2/8 PBE Update : Festival Queen Anivia summoner icon, tentative mastery/item changes, & more!

• Gold reward lowered from 400g to 300g

Notes

"The Black Cleaver is the most purchased final item in the game, unsurprisingly given how broadly powerful it is. it's extremely powerful across many champion archetypes - for example, it's a major component of Lethality builds, which are doing better than we want by stacking Black Cleaver + Last Whisper items + Lethality. 

We don't want to just nerf the item. It's functioning correctly for the heavier fighter types - we're not looking to indirectly nerf Garen or Darius here. We've tested this change for Black Cleaver in the past and those champions tend to feel really good about it, while marksmen/assassins/light fighters tend to feel relatively worse about it. 

This change therefore makes the item a bit more narrow, forces champions to care more about the defensive properties of the item, makes the build path easier for juggernauts who are highly reliant on it (Caulfield's is fine for a Garen or Darius who starts to get fed; not so much for one going even or falling behind) and harder for light fighters/assassins/marksmen. 

And finally, this makes Black Cleaver and Lord Dominik's more anti-synergistic. 

(Yes, we're also directly nerfing Ghostblade's Lethality and possibly Edge of Night's active - we're not giving those items a free pass, but it's important to look at the whole system and not just the couple most obvious offenders)"

"In regards to damage mastery nerfs, the potency of amplification effects in the mastery system has gone up over time. In light of many players expressing the feeling of damage creep and reconfirming it with mathematics, we are looking at tuning down more under-the-hood damage amplifiers in the mastery system for this patch. We don't expect this to heavily favor one class of champion over another, but we will be monitoring the fallout carefully. 

Regarding changes to Fearless, this mastery was over-tuned compared to its competitors. Rather than creep up the effects of its neighbors, we decided to tone it down as the outlier.

Regarding meditation, this mastery is getting a light hit partially because its value would've been disproportionately propped up by us hitting Merciless, but also because it trivializes mana management/costs a bit too well for how accessible it is.'

"Our belief is we've power crept the game through masteries too much, so we're sapping some power out of some worst offender invisible power masteries.

This is mainly aimed at damage masteries (though not specifically damage-dealing champions - nearly all tanks and fighters also get at least one of these amps) because it's mainly expressing in game as "fights are too fast", "damage creep", etc. - but we did look at non-damage masteries (Meditation, Fearless both leap out as very powerful right now) in order to avoid warping decisions too much."