my opinion on the Hyper Charge change now that I saw the update. I love Jayce. I love the ability to switch between Hammer and Cannon as the situation demands and I know I'm not alone in the feeling that sitting in Cannon form because it's safe and powerful isn't fun. I'm not a game designer, I'm not very good with balance and I haven't played very long to have much credentials, but I am wracking my brain trying to find ideas that could be proposed to make Jayce not such a nightmare to play against while also keeping the soul of the champion intact.

I'm working quickly here - Could you clarify why the change feels like it restricts you into staying in Cannon form? The low-end cooldown? 

The change from live is that the cooldown starts after you use it - thus the cooldown should be similar to the feeling from live, minus a chaining abuse case.


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I know i can't hope for you to reply - but if Jayce's gameplay at this point is such a problem - why is Ezreal's gameplay considered healthy with all the itemization changes? Not that it is overpowered, but it is a frustratingly different thing to play against compared to every other adc - highly mobile with long range cc/poke.

Ezreal's all-in is considerable weaker than Jayce's and armor is much more effective against his damage.

While Ezreal is slippery - his sustained damage in fight is also much lower - while Jayce has very high burst and much more natural penetration."

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I don't see the problem in toning down the AD ratio, but I also don't understand why you would want to nerf an all-in move that puts Jayce in vulnerable positions. The current Jayce style allows Jayce to use his To the Skies to clean up fleeing enemies, and is less so a team-fighting ability because of the positioning you give up. You would be better off smoothing the bonus damage that is applied from ranking up the ability as it increases in large increments.

The bonus damage on To the Skies! increase by 40 per rank. This pales in comparison the to 1.0 bonus AD ratio when used properly both early game and late game. 

Hence, the current tactic here is to shift his level ups to 25 to 275 and reduce his AD ratio to 1.0 to 0.6.

Most likely that AD ratio is a little too high still - but overall his damage should still be quite in line because there's lower spikes early in lane due to buying early AD and hopefully down in the extreme case where he has every AD item imaginable.


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I like the change to the passive, and the removal of the shred from his transform ability, but I feel that the loss of the movement buff will hurt Jayce's kit considering his current ms and changes to acceleration gate.

The movement speed buff is there. He gets both the movement speed and the proc on switch.


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Let me explain what I mean. The proposed changes to Hammer Form's W seems to encourage building attack speed to benefit from the on-hit magic damage, while Cannon Form's W has *ALWAYS* made building attack speed feel bad, because it is a completely wasted stat with this ability is in use. The proposed changes will only exacerbate this problem further by having the cooldown low enough that the amount of time you'll be without the 2.5 attack speed will only be a matter of seconds.

My thought here is that you can link the two bonuses - for example, Hyper Charge in ranged form, switch to Hammer - Q --> Activate Static Field --> Use both Hyper Charge and Static Field together.

It's a lot more mixed damage in this pattern as you'll also get the passive static field damage - but it will be riskier."

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Xyph, is your intent just to reduce Jayce's damage a bit because you feel it's too high or to make him be more like a bruiser?
In other words : Do you intend to reduce the potency of the current build and make building little damage and more defensive stats the better choice? Because I have to say, that's completely changing the nature of the champion I bought

No - I want to kill some of the spike circumstances right now that exist early and late because those are the things you have to abuse to be successful with Jayce at the moment.

Hopefully we can preserve his current AD/CDR build - but simply make it less ridiculous when super optimized early lane and late game fights."

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Increased with infy/mastery?

Yes - this will still be increased by critical damage chance.


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Is that .6 bonus ad or total ad.

.6 bonus so roughly 178 bonus AD to surpass the old damage. End-game Jayce gets something like 250 to 300 bonus AD when he's doing super well - so this should hit that extreme without hitting him hard if he's not being built hyper AD.

Update
Heavily retuning the missile flight properties at the moment - basically toying with widths and AoE in order to reward precision. I think Jayce's shock blasts have a decent cooldown compared to other craziness like Nidalee - however, his is much easier to hit from a number of perspectives.

No real numbers at the moment - just tuning some widths and AoE."

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UPDATE #2: Xypherous has editted his main post again, this time putting numbers to a lot of the changes.

"A quick heads up here - There is some fairly experimental stuff on Jayce that's going into the outgoing PBE build. You guys won't have access to this for a little while as PBE builds timing and pushes, while regular - are always on a 'as soon as we can' basis. 

You may see some craziness in the next few days from Data Scrapers but this content is really ridiculously rough. 

1. Jayce should not ignore resistances.
Yes, I know no one levels up 'R' anyway at the moment - but for the moment, let's pretend that Jayce theoretically shouldn't ignore your resistances. 

2. Jayce's poke pattern is fairly unhealthy.
Mostly from a fog of war, long range Q+E standpoint. 

3. Jayce's burst shouldn't hyperscale and his damage shouldn't be dependent on optimizing really weird obtuse use cases.
This mostly pertains to the 'W' functionality changes - where people are 'rolling' W charges to string together a 6 shot hyper charge. Also, Hyper Charge probably shouldn't deal 260% damage on a critical strike - or 325% damage on an IE crit strike. 

4. No, seriously. A lot of Jayce's power is locked up in really obtuse cases.
A little bit of why Jayce is so powerful in competitive play and not so much in regular play is the sheer amount of edge cases you have to abuse to get mileage out of Jayce. While some could argue this is mechanical mastery of the champion - a lot of it is simply unintuitive fodder that we should clean up so that his actual intuitive combos are powerful. 

So what's going on?
We're testing a fairly experimental series of changes designed to shift power away from these three cases and into the rest of his abilities - as well as streamlining some of Jayce's muddier patterns. In general, Jayce is a decent character to have in the game but the vast majority of his power is locked up in extreme abuse cases at the moment - especially with end game super burst scenarios or long range poke scenarios. 

I'll have some more specifics as we start to refine what we have - but here is a rough list of the major changes: 

Passive Statistics
Shifting around his statistics to favor mana regeneration as Jayce should be more of an active laner focused around spells to achieve victory. The shift in regeneration should also compensate for the removal of Mana on Hit from Static Field. 

HP/5 reduced to 5 from 7
HP/5 per Level reduced to 0.5 from 0.7
MP/5 increased to 10 from 7
MP/5 per level increased to 1.0 from 0.7
Jayce may no longer level Transform but his abilities have 6 ranks. 

Hextech Capacitor
Moved a portion of his transform passives onto his character passive. Additionally, Hextech Capacitor is weak at character levels 1-3 but stronger at 6 and 9 to smooth out power differences between the fact that he has multi-form abilities and no ultimate. 

* Now additionally grants 5 to 130 magic damage for the first attack after transformation, based on character level. 

To the Skies!
To the Skies! had some early game spike power and late game spike power. Normalizing this curve such that you don't have to stack a ton of early Attack Damage or a ton of late Penetration in order to utilize this ability effectively for burst. 

* Mana Cost fixed at 30 at all ranks from 40/50/60/70/80
* Damage rescaled to 25/75/125/175/225/275 (+0.6 Bonus) physical damage from 20/65/110/155/200 (+1.0 Bonus) physical damage 

Static Field
Static Field should encourage Jayce to stay in Hammer form and engage on his opponents for prolonged periods of time while his Cannon Transform is unavailable.
Also experimenting with a W -> R -> W swap combo - though the current gameplay is a little unintuitive. 

* Passive mana gain on-hit removed.
* Damage rescaled to 60/110/160/210/260/310 (+1) from 100/170/240/310/380 (+1)
* Basic Attacks during static field now deal an additional 10/15/20/25/30/35 (+0.2) magic damage on hit. Numbers even more highly experimental and subject to change on this one. * Cooldown rescaled to 13/12/11/10/9/8 from 10 

Thundering Blow
Thundering Blow in top lane was often Jayce's easy-mode button. If Jayce was in a bad spot - he could simply Thundering Blow to escape. Aggressively gating the Mana Cost on this ability means that eventually, Jayce's second chances will run out.
However, we wanted to preserve Jayce's engagement pattern if he chooses to be active - hence the To the Skies! Mana changes. 

* Mana cost fixed at 85 from 40/50/60/70/80
* Now has a rank 6 that deals 23% health damage and up to 700 magic damage versus minions. 

Transform: Mercury Hammer
* Now grants 5 to 35 Armor and Magic Resistance, based on character level. 

Shock Blast
Changes here are mostly to increase the dodgability of Shock Blast, especially from fog of war + acceleration gate circumstances. 

