2/22 PBE Update: Dragon Sorceress Zyra, Dragonslayer Xin Zhao, New Chroma, New Ward skin, & more!

Continue reading for more information and context!

Table of Contents

• New Champion Skins
• Dragon Sorceress Zyra
• Dragonslayer Xin Zhao
• New Chroma
• Dragonslayer Xin Zhao
• Dragonslayer Pantheon
• New Ward Skin - "Eye of the Dragon Ward"
• New Summoner Icons
• Adding Simple Recalls to Older Champs
• Miscellaneous
• Balance Changes
• Champions
• Items
• Notes and Context

New Champion Skins

Two new champion skins debuted in today's patch - Dragon Sorceress Zyra and Dragonslayer Xin Zhao.
Here's Riot LoveStrut with a bugs and feedback thread for Dragonslayer Xin Zhao:

"I may be outnumbered, but not even the odds can stand against me!" 

Dragonslayer Xin Zhao climbs up the mountains to the cave of the mysterious woman rumored to be behind the sudden dragon resurgence terrorizing the kingdom. His fierce determination to protect his people drives him onward, no matter the cost. 

Slaying in Style 

• All-new model and textures (Dragonslayer Set: +50 vs. Dragons)
• All-new VFX (His spear burns with his desire to protect his people.)
• All-new SFX (Ahh, the sweet sounds of dragon slayage.)
• All-new animations (Dragons always seem to attack when you're just trying to head home.)
• Set to be 1350 RP (prices are subject to change) 

We always love hearing your feedback and feelings! All bug reports and thoughts help us make these skins even more awesome, so please keep 'em coming! 

Thanks, cuties! <3"

New Chroma

Chroma on the PBE for both the new Dragonslayer Xin Zhao skin and for Dragonslayer Pantheon:

Dragonslayer Pantheon 

New Ward Skin

Keep watch on those dragons (or hunters!) with the Eye of the Dragon Ward!

New Summoner Icons

Three new summoner icons to go with the new skins were also added this cycle:

Adding simple recalls to older champs 

Simple recalls are being added to 74 older champions and 351 skins! These simple recalls are reused animations from idles  and emotes!

Here's context from Ququroon.

"Hello, everyone! It's time for every champion to have recalls, and it's time for it to hit PBE! 

In case you haven't heard, we're repurposing existing animations to give every champion in the game a recall! You can read more about it here! 

As you may suspect, this change affects a -lot- of different champions, so the testing here will be a bit broad. The bugs on this should be rather limited, probably just a skin missing an animation at worst. Feedback is what is really useful, so here are some questions to think about. 

Were you excited to see your champion now has a recall?
Does the recall match your expectation?
Does it meet these rules for the project?

Ruuuuruuus:

• Only use existing animations. No new animations will be created.
• Absolutely no gameplay animations (spells, attacks, anything).
• Absolutely no stealing animations from other skins.
• Avoid breaking the recall ring (don't have the champion move too far away).
• Look for Champion Personality moments (ie. Amumu crying).
• The animation does not need to be 8s long (opt to return to Idle1 for shorter animations).
• Trend towards Idle variants (they're seen far less in the game, as you're often not standing still).
• Trend away from dances - dancing is already something you do for the animation, so we don't want to double up unless it really fits the champion, or there are no other options.

I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts, and I hope you have a nice day. :D"

[FULL LIST OF 70 + champions and 300+ skins here]

Miscellaneous

• Several 7.5 Visual changes  for ability tool tips, including color scheme changes, layout tweaks, mention when ability is an ultimate, and have horizontal rules!

• New Render Code Path being tested on Kha'Zix/Gromp -

"Riot JxE from the Render Strike Team here. We're the team that's been refactoring our rendering code in order to clean up the code for our other engineers!

We've put a test on the PBE this patch that's running Kha'Zix and Gromp through our new rendering code. There should be NO visual differences between the two, so let us know if you see any weird visuals or rendering bugs on Kha'Zix and/or Gromp. Please post screenshots in this thread if you find any."

Aatrox
[Context & Changelist from ricklessabandon]

• Blood Well (Passive) - [reworked]

• Base Blood Well Capacity decreased from 105 to 100

• Blood Well capacity growth per level decreased from 45 to 0

• Dark Flight (Q)

• Cost lowered from [10% current health] to [no cost]

• Damage changed from [70/115/160/205/250 (+60% bonus AD)] to [10/35/60/95/120 (+110% total AD)]

• [new effect] Now fills 20% of the Blood Well upon cast

• Blood Thirst / Blood Price (W)

• Blood Thirst

• Heal changed from [20/25/30/35/40 (+25% bonus AD] to [30/45/60/75/90 (+5% missing health)]

• [removed effect] No longer triples the healing while below 50% health

• Blood Price

• Cost lowered from [15/23.75/32.5/41.25/50 (+25% bonus AD)] to [no cost]