The acceleration of gate also favors using E after launching Q - as this will give the opponent the smallest amount of time to react. 

* Damage rescaled to 60/105/150/195/240/285 (+1.2 Bonus) from 60/115/170/225/280 (+1.2 Bonus) - Probably needs to be scaled up a tad. * Missile Speed increased to 1450 from 1350
* Missile Width decreased to 50 from 60.
* Missile Area of Effect decreased to 160 from 175
* Accelerated Missile Width remains at 60.
* Accelerated Missile Area of Effect decreased to 225 from 250
* Accelerated Shock Blast initial speed increased to 2550 from 2350
* Accelerated Shock blast now decays down to 1550 during flight 

Hyper Charge
Hyper Charge harass becomes more dominating depending on the rank of the spell in a lot of cases. Early ranks of Hyper Charge tend to be less than mana efficient in a lot of ways. These changes are designed to reduce some of obtuse abuse cases of Hyper Charge with IE or priming the skill but to also make Hyper Charge's cost roughly equivalent to its effect. 

* Damage reduced to 70/80/90/100/110/120% from 70/85/100/115/130%
* Critical strikes now simply add 100% of your total AD to the damage (this can be further modified by critical strike damage) rather than being dependent on the rank of the skill.
* Cooldown rescaled to 14/12/10/8/6/4 from 14/12/10/8/6
* Cooldown now begins when Hyper Charge is fully consumed
* Mana Cost rescaled to 30/38/46/54/62/70 from 40 

Acceleration Gate
Jayce brings Acceleration Gate as his primary team utility. The Jayce player should feel confident that his team contribution shouldn't be necessarily gated by his playstyle or what he is forced to build. The cooldown nerfs in 3.9 should control Gate''s spamminess and uptime - and thus the Mana Cost here seems to be unnecessarily restricting him to Mana intensive builds. 

* Mana Cost reduced to 20 from 50
* Has a 6th rank that increases Movement Speed by 55%. 

Transform: Mercury Cannon
This proc effect was mostly unnecessary - while it ensured Jayce made it to late game, the combined effect of the proc means that Jayce effectively ignored far too much of his opponent's armor than was healthy. 

* No longer has an armor and magic resist reducing proc."

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Hyper Charge is the main one, and for a couple of reasons. ADC Jayce is not built like traditional ADCs. I typically end up with damn near 40% CDR on him, or at least 30%. A 3 second cooldown on Hyper Charge would be really close to 1.5 seconds at max rank with max CDR, and you'd basically just be spamming W late game, whereas Jayce *should* have to use many of his abilities, and use them well, to be a force in game.

Actually on this note specifically - because Hyper Charge's cooldown starts when you press the skill - we're going for the cooldown here that doesn't change the timing of the live version much, other than removing the stringed use case. 

Here's how it goes, Jayce's Hyper Charge is 3.6 second cooldown late game with 40% CDR - however, since it takes you a full second or more to discharge them, the cooldown till the next one is roughly 2 seconds. 

This iteration simply starts the cooldown after you've used the last chage - hence the cooldown till the next one is roughly 2 seconds (or we'll adjust numbers till this is true)

3 probably isn't the right number here - it's probably closer to 3.5 or 4, will keep adjusting until it's closer to live pacing."

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I can't really say as I'm excited at these ideas. Moving past the necessity of cutting down on his siege poke, you're looking at moving that power to his W in his respective forms, in one case in the form of a constantly spammed AS steroid and in the other a wonky PBAOE with a new on-hit component.

Not sure I agree with this sentiment - as Jayce's cannon 'W' is one of the most powerful skills on his kit currently. It's one of the things that has to be toned down - for example.
The cooldown change on 'W' isn't meant to make it more spammy - but to recreate the same cooldown pattern that exists on live while removing the abuse of stringing them together back to back. Currently from testing, we'll probably be moving the low end cooldown of that to 4 seconds. 

Additionally - one of the goals isn't to reduce To the Skies! or Thundering Blow damage - it's to trim off their extreme cases. Shifting power into To the Skies! base damages instead of its ratio's make it a impactful spell regardless of whether or not you are abusing early stacking AD or massive AD / penetration. 

Similarly with Thundering Blow! if we do make any changes - it'll be to curtail its use case as a spammable repeatedly second-chance in lane.

As for Shock Blast - the goal here isn't to reduce the damage of Shock Blast - it's to give more counterplay and dodgeability to the actual Shock Blast itself. Shock Blast should be about clever uses of Blast / Gate combos - not the fact that it's gigantic and super fast coming out of fog of war."

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- Fixing Hyper Charge stacking. (Mostly neutral, but a nerf if you used it this way.)
- Reducing AD ratios on both Qs while increasing flat damage. (Solid late-game nerf, early game nerf if you went heavy AD runes / masteries / itemization)
- Reducing the use of Thundering Blow as a safety net in lane. (Nerf.)
- Making E-Q more dodgeable through reduced projectile speed. (Nerf.) 

So nerfs to all three of his iconic abilities, an edge case nerf / fix to another...and to balance that out, the only buff you've floated to this point is the self-buff on Static Field.

Definitely a fair point. There's a lot of numbers that are up in the air that determine whether any specific change is a net buff or a net nerf. 

Essentially, you can use low numbers to stamp gameplay out completely and this is a pattern that lowers the power level for every person using him. Or if we fix the gameplay to work out appropriately - I think higher numbers might actually be required in order for those play patterns to have the right risk to reward ratios. 

Like, everyone complains about Nidalee Spear being spammy and super damaging - but Dark Binding obliterating your health and rooting you is fine - because the missile speed and dodgeability of the spell demands that yeah - you deserved to take that damage. 

I guess the goal at the end of the day here is - If you weren't abusing the edge cases on Jayce, hopefully your power level will go up. If you were abusing the edge cases on Jayce's kit, then by all means - you should be hit as that's part of the reason why Jayce is so dominant in higher level play.

Quote:

GIVE THE MAN SOME MORE MANA!!!!!

Thundering Blow costs 40 Mana. 

Really now.

Quote:

But Xypherous...
Can I finally go wit's end/sunfire Jayce?

I don't know.

Is that a thing that seems cool?"

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Granted, the proof is in the numbers pudding, but you've presented three of those four changes as intended nerfs, and the fourth- the flat/scaling changes to Qs- as a way to rein in his edge case power. This could very well be a buff under a lot of- maybe even most- circumstances: Bruiser builds, recovering from rough laning phases, maybe (oh, let it be so...) jungling... but at the cost of some of his effectiveness if he does get fed.

Well, I've just posted the current version I'm testing - I'll make further updates on changes based on refinement. 

I'm fairly happy with the set of changes in total at the moment directionally - as I think this shifts his power to the appropriate spots - while shifting his costs to the appropriate spots as well.

Quote:

Well sunfire/wit's end is the official build for the island of misfit children (Shyvana, Udyr, etc.) But I don't think any of the newer champions will go with it because well... they tend to scale with damage or AP, and not sort of neither.

Take a look at the changes and you tell me - just updated with a fairly massive changelist. :P

Time for more testing - Static Field changes are testing to be quite sketchy at the moment, though the Shock Blast seems promising."

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Blind responses (ie, without being able to see them in action):
- Reducing his health regen while expecting him to be in melee more seems problematic

Mana related starts such as Faerie charm is heavily hindered by this change - resulting in a need to purchase early sustain related items. Itemizing right out of the gate for Mana will be poor and generally ineffective due to the need to cover your health bases far more than mana, if aggressively trading. 

Trading 2 hp/5 for 3 mp/5 means that you should probably consider starting with sustain related opening moves.

Quote:

- TTS seems undertuned; at max rank he'll do less damage if he has 188 or more AD (roughly a bloodthirster or manamune on top of base)

TTS is/has always been bonus AD scaling - so it's 188 bonus attack damage that it evens out at, so basically a full bloodthirster and manamune and last whisper.
But it's laaate.

Quote:

- Thundering Blow: Punishes early game, pushes him even more into continued reliance on tear / manamune, which will marginalize the impact of this change.

Almost every other ability had mana costs reduced for normal Thundering Blow cadence. Repeated Thundering Blow cadence without hard engaging with other spells will almost certainly be OOM.

Quote:

- Hypercharge - Still seems spammy, mana cost seems prohibitive (once again forcing him into tear builds).

Pure ranged poke + thundering blow pattern will require a lot more mana - certainl 

y true. Builds focused around To the Skies! and aggressive trading will not - ideally.
Accel Gate + Shock Blast combos are also reduced in total cost. 

This is the most unrelenting safe attack pattern - so if you want to be safe consistently - you'll probably be forced into heavy mana.

Quote:

- Transform: Mercury Cannon - Another nerf. Shred will be missed, but no real opinion beyond that.

Proc is mostly unused power here from players.

If acquired early, mostly a trap to put points into until late."

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To follow up on the above, look at the numbers. I absolutely adore the idea of a more engaged laning phase centered on TTS and aggression, but the kit really doesn't support it. At rank 1, TTS not only does half the damage of an un-accelerated Shock Blast, but it also does roughly half the damage of an auto attack. It's a gap closer and slow, which makes it useful for securing ganks, but for trading, why would someone spend mana and run the risk of closing to melee range for the sake of an ability that will do less damage than they could do by sitting safely at range and right clicking?

TTS's base damage will look relatively low given the fact that the built-in gap closer plus CC will ensure one or more followup autoattacks. That and hextech capacitor means that if TTS is bursting you - we have an issue because TTS also sets up 3 or 4 other parts of his kit to deal full damage to you as well. 

This is also why Jayce's all-in at level 2 specifically is strong on live.

So the Shock Blast comparison is a bit moot in most cases - as getting free Shock Blasts is decent - but usually offers poor followup potential for further damage. Granted, the question here is whether TTS is worth the risk of Shock Blasting - but that's why Capacitor / Static Field is relatively important here. 

However, the thing to note here is that the aspects of his kit that should be mana limited are the ones with no response - strong fast autoattack harass in lane and repeated melee disengage. These two elements offer very little play for the opponent and give very little opportunity for his opponent to respond - hence, I don't care if Jayce is using Shock Blast or TSS - just so long as he's not continuously hyper charging you without putting himself at risk.

Quote:

You'll make sure of that by adding resistances to his Hammer form and making damn certain his Canon form is bad.

His Hammer form already had the resistances on live - I'm simply making them scale off character level.

Quote:

Jayce whom, by your own admission, is weak right now outside of absuing edge cases that you'll be sure to remove.

Correct. In order to use Jayce currently - you should ignore levelling 'R' early - concentrate your early game power into Q - and build in a very specific order. Removing the edge cases and making that power accessible in the base kit itself is important. Hyper Charge should have a low cooldown late game because the cooldown is low - not because you prime it or wait for it. TTS should deal decent damage at all points in the game - not because you had a bunch of flat attack damage runes or built a crazy amount of AD/Pen late game.

Additionally, if you're top lane - instead of engaging, your current costs push you towards playing a safe fall-back position because the Mana Cost to benefit ratios aren't worth it. 

In turn, this means that - if you want to play Jayce outside out the Muramana instant-gib combo - don't bother. Flat nerfs are going to make this playstyle the only possible way to play Jayce - and if you don't play him in that specific manner, you're going to fail.

Quote:

I just honestly don't see how +35 magic damage per hit makes up for all the nerfs you're throwing his way.

You're absolutely right - it doesn't - because that's not the thing he's getting: 

Transform: Capacitor damage on switch without the need for points. Hammer resistances without the need for points.

Stats: Traded 2 hp/5 for 3 mp/5. Late game, he trades 5.6 hp/5 for 8.4 mp/5. 

Hammer Form Bases: Higher base damages available on his kit (+75 on Q, +3% Max Health on E1 rank 6) in exchange for lower scaling (roughly 0.4 Bonus AD 

Gun Siege: Shockblasts will be tougher to land - true. The entire combo takes 30 less mana and Acceleration Gate is essentially free for all intents and purposes.

Lower Cooldowns: Generally lower cooldowns, especially at max ranks and Static Field's cooldown additionally going down with rank."

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What if you increased the mana regen on his W so that he didn't need to buy tear, but likewise reduce his damage slightly so that spaming his spells doesn't hurt as much but ALSO he can't spam UNLESS he goes into melee frequently to regain mana?

The problem with the mana form on Melee 'W' at the moment is that it only benefits Jayce's who are ahead. You cannot be in melee form for a prolonged period of time autoattacking minions unless you are already winning for the most part.

Quote:

In this way sure Jayce can spam you a few times BUT he will run out of mana and when he goes in for more mana --- he will have the opportunity to be punished.

Think about a Jayce who is behind in lane - now he no longer has access to his spells at all unless he buys a tear. This is because his Mana costs are all higher but he can't use his melee attack. 

Then think about later on - what that does to his item build: 

Having Mana only available in Hammer Form means that mid or late game, Jayce is going to have a serious Mana problem that he will still need to solve with items. Mana on hit is a mechanic that serves to mask your actual Mana problems.

For example, Malzahar always feels like he has infinite Mana in lane - but as soon as he runs into an actual fight where he's no longer able to access that Mana mechanic - he rapidly runs out of mana. Having a high amount of Mana on hit on his Static Field creates a similar result - especially if his Mana Costs were retuned around it.

Hence the focus on MP/5 and retuned Mana Costs on the things that *should be* spammable."

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Edit: I also just realized I changed around from bad early damage to significant but now on the condition of - if he has mana - I suppose that forces a tear buy, but scaling could be organized such that early AD provides a much higher benefit than huge mana pool - or it could be a trade off, do you want to spam weak spells? Or spam a few strong spells?

The question for me right now is which spells on Jayce should be relatively ungated and which spells on Jayce should be relatively gated. Which play patterns of Jayce are obnoxious / overpowered when excessively used and which play patterns of Jayce are relatively weak when excessively used and then make sure that the costs of those styles match up with their reward. 

For example, using TTS! to all-in is a relatively weak pattern early on compared to some of his other skills - hence it shouldn't actually drain your Mana pool that much - thus allowing you to use other spells. 

Shock Blast is gated right now based on Acceleration Gate's cooldown - so Shock Blast and Acceleration Gate should both be relatively cheap. They are gated by cooldown already and thus can't be excessively used to begin with. 

Hyper Charge should be relatively cheap at low ranks because the benefit it provides is questionable at rank 1. Quicker harass at the expense of some last hit potential - it also has some crippling interactions with Block or Doran's Shield that make it odd. However, later ranks of Hyper Charge start quickly becoming painful harass at safety - thus that should probably be gated via Mana. 

Thundering Blow or To The Skies! - which one of these should be gated? In lane, strong wave clear often provides a source of safety - but To The Skies! is also a primary engage mechanic that should be rewarded because of Jayce's relative strengths. If we had to pick one of these spells that should be unspammable to ensure that the other one can be cast - Thundering Blow kind of wins out."

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Before I say anything, thanks for responding. I'm a nobody in the league community/world, I've been a banned a few times I try to take it a lot more relaxed but it is really nice to have a discussion over one of my favourite champions with a major game designer.

My goal here is to make the best Jayce possible that is also the most intuitive and deep to play because I think he's a cool character. 

So no - throw the feedback my way - Hopefully two things will happen: Either you're right and I'm wrong and the character becomes better for it - Yay!Or I'm right and I'm able to convince that I'm right and you walk away feeling better - Also a net positive.

But that kind of hinges on me responding to everything as best I can. :P"

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In short, trading with his melee abilities as you've laid them out is disadvantageous in every way. Your alpha is lower, your sustained is lower, you spend more mana, and you take more damage than if you just continued with ranged AAs and shock blasts, and your burst / all in is lower than if you just spent the mana on cannon form abilities. It's the same as it is now- the only time you'd go hammer is to either secure a gank or to finish off an opponent who stuck around too long after getting poked down.

Any reason why you decided to omit Thundering Blow in Scenario A (I assume Mana) or only credited it with one autoattack even though the target is slowed? 

If we are assuming Hextech Capacitor bonuses, then the ideal combo without Thundering Blow is: Hyper Charge, Transform, TTS!, Static Field, rapid AA x 3. 

A lot of these scenarios are hinged upon the fact that you have more autoattacks in ranged form than in hammer form but seem to omit the fact that after a hammer harass - switching back to gun form will have the potential to use Scenario B in a much more guaranteed fashion. 

The other factor to look upon this is reliability and the guaranteed nature of it and how that plays out in general. A lot of these look fairly terrible if Shock Blasts get dodged once, for example - or if you drop an autoattack.