• Damage changed from [60/95/130/165/200 (+100% bonus AD)] to [30/60/90/120/150 (+75% bonus AD)]

• [new effect] Now fills 20% of the Blood Well when hit effect occurs

• Blades of Torment (E)

• Cost changed from 5% current health to 30 health

• Damage changed from [75/110/145/180/215 (+60% AP)(+60% Bonus AD)] to [70/115/160/205/250 (+70% bonus AD)]

• Damage type changed from magic to physical

• Slow potency changed from 40% at all ranks to 30/35/40/45/50%

• Slow duration changed from 1.75/2/2.25/2.5/2.75 to 2 seconds at all ranks

• [new effect] Now fills 20% of the Blood Well upon cast

Fizz
[Changelist from phroxz0n]

• Urchin Strike (Q)

• AP ratio increased from 35% to 55%

• Seastone Trident (W)

• Bleed duration lowered from 4 seconds to 3 seconds
• Mark duration increased from 4 seconds to 6 seconds

• Chum The Waters (R)

• Auto pick up on miss is less generous. -src.

• "Ground attach removed (fix now flops on ground and plays death animation when it misses)"

Kindred
[Changelist from ricklessabandon]

LeBlanc
[Changelist from ricklessabandon] [NOTE: These are "extreme" and WIP.]

• Shatter Orb (Q) damage to minions increased from 40% to 80%
• Damage changed from [22/36/50/64/78 (+20% AP)] to [44/72/100/128/156/ (+40% AP)]

• Distortion (W) damage lowered from [85/120/155/190/225 (+60% AP)] to [40/65/90/115/140 (+30% AP)]

• Mimic'd Distortion (R+W) damage lowered from [125/225/325 (+50% AP)] to [60/120/180 (+50% AP)]

Miss Fortune

• Double Up (Q) - [removed - "If the first shot kills its target, the second deals 50% increased damage."]

Quinn
[Context]

• Vault (E):
• Cooldown increased from 12/11/10/9/8 to 15/13.5/12/10.5/9
• Mana cost increased from 50 to 70 at all ranks.

Ryze

• Rune Prison (W) root duration lowered from 1 second to 0.5 seconds.

Varus
[Context]

• Piercing Arrow (Q) 

• Cooldown increased from 16/14/12/10/8 to 20/18/16/14/12

• Total AD ratio on Maximum Damage lowered from 165% to 150%

• [new effect] "Piercing Arrow's cooldown is reduced by 5 seconds (affected by Varus' cooldown reduction) if the arrow detonates Blight stacks from at least one enemy champion"

Doran's Shield - [context / experimental. ]

• Total cost lowered from 450 to 400
• Health increased from 80 to 100.
• Health regen changed from [6 health per 5 seconds] to [100% base health regen]

• [new] UNIQUE Passive: Gain an additional 200% Base Health Regen Health for 10 seconds after taking damage from an enemy champion.

• [new] Passive: Deal 5 bonus physical damage to minions.

• [removed] UNIQUE Passive: Blocks 8 damage from single target attacks and spells from champions.

• AD lowered from 60 to 55
• Unique Active Cooldown increased from 30 to 45
• Unique Active Duration lowered from 10 seconds to 5 seconds

Notes & Context

[CONTEXT IT IN MMAAAANNN!] 

Below we have red posts and tweets regarding changes seen in today's update:

1) Meddler with context on a lot of PBE changes in his Quick Gameplay Thoughts for Feb 22nd:

"PBE Context Dump 

We've got a bunch of things hitting the PBE today. Quick context on some of them: 

• Ashe - too strong in organized play in particular. We're testing a nerf to her E, given that's much more powerful in organized play than regular. 

• Doran's Shield - Experimental changes testing a version with a Spectre's Cowl like passive designed to give sustain when being harassed that doesn't have to be balanced around bot lane (isn't significantly more effect against two harassers than one). 

• Exhaust - Too strong. Currently testing a CD nerf, might try something else at some point. 

• Rengar, Jayce, Le Blanc - Unsure if changes will be on PBE today or not at time of writing, previous set of nerfs weren't sufficient on them though, so likely hitting them again in 7.5. 

• Kindred - Testing improvements to which camps marks spawn on (reduce random chance of getting screwed). Longer term (which patch uncertain) we want to look at making crit more appealing for them, open up crit itemization as a pathway in part to support a later game power curve. 

• Talon - Nerfs to passive damage levels 1-11 and Q. Looking to reduce his power against other melee lanes especially where those effects are disproportionately powerful (much easier to access) 

• Aatrox - has changes on the PBE today, note though numbers haven't gone through final tuning yet

On several of the changes, Meddler added:

"We'll be doing a pass on nerfs to Jayce, Talon, Rengar, Quinn, Varus once we've seen what impact the 7.4 changes (and Edge of Night hotfix) have on them. Our prediction is they'll still be too strong, hence we're testing nerfs, but it's possible we pull back on something if 7.4 hits them harder than expected."