Quote:

Why is it 'abusive' to avoid leveling R? The ability does not offer as much of a power increase to his playstyle as leveling one of his other skills. This is not abusive, merely choosing the skill that is most efficient to level. I fail to see how this is different from playing any other champion; certain skills are better to level first than others. If im playing Zyra, i completely ignore leveling W because it doesnt provide as much of a power increase as leveling other skills.

Jayce's balance is assumed around a specific power curve where points in his 'R' are spent.

We could take the approach of 'Well, let's nerf Jayce's early abilities, because people aren't spending points in R' - which would be a flat nerf to anyone not using this strategy.
Or we could just simply agree with you that R is a terrible level up and let you rank your basic abilities some more and just give you the 'R' bonuses for free and balance around the fact that you are sinking lots of points into your primary abilities.

Quote:

Again, im not really sure why this is a problem. Almost every champion in the game has a optimal build.

It's not a question of if someone has an optimal build. It's what that optimal build does and what benefits it brings to the game as a whole.

Muramana Jayce does a lot of neat tricks and uses his full combos to all-in. However, it's also incredibly bursty, swingy and eclipses some of the good aspects of Jayce. Thus, it shouldn't so far surpass all his other builds to the extent that it does."

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Update 3:  Here's Xypherous's latest draft:

"A quick heads up here - There is some fairly experimental stuff on Jayce that's going into the outgoing PBE build. You guys won't have access to this for a little while as PBE builds timing and pushes, while regular - are always on a 'as soon as we can' basis.

You may see some craziness in the next few days from Data Scrapers but this content is really ridiculously rough.

1. Jayce should not ignore resistances.

Yes, I know no one levels up 'R' anyway at the moment - but for the moment, let's pretend that Jayce theoretically shouldn't ignore your resistances.

2. Jayce's poke pattern is fairly unhealthy.

Mostly from a fog of war, long range Q+E standpoint.

3. Jayce's burst shouldn't hyperscale and his damage shouldn't be dependent on optimizing really weird obtuse use cases.

This mostly pertains to the 'W' functionality changes - where people are 'rolling' W charges to string together a 6 shot hyper charge. Also, Hyper Charge probably shouldn't deal 260% damage on a critical strike - or 325% damage on an IE crit strike.

4. No, seriously. A lot of Jayce's power is locked up in really obtuse cases.

A little bit of why Jayce is so powerful in competitive play and not so much in regular play is the sheer amount of edge cases you have to abuse to get mileage out of Jayce. While some could argue this is mechanical mastery of the champion - a lot of it is simply unintuitive fodder that we should clean up so that his actual intuitive combos are powerful.

So what's going on?

We're testing a fairly experimental series of changes designed to shift power away from these three cases and into the rest of his abilities - as well as streamlining some of Jayce's muddier patterns. In general, Jayce is a decent character to have in the game but the vast majority of his power is locked up in extreme abuse cases at the moment - especially with end game super burst scenarios or long range poke scenarios.

I'll have some more specifics as we start to refine what we have - but here is a rough list of the major changes:

Passive Statistics

Shifting around his statistics to favor mana regeneration as Jayce should be more of an active laner focused around spells to achieve victory. The shift in regeneration should also compensate for the removal of Mana on Hit from Static Field.

Attack Damage reduced to 47 from 50
MP/5 increased to 10 from 7
MP/5 per level increased to 1.0 from 0.7

Jayce may no longer level Transform but his abilities have 6 ranks.

Hextech Capacitor

Moved a portion of his transform passives onto his character passive. Additionally, Hextech Capacitor is weak at character levels 1-3 but stronger at 6 and 9 to smooth out power differences between the fact that he has multi-form abilities and no ultimate.

* Now additionally grants 10 to 130 magic damage for the first attack after transformation, based on character level.

To the Skies!

To the Skies! had some early game spike power and late game spike power. Normalizing this curve such that you don't have to stack a ton of early Attack Damage or a ton of late Penetration in order to utilize this ability effectively for burst.

* Mana Cost fixed at 30 at all ranks from 40/50/60/70/80
* Damage rescaled to 40/90/140/190/240/290 (+0.6 Bonus) physical damage from 20/65/110/155/200 (+1.0 Bonus) physical damage

Static Field

Static Field should encourage Jayce to stay in Hammer form and engage on his opponents for prolonged periods of time while his Cannon Transform is unavailable.

Also experimenting with a W -> R -> W swap combo - though the current gameplay is a little unintuitive.

* Passive mana gain on-hit removed.
* Damage rescaled to 60/110/160/210/260/310 (+1) from 100/170/240/310/380 (+1)
* Static Field applies a mark to opponents - your basic attacks deal an additional 20/25/30/35/40/45 (+0.2) magic damage to units marked by the field.

Thundering Blow

Thundering Blow in top lane was often Jayce's easy-mode button. If Jayce was in a bad spot - he could simply Thundering Blow to escape. Aggressively gating the Mana Cost on this ability means that eventually, Jayce's second chances will run out.

However, we wanted to preserve Jayce's engagement pattern if he chooses to be active - hence the To the Skies! Mana changes.

* Mana cost fixed at 85 from 40/50/60/70/80
* Now has a rank 6 that deals 23% health damage and up to 700 magic damage versus minions.

Transform: Mercury Hammer

* Now grants 5 to 35 Armor and Magic Resistance, based on character level.

Shock Blast

Changes here are mostly to increase the dodgability of Shock Blast, especially from fog of war + acceleration gate circumstances.

The acceleration of gate also favors using E after launching Q - as this will give the opponent the smallest amount of time to react.

* Damage rescaled to 50/100/150/200/250/300 (+1.2) Bonus AD from 60/115/170/225/280 (+1.2)
* Missile Speed increased to 1450 from 1350

* Missile Width decreased to 50 from 60.
* Missile Area of Effect decreased to 160 from 175

* Accelerated Missile Width remains at 60.
* Accelerated Missile Area of Effect decreased to 225 from 250
* Accelerated Shock Blast initial speed increased to 2550 from 2350
* Accelerated Shock blast now decays down to 1550 during flight

Hyper Charge

Hyper Charge harass becomes more dominating depending on the rank of the spell in a lot of cases. Early ranks of Hyper Charge tend to be less than mana efficient in a lot of ways. These changes are designed to reduce some of obtuse abuse cases of Hyper Charge with IE or priming the skill but to also make Hyper Charge's cost roughly equivalent to its effect.

* Damage reduced to 70/80/90/100/110/120% from 70/85/100/115/130%
* Critical strikes now simply add 100% of your total AD to the damage (this can be further modified by critical strike damage) rather than being dependent on the rank of the skill.

* Cooldown rescaled to 14/12/10/8/6/4 from 14/12/10/8/6
* Cooldown now begins when Hyper Charge is fully consumed

* Mana Cost rescaled to 30/38/46/54/62/70 from 40

Acceleration Gate

Jayce brings Acceleration Gate as his primary team utility. The Jayce player should feel confident that his team contribution shouldn't be necessarily gated by his playstyle or what he is forced to build. The cooldown nerfs in 3.9 should control Gate''s spamminess and uptime - and thus the Mana Cost here seems to be unnecessarily restricting him to Mana intensive builds.

* Mana Cost reduced to 20 from 50
* Has a 6th rank that increases Movement Speed by 55%.

Transform: Mercury Cannon

This proc effect was mostly unnecessary - while it ensured Jayce made it to late game, the combined effect of the proc means that Jayce effectively ignored far too much of his opponent's armor than was healthy.

* No longer has an armor and magic resist reducing proc."

Continuing the discussion....

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FFS... can you please just nerf Muramana already! I'm sick and tired of the game being balanced around this one broken item. Please just nerf it's active damage -- tear charge rate nerf isn't enough. It inhibits almost alll other builds in the game for these characters, ESPECIALLY Jayce.

Let's consider what would happen to Jayce if we simply nerfed Muramana and called it a day. 

Most likely - Jayce would still need to purchase Muramana - because all the nerfs tied to Jayce have lowered the effectiveness of all builds - because the way his skills and costs are set up, a spammy mana based build based around stacking tons of Attack Damage ratios would still be the way to go. 

So at the end of the day, Bruiser Jayce would still be bad - it's just that Muramana Jayce would be equally bad.

Additionally, think about who benefits the most from the spell-cast proc change: The person simply charging tear or you, who is using spells while using Sheen / Tri-force. Transform alone is not what you're using - thus you're still proc'ing Sheen and Tri-force if you're engaging with TTS! or Hyper Charge. 

What we need to do is solve why Jayce even needs that much Mana in the first place by readjusting his mana costs / damage such that Jayce doesn't even care about Mana unless he's abusing a pokey ranged form Jayce.

Changes like increasing his mp/5 and lowering the cost on his bruiser centric forms allow him to not need a mana item - which rapidly tilts Muramana's value. Hence, Hyper Charge and Thundering Blow! costing a ton of mana - but the rest of Bruiser Jayce's kit of Static Field / To the Skies! / Acceleration Gate shouldn't.

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Having extra damage on transformations is fun because it encourages me to actively switch often and utilize my entire kit

I definitely agree with you on this - and that's why it's his passive now. Transform now adds 5 to 130 magic damage on transform."

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So then what becomes important for Jayce in terms of items? If a player focused on all his abilities in all forms and didn't bank on pokey ranged, would Jayce even need to bank on mana and mana regen items? I totally get if that was the case, but having that little extra longevity with some extra mana and mp/5 still sounds like a nice thing to grab (and Muramana has all the stats that Jayce really wants, unless Static Field can really benefit from the AP from Athene's or something).

Jayce really only has a few needs - AD, CDR and Mana if he wants to perform in a ranged/poke capacity. So he's still definitely going to get Tears early on in lane if he chooses to depend on a delayed harass capacity as most of the mana costs are shifted to penalize this particular playstyle that simply involves waiting on tear. 

Hopefully though, after cleaning up enough of Jayce's kit - we open enough space where if he is focusing on Shock Blast, TTS!, Static Field and Acceleration Gate rather than Hyper Charge and Thundering Blow! - we might open back up the opportunity for Jayce to be played as a Tri-Force (or possibly Iceborne Gauntlet) style melee Jayce that we saw at the end of S2 - based on what the player wants out of Jayce.

We usually don't attempt to balance for two playstyles on a character and try to go for a unifying one playstyle that plays better - but I mean, it's Jayce - it's kind of his entire theme. While that might be a fantasy - at least reducing the power difference between the two builds and allowing both of them to be played in most settings will be an overall net gain - rather than continuously flat nerfing Jayce until the ranged form is the only thing that can be played and the bruiser version is silly at best."

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Hey Xypherous I've been lurking for a while and ive seen the plans for accelerated shock blast and It just doesnt seem right to have the speed decay over time, how quick is this decay? 

Right now the decay happens over 0.667 seconds - so essentially the decay fully kicks in after moving 60% of the distance. 

This number is still being tuned to make Shock Blast feel dodge-able.

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I don't get how Jayce's power is confined to really obtuse cases like abusing crit and IE bonus, while Jayce is so strong in competitive play, and no one in competitive play has ever built crit on Jayce.

This particular change is more of an abuse in Dominion than Summoner's Rift.

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imagine this rather than a ball of energy only being sped up after going through a energy field why not have it alter the ball of energy into a beam, sort of like a focusing lens.

I know that's probably a really good change for Jayce overall for acceleration gate to provide a tangential bonus to Shock Blast rather than making Shock Blast better in all respects - However, what I'm attempting to avoid right now is what I fear we did to Olaf a while ago - nerf him flatly across all ELOs and still not solving his competitive strengths. If we keep flatly nerfing Jayce - he's going to be unplayable except in the highest tiers - we need to shift his power around to good places, otherwise Jayce will just be weak. 

Trying to do this as quickly as possible so Jayce doesn't feel like he's in the twilight phase of 'needs to be reworked' and 'weak' 

Edit: Updated original post with some revised numbers of the current testing iteration. Still no word on when this current one will be out on the PBE - it's highly likely you guys have some of crazy hybrid version in between the two. 

Essentially - trying to tone down hammer-less level 1 form harass a bit.

Side Note: I know I work fairly chaotically - so thanks to everyone who's been keeping up and providing feedback. It's a mutual goals of trying to make Jayce the best character he can be while also avoiding him from being completely dominant competitively so hopefully this works out. :x"

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Have you had a chance to test these changes behind closed doors yet? I'd be curious to hear how it performed. If my worries about the cost/risk-to-benefit of his hammer kit look like they are unfounded in practice, that would be good to know. Those concerns are still present, but if I beat that dead horse any more I'm afraid it'll turn into Hecarim.

Yeah - most of my testing has been focused on whether or not top lane hammer from has been decent - so focused testing around what is the best lane pattern versus certain champions - whether or not I still feel compelled to never stick around and trade. 

So taking relatively overpowering melee tops like Renekton, etc - and whether seeing a melee pattern is having a decent effect. We've also been doing testing in the reverse case - as to how to play against a ranged focused Jayce - but mostly this boils down to 'Hey, did you know that Doran's Shield makes Hyper Charge seem silly?' 

The other portion of testing has mostly focused around the mid matchups - but admittedly this is just shock blast tuning.

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What I'm a little confused on though is the melee W. So when statick field is up you say it 'applies a mark.' When you tap someone with the mark with your AA is the mark popped and your goal is to hit everyone once who got hit by the field, or is it more like a debuff and you just do additional damage to them while the field is active? 

If it's the first case how long does the mark persist? If you activate the field out of range and THEN walk into range does the mark still get applied?

Not sure which version made it to the PBE at the moment - but the idea is that the mark is continuously reapplied while they are in lightning field and the mark lasts for two seconds. 

The mark is not consumed on attack - so the idea is to hit them as many times as decently possible while they are marked. 

If you activate the field out of range then walk into range (like, with TTS) the mark should still get applied - though that may not be what you're playing.

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I'm not totally convinced we're there yet (more below), but it's very gratifying to see that feedback having an effect.

Kind of why I'm posting - I know we're doing these set of changes fairly hot and fast with limited testing. While more information may not necessarily be better - more eyes probably isn't a bad thing in case we miss an edge case.

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Given the mana gating of TB, I still think TTS could stand to be tuned upward. Maybe I haven't seen the burst case you seem to be giving such a berth to

It's mostly Jayce's level 2 all-in on live that we're trying to dance around."

=================================================================
Update 4: Here are 20+ more posts on Jayce as well as an announcement that the project is being delayed and won't be out for 3.10

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b) If not, is there anything to the notion of keeping early rank bases low to address that but ramping higher with ranks?

We'll see - we haven't had a series of really in-depth midgame centric tests as I'm focused on the lane feel paradigms.

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a) I'm hesitant to jump on board with nerfing that sort of high risk, high reward start. Full AD Riven is similar- she gambles everything on being able to wreck her lane at level 2.

To be perfectly fair - that's one of the reasons Riven fails as a design - I should really start messing around with trying to improve moment to moment counterplay for her rather than the strategic counterplay goals I set out initially."

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"Okay 4 a.m. - most likely I should make preparations to pass out - so I'll be unable to respond.
Most likely I'm not going to get much in the form of iteration over the weekend - and I suspect that the Jayce on PBE is a little wonky due to being being some kind of weird work in progress build but theoretically he should be available to play. 

Some of the tooltips might still be messed up - need to clean up stuff. 

I'm most interested in the following points and it would be great if you guys could provide thoughts and experiences from what you see in game - or just general thoughts on the pattern overall and whether or not I'm missing something. 

1 - As Jayce, Whether his top lane feels like Hammer form is 'worth it' to switch to and swap damage in, instead of just spamming Thundering Blow! 

2 - As an opponent of Jayce, Whether his top lane feels egregious to fight against to due safe ranged spam - whether or not this Jayce is essentially more 'fair' to fight against and gives you more opportunities to fight back. 

3 - As an opponent of Mid Jayce, Whether his Shock Blasts feel more fair to dodge late game - They will still hit like trucks - but hopefully they are stylish narrow exploding trucks that can miss rather than massive thundering boulders of death. 

4 - As a mid Jayce, whether or not Shock Blasts feel like they have sufficient payoff.

I suspect we most likely have not hit extreme high-end burst enough - but I'm hoping that the removal of something on the order of 0.7 Bonus AD ratio off the high end in exchange for roughly 110 base damage, +3% Max Health damage will curb some of this."

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The 5 bonus damage from his passive at its first ranks feels like a joke. After reductions it comes out to about 1 damage. 

Drat. That only confirms that the build that made it on PBE isn't the latest one that I have on the first post - this has been retuned to start at 10 damage to avoid this very issue.

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I want more hammer in his hammer ... grr ... I don't know it's 5am I'll try again tomorrow.

Again - not quite the latest version on PBE - since retuned some numbers significantly compared to my first pass."