Regarding the experimental Doran's shield buffs, Axes added:

"We're currently looking purely at whether this pattern is best in the correct contexts - changes are experimental. I agree that this is almost certainly numerically overpowered. 

The +5 physical damage works on everything right now but will be just basic attacks (maybe single target spells?) tomorrow. Good chance I pull that line entirely in the near future."

2) ricklessabandon jumped on twitter to share tentative Blade of the Ruined King and Kindred changes that will be returning to the PBE with upcoming 7.5 cycle!

[1] "a few projects i'm working on will be hitting the pbe this week, so i wanted to get some early, tentative information out there to think on" 

[2] "and here's where the kindred changes will start at this cycle"

[3] "here's where the blade of the ruined king changes will start at this cycle"

He also shared a set of LeBlanc PBE changes -

[1] "following yesterday's "previews" of projects hitting pbe this week, there will also be some leblanc changes showing up—starting out extreme" 

[2] ""extreme" emphasizing that this is a starting point for numbers, and that we'll be doing a lot of testing and discussing this week"

3) Here's ricklessabandon on Aatrox PBE changes:

"Hi friends, 

The time is nigh — Aatrox changes will be hitting the PBE soon! I wanted to start up a thread to go over some of the things you can expect as well as create a space to collect feedback and answer questions as time allows. 

So, you're probably wondering what kind of changes you can expect (if you somehow didn't already skip to the changelist below). First off, this isn't what we'd call an "Aatrox update" — the changes are intended to give Aatrox some attention he's been in want of for a while to get him into a better spot (for people playing as, with, against and any spectators) but we aren't replacing parts of the kit to get there. This means that while we're hoping to make improvements to his current state, we'll also be keeping him on the list of champions we feel are good candidates for updates (i.e., these changes aren't meant to be a replacement for an Aatrox update). The changes we are doing are hoping to accomplish a couple tactical goals: give Aatrox a clear "window of power" in which he'll be a powerful, bloodthirsty force to content with, and to give him a more stable baseline (fewer and less extreme "famine" states). Delivering well on those should put him in a much more sustainable spot on our end, which would mean no more painful droughts of attention (which is the primary overall goal here). 

Moving on to the exciting part, the actual changelist for the first PBE iteration!
All numbers/notes below should be differences from the live servers. 

• General 

• Base Blood Well capacity :: 105 → 100
• Blood Well capacity per level :: 45 → 0 

• Blood Well (P) [ reworked ] 

• Aatrox fills the Blood Well through his abilities. When Aatrox fills the Blood Well to 100%, it becomes 'locked' and beings to drain over 4 seconds giving him Blood Rush for the duration 

• While under the effects of Blood Rush, dealing or taking damage versus champions will fully refresh Blood Rush's duration (and fully refill the Blood Well) 

• [ Blood Rush ] Aatrox gains 25% base attack damage and 20 / ~ / 50% attack speed. Upon taking fatal damage, Aatrox will revive and recover 30% of his max health. Aatrox cannot revive more than once every 180 / ~ / 120 seconds 

• Dark Flight (Q) 

• Cost :: 10% current health → No cost 

• Damage :: 70 / 115 / 160 / 205 / 250 (+60% bonus AD) → 10 / 35 / 60 / 95 / 120 (+110% total AD) 

• [ new ] Now fills 20% of the Blood Well upon cast 

• Blood Thirst (W) - heal effect 

• Heal :: 20 / 25 / 30 / 35 / 40 (+25% bonus AD) → 30 / 45 / 60 / 75 / 90 (+5% missing health) 

• [ removed ] No longer triples the healing while below 50% health 

• Blood Price (W) - damage effect 

• Cost :: 15 / 23.75 / 32.5 / 41.25 / 50 (+25% bonus AD) → No cost 

• Damage :: 60 / 95 / 130 / 165 / 200 (+100% bonus AD) → 30 / 60 / 90 / 120 / 150 (+75% bonus AD) 

• [ new ] Now fills 20% of the Blood Well when hit effect occurs 

• Blades of Torment (E) 

• Cost :: 5% current health → 30 health 

• Damage :: 75 / 110 / 145 / 180 / 215 (+60% AP) (+60% bonus AD) → 70 / 115 / 160 / 205 / 250 (+70% bonus AD) 

• Damage Type :: Magic → Physical 

• Slow Potency :: 40% at all ranks → 30 / 35 / 40 / 45 / 50% 

• Slow Duration :: 1.75 / 2 / 2.25 / 2.5 / 2.75 → 2 seconds at all ranks 

• [ new ] Now fills 20% of the Blood Well upon cast"