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Xypherous: Sun is coming up! I need to get back into my coffin. Just one more post, but I need to hurry so I can avoid the sun! 

Pretty much this.


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What do you want from the ability hyper charge? For it to do nothing? Its a quick burst that requires him to be quite close in range + you're suggesting that muramana is the problem not jayce; that if hyper charge is tweaked it will be good without muramana - it just won't be ---
Xypherous has pretty much stated that muramana isn't the real issue, its Jayce's kit and his abuse of it with not just hyper charge but all his abilities - the spam, the poke, the hammer E, everything. 

Clarifying this a little - Muramana is an issue with Jayce's power level as his burst potential is really high with it - but just nerfing Muramana won't make a non-poke non-burst Jayce better - it'll just make every Jayce build equally bad. 

It may definitely be the right call to nerf Muramana - but first you have to figure out what does a Jayce without Muramana look like early/late game? What mana items does he build? How does he play? Does that playstyle work? 

Because otherwise, you're just like - Welp - You have no builds and we nerfed everything else around you, good luck.

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1) His poke is too good for free farming. Even if it's easier to dodge from long range, you can still free farm just as much as you want with it because minions don't dodge. 

Having 6 ranks allows me to stretch out the damage between ranks and hit the mana per damage ratio of this ability. 

So it you look at the ranks in damage:
50/100/150/200/250/300
vs.
60/115/170/225/280 

You can see that at every rank until rank 6 - Shock Blast is doing less damage per mana by virtue of the fact that it's doing less damage overall. Since I haven't touched the mana costs on Q - the relative efficiency you get on mana per point has also been somewhat reduced. 

On the flip side - TTS! has much higher damage attached to it - which means he *can* use that to minion farm, but that also puts him in hammer form and next to minions which offers more of a window for opponents to engage if he's primarily doing that.

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2) His range form is much more superior than his melee form that there's no point to go into ranged form.

Assuming you mean no point in going into hammer form. :3 

Hammer form at the moment on live isn't as pronounced because the optimal build ignores putting points into Transform - which is where Hammer Form gets a lot of its passive bonuses - the hammer proc and free resistances. 

The hope here (and obviously, I could still be off) is that by making it based off character level - the hammer form is going to get some of its power back because we balanced around assuming that 'R' would be ranked early. (Rather than currently at 12/13 to access more shred for the gun form.)

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3) His accel gate is still a one-point wonder to buff his Q damage as it doesn't scale so his damage skyrocket after lv 2 and will continue to go up really high.
4) He deals too much damage from leveling only one skill. God gated Q is worth one ult in term of damage and his To the Skies is worth a normal skill. That's just too much for something that's so spammable.

Which is again why stretching it out across 6 ranks instead of 5 makes intuitive sense to me - He *will* gain a lot of damage from levelling out that one skill - at some point though - that one skill's gains will have to somehow equalize with an ultimate. 

Having 6 ranks allows for each level-up to be weaker - but still end up compensating for the lack of an ultimate. 

Essentially - we need to think about what kind of limiters could gate him much more effectively at levels 1 to 3 - because that's when the power of having 6 abilities kicks in - after that though - you need to think about what kind of benefits that you can give him at 6 without creating a massive spike at 9 to smooth out the power curve difference between him and other champions. 

Hence - putting another spike at 11 (which is when you get your rank 6 ability) matches up with everyone else's level 11 (which is when they get their rank 2 ultimate) and focusing on Capacitor and Hammer passives to be free at 6.

Anyhow, here's hoping at least - have to double down and test some more."

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I am not sure about your thought process here. You are saying that you need to give hima spike at lvls 6 ,11, 16. But the thing is there is very few champions with 6 ablites. The normal champs (aka 4 ablity) need to have a power spike. The power spike is there Ult that has (most of the time) huge cool downs.

The problem with 6 ability champions is that they have a spike in power from 1 to 3 (because they have access to all 6 abilities) - compared to their lane opponents, which creates early dominance. 

However, at level 6 - they very quickly lose this advantage because their lane opponents get an ultimate on them which pretty much means they'll lose any all-in attempts. 6 ability Jayce versus Renekton with his ultimate - Renekton will single handedly devour you, for example. (Although that may be more of a sign of Renekton than anything else. :P) 

This also means that they have a double spike at level 9 - as they'll have fully maxed two abilities (similar to Zilean) - which means that a 6 ability champion looks something like this:
1-3 Dominant
4-5 ??
6-8 Poor
9 Dominant 

This discrepancy creates a lot of interesting gameplay - but it's a little too much from anyone who's experienced playing against them. 

So the job is basically - look at all these spikes, how do we tone down some of the early spikes such that they'll be more fair to fight against and smooth out some of the terrible dips so they won't be completely powerless at that time. 

The difference in power curves is always an interesting one - but a lot of the cool aspects to the curve can be gained without needing the difference to be so pronounced which is the current case - especially the second spike at level 9 seems fairly superfluous in terms of overall value. 

TL;DR - 6 ability champs have strong 1-3, weak 6, strong 9, moderate 11. Normal champions have normal 1-5, strong 6, moderate 9, strong 11.

End curve goal for Jayce is above average 1-3, below average 6, moderate 7-10, strong 11 - still keeping the relative differences intact but taking away some of the unnecessary spikes/dips that cause extremes."

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Xypherous, what do you mean by Zilean maxing two abilities at level 9?

Zilean effectively has two max'ed abilities at level 9 because Rewind effectively "copies" a spell slot."

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I've been playing a bit of Jayce for the past day, and I'm really enjoying his Hammer form w. I've been trying out a sunfire cape/wit's end/iceborn gauntlet build and I feel very powerful in my all ins, and I've found mana to be a non-issue unless I try to spam hypercharge.
Honestly, i feel like the on-hit portion of his static field is a bit too strong; combined with TTS, his passive, and hypercharge, it allows for a huge amount of burst potential.

I know - the version on PBE right now is 20 to 70 magic damage - I had intended this to be 20 to 45 magic damage on hit but my changes got desync'ed from the PBE deploy.

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So I just played Jayce vs Bots. and I notice that you can W from hammer into Range and the bonus damage on auto's is there. Is this intended cause I'm thinking with hammer w into range w with muramana the damage is gonna be ridiculous. I honestly liked what I was playing gonna play some normals tomorrow.

This is another side effect of the PBE deploy happening mid-changes - I wasn't able to quite get the version I described out - which is a lot more melee centric."

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Bruiser Jayce IS good. It is just no where near as good as a full damage build on him because of his built in self peel, escape, and chase ability, combined with incredibly high ratios.

Given how sub-par Jayce is doing at the moment for non-competitive players even before patch 3.9 - I'll leave this up to you to decide whether it's Bruiser Jayce is actually good or not - especially since we've hit him in 3.9 with multiple item nerfs and the gate cooldown.

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Jayce DOESN'T need that much mana; the mana build just allows him to have crazy poke constantly rather than forcing him to ration his mana. Have you ever seen Crit carry Jayce? It doesn't have quite as much poke, but it can kill just about anyone in 3-4 hits as it is now (You are nerfing this, but that doesn't change the fact that you just said it wasn't viable.) The damage output is so high from the build that even though you aren't particularly tanky, you can walk into the middle of a teamfight and kill the people you want to so fast that it doesn't matter. Lifesteal will keep you up once those targets you needed to kill are dead.

I have indeed seen Crit Carry Jayce - it's a build that ruins a lot of Dominion games. 

While it's not an abusive build on SR simply due to the fact that if you fall behind you fall waaay behind - it's an edge case that causes Jayce to spike unnaturally in that mode - which is why we're removing the critical chance interaction at the high end.

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Your changes aren't going to fix Jayce. They are just going to make him overall stronger. Everything about him except his W in cannon form and his R is getting buffed overall, when his W and R are the least abusive parts of his kit, despite having the most potential for abuse with non-standard builds.

Let me get this perfectly clear: I don't particularly care about nerfing or buffing Jayce. I want Jayce's power to be in his common use cases and not edge abuse cases. 

The problem right now is that the dominant playstyle (and most effective playstyles) for playing Jayce is eating up the lion's share of Jayce's power budget. Now we could keep nerfing the dominant playstyle directly - but given the amount of nerfs he's had - that most likely simply leaves all Jayce's weaker - not somehow make Bruiser Jayce better. 

There seems to be this notion that if you somehow nerf only Muramana Jayce enough - his other builds will become more viable in the game. While Bruiser Jayce will become relatively better - this isn't the same thing as making sure that Jayce can be viable.

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For example the hypercharge change, which slightly nerfed the dmg(largely in dominion) but also reduced the CD which might have actually increased its overall dps.

The reduced CD at rank 6 is to compensate for the fact that the CD now starts after you use all 3 charges - which means the CDs are roughly the same. 

Mainly - this is targetted at removing a stringed use case where you get 6 'W' shots in a row - by hitting 'W', pausing for 2 seconds, then going into engagement range, firing 'W' - and instantly hitting 'W' again to get another 3."

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Then nerf it in dominion. Isn't that what this map specific balance is for? For when a build or champion that in SR is balanced, but is OP elsewhere, nerf it there. You just said that this build is fine on summoners rift but not on dominion, but then you say you are removing it from both, not one month after you just announced map specific balance changes, of which Jayce is already on the nerf list for his extreme poke and high mobility. I just don't get why immediately after stating that different characters are going to be balanced on different maps, you make a nerf that applies to all of them because of one of them.

Let me rephrase - Critical Chance Jayce isn't effective on SR because it's incredibly swingy - You either do extremely well and blow someone up instantly - or you fall behind and you lose completely. Build variety takes second place to having a terrible gameplay experience - especially one that takes advantage of an edge case to begin with. 

Is it a less problematic build on SR? Of course it is - simply because it happens less frequently. Does it mean it isn't a problematic build? No - it just happens less frequently because when you lose - you are completely useless as there's less of a net to catch you when you fail early. 

Furthermore, consider balancing around this build in SR - Jayce will lose power on his overall kit when critical strike scales different on him. Is this a cool or desirable Jayce build? No, it just hopes to one-shot you during his Hyper Charge. Does it make Jayce a better character or create more interplay between builds? No, again, it just hopes to one-shot you during Hyper Charge. 

While this is primarily a Dominion related problem - this is just bad design overall. Even if the problems don't show up too often on SR - there's no real reason to have this stick around as part of the power level of Jayce.

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Sorry for repeating this, but what do you guys think of my ideas for jayce e cd?
16/16/16/14/14/14

There's no real gain in spending 4 skill points to reduce the CD of a skill by 2, nor is it particularly intuitive. 

Just make it linear - unless there's an actual reason to stop at skill level 4."

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If I want to go top lane Lulu then I should be able to go top lane Lulu regardless of what anyone thinks.

Top lane Lulu is not obnoxious because it breaks the meta. Top lane Lulu isn't fun because Solo Lulu isn't particularly fun to fight against in her current state. 

I know that single-handedly stomping your opponent with zero counterplay is fun to a certain extent because you have absolutely crushed them with no response. However, that's not particularly engaging for anyone besides you - nor is it an actual matchup. It's just Lulu stomping someone else because she's so dedicated anti-engage + poke. 

You don't get to ignore the laning phase by simply picking a hard-counter and you certainly don't get to automatically win laning phase because you chose a character who has zero solo lane gameplay. That's not part of our ideals.

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When you do things that take that from me it makes the game less fun.

We can't optimize for one person's fun at the expense of the game's gameplay. 

Some characters *are* fun to fight against in multiple lanes and so that's fine. Zyra, for example, is interesting and tolerable to fight in mid, bot or even jungle. Hell, 

Fiddlesticks is tolerable to fight against in most lanes.
Lulu is not one of these characters. AP Soraka is not one of these characters.

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Ok thanks for the clarification. Also, isn't that what SOTD does? Give three super charged shots and pray you kill someone, or else you just spent 2000 gold on nothing.

It's a little different in the case of SoTD as it gives you 3 guaranteed critical strikes. 

The play pattern of blow up a guy and hope you get out is a similar pattern - it just takes out a portion of the randomness in critical strikes by making it guaranteed for a window. 

However, the IE crit Jayce build is much worse because its also extremely random for a long time - a % chance to deal 350% damage. If you roll 2 crits instead of 1, you absolutely murder them. 

Additionally, if you haven't noticed - SoTD isn't exactly a success. XD"

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We're not asking you to nerf Manamune to destroy Jayce's only viable build, but instead because it would allow you to shift this power to other areas of his gameplay which are healthier for the game. Take his power from this Manamune/tear-focused gameplay and put this power elsewhere in his kit. Make him use his entire kit; make him able to be built bruiser effectively.

You can do this regardless of whether or not Manamune is powerful or not. Nerfing Muramana doesn't allow you to do anything more except raw buffs to everywhere on his kit.

What causes a Manamune build to be powerful? High AD ratios - the necessity to spam high mana costs spells on a relatively low cooldown - the ability to apply a ton of single target hits quickly and a focus/synergy on a single type of damage. 

While nerfing Muramana might be a good call in the future - you don't actually need to nerf the ability to actually do any of the changes mentioned in shifting power from parts of his kit to other parts of his kit - the power level of Muramana doesn't actually impede your ability to shift power into things that aren't synergistic with those attributes. 

Look at the complete set of changes: Increased mp/5, lowered mana cost on offensive bruiser abilities, higher base values, lowered AD ratios, a focus on a bit more magic damage, a loss of % armor reduction, removing 'W's stringed case. 

Then ask - well, if Muramana was nerfed - could I do more changes? It'd be the exact set of changes regardless. 

Ask yourself whether Manamune actually prevents Jayce power from being shifted or if it just prevents Jayce from being straight buffed - because the two aren't the same.

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His power curve needs to be reworked so that he doesn't hyperscale (as you have pointed out, but have done nothing to fix as of yet other than removing W priming).

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Bruiser Jayce may not be optimal, or up to par overall, but it is viable. Straight damage Jayce is borderline OP atm. I don't personally care about bruiser Jayce. But full damage Jayce, even though his laning isn't particularly amazing, is far too strong overall.

So the changes include lowering his burst AD ratios by 0.7 across the kit, removing 25% of his armor reduction as well as making his AD poke burst damage more dodgable. 

So what else is causing full damage Jayce to be powerful / hyperscaling that I'm not addressing? 

Because if I removed 0.7 AD ratio on say... Jarvan and removed 25% armor reduction, people would be crying bloody murder about me gutting his late game on any sort of Attack Damage build."

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In Jayce's case, how easy would it be to fix his siege-poke problems, even before the E changes, if that sort of activity ran him rapidly dry?

With the existence of blue buff - you can't actually rely on Mana being a meaningful gate later on in the game, regardless of whether items like Manamune or Muramana exists. 

In fact, given that Mana itemization exists, Mana mostly serves as an early game gate without being too significant of a late game gate. If you want the inverse scaling (late game gate with zero early game gate) you'd use Energy or Fury instead. 

Think about siege-poke in its various forms - is Mana gating actually appropriate for any of these? If powerful siege-poke is gated by Mana - it does nothing to curb the power of siege-poke, simply the duration of the siege. Attacking the reliability / counterplay in siege mode is far better than simply demanding the opponent to weather the storm of 4 or 5 undodgable hits. 

Siege-Poke has always been better limited by cooldowns and actual counterplay rather than Mana as it gives windows of opportunity to either counter-poke or the ability to initiate on the enemy because 'outlasting' a high reliability siege has proven to be pretty poor gameplay overall. 

As I've said repeatedly - it may still be a good idea to nerf Muramana at the end of the day due to its various power levels - but nerfing Muramana does nothing to solve Jayce's issues - it only nerfs his current FoTM build.

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Also, one of the main strengths with bruiser Jayce was his synergy with Sheen items which he got a lot of his damage from, and now Sheen procs don't work with Transform. Comment?

Don't think this will actually affect him that much - mostly because Bruiser Jayce doesn't typically get a chance to autoattack after transforming without using one of his other spells. 

There is a case where Bruiser Jayce could get a Sheen proc with only using Transform - but that's Hammer to Gun. He'll definitely lose some power here - but hopefully the Capacitor change mimics this particular chain well enough."

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Hammer
Transform ~> auto attack ~> TTS ~> auto.

Using TTS! when you're in AA range is such a ridiculous large loss of DPS that I should probably retune by scaling the height by the distance travelled - mostly because if you are in AA range - the best candidate is to simply AA again or activate some other skill like Lightning Field.

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Gun
Transform ~> auto attack ~> Hyper Charge

As for this combo - recall that Sheen has a 2 second cooldown. Hyper Charge won't actually proc Sheen in this instance.

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I can see that being a good thing... but if nothing else changes, I'm still going to build tear on him and abuse the bejeebus out of it. If there's no real opportunity cost in my build for buying a tear, why wouldn't I buy it and use it to save a finite resource (health) by expending a now-plentiful one (mana) by consistently tacking on a trailing E to that WRQW?

Obviously this needs further testing - but currently with stretching out his base damage, if you're not buying some sort of sustain or damage component, you can spam all day but not win anything. 

But we're debating over a point that is best resolved with testing - especially considering the tear nerfs in 3.9 and the removal of Transform from proc'ing Tear which is why these discussions seem circular, they're a couple of steps removed from actual evidence at the moment. 

The magnitude of the nerf on tear is fairly staggering if you knew how it worked under the hood. Moving the charge from 3 to 4 seconds and also making it strictly obey its' charge system causes it to charge dramatically slower on characters who used to be able to fully optimize the charge rate (like Jayce was) - which is why I want to take it slow on this one, especially considering that the Accel Gate changes were also in 3.9. 

The full extent of the 3.9 nerfs on Jayce's muramana item path is pretty big - we took away the ability for Muramana to apply a second cleaver proc on hit and additionally increased its charge time for him by roughly 25% overall. While I'm all for decimating things that I dislike - I don't really have enough information on Muramana at the moment to make the right call. 

For those of you in the dark, Muramana allowed anyone to stack an additional Black Cleaver proc on every hit. We've since removed this interaction - thus Hyper Charge no longer automatically grants you full stacks in the 3 hits. 

As I've said before - it may still be the right call to nerf Muramana at this point but the power level of Muramana shouldn't stop the power shift changes in the first place because it doesn't actually make these changes any harder to do - it just means that there might be a potential abuse case with it still - but that still doesn't change what changes you should make."

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I disagree 110%. Nerfing Muramana won't make every Jayce build bad for the sole reason that Jayce doesn't need muramana to be good. In fact, it's unfair of you to claim that builds without muramana on Jayce is bad.
For example, I have over 400 ranked games played with Jayce in S2 and S3. I have never built a manamune (or even a tear for that matter) in any of my games with Jayce. I have always built triforce and I've gotten to diamond with it.

You are a great Jayce player and that post was not meant as direct offense to you specifically. It's perhaps more accurate to say that most players can't actually get Jayce to work with that build - thus relying on the mana/poke crutch that he currently has. 

Hopefully the Jayce on PBE augments or emphasizes your core playstyle because I think we agree that that playstyle is somewhat healthier than the pure burst / glass combo that Jayce has on live. 

I'm interested in whether or not we are heading towards the direction where that flexibility and combo linking is still core to Jayce or whether we are moving towards that pattern or not, because I think Jayce as you've described feels more fundamentally true to the idea of a dual weapon transform character."

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On one hand you're saying that the glass cannon playstyle isnt healthy for the game, then you go on to suggest that a player who builds glass cannon with the only difference being Triforce instead of Muramana is a healthier playstyle.

I'm not sure I'd call any build whose first item includes a Ruby Crystal necessarily a glass cannon build - but there's more than a grain of truth here in that this Jayce is still squishy. However, focusing on both Health / Lifesteal does encourage far more tankiness than Pen / AD / LS as he does on live. 

Full item builds are ideals but I'm not sure the Muramana build actually has any transition points out of it - whereas Triforce is muddy enough to offer lots of potential transitions and still make sense holistically as a build. 

That's always been one of the defining traits (and flaws, actually) of Tri-force builds. It just does whatever it needs to do and never really impedes your item build in any direction. Unfortunately, this does make fighters who snowball with it kind of obnoxious - but I feel like we've moved on. 

The actual important statement however, is if we can get Jayce to this step:

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Late game, he can branch out in multiple ways, such as going heavy DPS, regular Tanky DPS, or just a very tanky Jayce. Back in S2, I had 3 different builds for Jayce depending on what I needed to do for the team. Now I just stick with a DPS heavy build because it's fun and satisfying to blow people up.

If transitions out of damage are viable builds - this would most likely be the healthiest direction overall."

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According to his list Ruby sightstone is not a first item.

I'm going to assume you meant Ruby crystal. I wasn't aware Phage did not build out of a Ruby Crystal. 

Oh, I see - it's his second item instead of his first. My bad on that. 

Although I find that VS questionable in most playstyles - I'd personally go Doran's as I think long swords are a little weak right now unless going for brutalizer. Although, that may just be the power of LS quints at the moment. :P"

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"As a side note - his 'W' on-hit damage won't be working till the next deploy as I missed a file. 

Le sigh."

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The on hit damage is a good idea, however it may not encourage jayce to stay in hammer form.
I would rather activate Lightning Field then switch back to cannon form to get both the on hit damage and attack range.

The on hit damage should only apply to things that have been damaged by lightning field recently within the last 2 seconds - so if you're just meandering at 500 range with lightning field, you're not going to deal any bonus magic damage in gun form.

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My personal feelings on Jayce isn't the damage, it is the fact that he has poke and disengage in the same kit.

Attempting to target this via the mana cost on his disengage mechanic at the moment - if your engages cost proportionally less than his disengages, he'll need to fill in the rest of the gap with poke or be aggressive and trade. 

Hence the mana tuning - which may still not be tuned appropriately for ranks in 'E' - although ranking up 'E' now is pretty bad."

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I'm sure that there are additional ideas out there, but the point is that just increasing mana costs doesn't actually solve the problem of Jayce's knockback, especially when building tear is so popular still. Hell, increasing mana costs just makes people build tear more often.

A nearly free disengage is almost always going to be broken - unless it's not a disengage to begin with (which is what your suggestions are pushing it towards).

However, the repeatable nature of the disengage is the obnoxious part as the actual power level of the disengage portion of the ability is fairly low already. 

By making the disengage spammy and free - there's no cost to making mistakes and no tradeoffs to make in lane - While strategic power isn't as satisfying as most mechanics (as you've pointed out) - you're looking at one use case of the ability rather than the entire laning experience. 

The other portion of this is that powerful disengages help even out the binary nature of top lane because if your disengage isn't quite strong enough to do its job, you basically play a game of 'does your engage beat my disengage?' that is matchup dependent rather than playstyle dependent. 

Saying that everyone loses is an odd statement - because the alternative is that Jayce simply hard loses certain matchups because he can't actually disengage. Binary laning phases tend to be a worse alternative than one with frequent reset mechanics."

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What does this make Ezreal? 

Given that rank 1 Arcane Shift is 19 second cooldown and 90 mana cost - Ezreal is already somewhat gated in lane, arcane shift wise. 

Oh - okay, sorry what I said above pertains mostly to lane. Late game fights follow a whole different set of rules. 

The nature of bottom lane with a support means that engagements are much less frequent - so this isn't as big of a gate as a comparable CD in top lane though - so you have a point there."

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Point taken. However, I still feel that increasing mana costs only leads to the issue of pigeonholing Jayce into building tear for most players. Or at least, it wouldn't be a very significant impact considering the dominant way of building Jayce.

Given that I've lowered almost every other mana cost on him - it should only be a net increase in Mana Cost if you're spamming Hyper Charge and Thundering Blow! 

The vast majority of his combos have been lowered overall - so his mana consumption (assuming an equal reliance on all skills) is down while his spike consumption if focused on some skills should be up.

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What if, instead of increasing mana costs, you increase the cooldown time?

This could be an option - but 40 mana cost is much too low for Thundering Blow! 

Ideally, it's probably best to do a mixed solution where the cooldown is much higher earlier and the mana cost is fixed at 80. 

At this point, it's looking like internally, there isn't quite enough confidence to ship Jayce with this patch as we probably need some heavy grind on late-game testing (I've been super focused on laning) - so we can go and hammer on it for another week and a half.

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With the increased slow on TTS aren't you actually increasing the disengage power jayce has with the m:QE combo? With that level of a slow a knockback could probably be much shorter and still provide its job - I would be worried about any hard engage champions being able to get onto Jayce if they are that slowed and hit by E.

Only at rank 6 - which is at level 11 - I'm not sure Jayce's disengage problems kick in that late - they start much much earlier."

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"Since we have to finalize the goals for the patch soon - the Jayce rework won't make it on the docket for the next incoming patch as we're starting to really double down on some testing on this and other reworks. Thanks for everyone whose stopped by and contributed to the post - I'll reopen this to restart testing again on the PBE after we ship the next patch. 

Thanks guys!"