7/12 PBE Update: Urgot Champion Update Continued Testing, Tentative Balance changes & more

The PBE has been updated! Today's update brings us new Urgot Pick and Ban quotes, some changes to pinging items and abilities, and more tentative balance changes!
Continue reading for more information!

Table of Contents

• Urgot Champion Update Continued Testing
• Miscellaneous
• Balance Changes
• Context & Notes

Urgot Champion Update Continued Testing

As the Urgot champion update continues testing on the PBE, today's update provided his updated champion pick and ban quotes:

Pick: "You cannot know strength... Until you are broken."

Ban: "Cling to hope. It is all you have."

A ton of non-English VO were also added:

• Brazilian Portuguese
• Czech 
• French
• German
• Greek
• Hungarian
• Italian 
• Japanese
• Korean 
• Latin American Spanish
• Romanian 
• Russian 
• Spanish
• Turkish

Miscellaneous

• Advanced keybinding options added, you can now bind auto attack move to left-click.

Akali

• Twilight Shroud (W)
• Cooldown lowered from 20 to 18

Dr. Mundo

• Infected Cleaver (Q)
• Tooltip reworded for clarity

• Burning Agony (W)
• Cost lowered from 10 health per second to none.
• [New effect] Now deals 15/20/25/30/35 (+10% AP) magic to himself every second.

• Masochism (E)
• Cost lowered from 25 health to none.
• [New Effect] 
• Passive: When Dr. Mundo suffers magic damage, his magic resist is increased by 2% for 2 seconds, up to a maximum of 6/12/18/24/30%
• [Slightly reworked effect] 
• Active: Dr Mundo's next basic attack will headbutt the enemy, dealing an additional x physical damage (3% of maximum health) at the cost of 25 health from Dr. Mundo.
  
  Upon activation, Dr. Mundo gains up to 60/100/140/180/220 attack damage (no less than 30/50/70/90/110) based on his missing health.

Elise

• Base AD lowered from 50.54 to 47

Gragas

• Explosive Cask (R)
• Cooldown changed from 100/90/80 to 120/100/80

Lee Sin

• Base AD lowered from 61.176 to 58

Nami

• Aqua Prison (Q)
• Cooldown lowered from 14/13/12/11/10 to 12/11/10/9/8

Nasus
[Context 1 / 2]

• Spirit Fire (E)
• Armor reduction changed from 20/25/30/35/40 to 15/20/25/30/35%

• Fury of the Sands (R)
• Siphoning Strike (Q) now has a 50% reduced cooldown when Fury of the Sands is active.

Rek'Sai

• Queen's Wrath / Prey Seeker (Q)
• Unburrowed damage lowered from 15/20/25/30/35 to 5/10/15/20/25
• Attack damage increased from 40% to 50%

• Void Rush (R)
• Cooldown changed from 100/80/60 to 110/80/50

Zyra
[Not a functional change, this is a tooltip fix]

• Deadly Spines (Q)
• Tooltip updated to show correct Thorn Spitter range

Context & Notes

AHH! AFTER 10000 YEARS I'M FREE! ITS TIME TO CONQUER WIP!

1) Riot MEMEMEMEME tweeted some changes coming to Giant Enemy Crabgot, changing his chains. Look for these in a future PBE update:

"Adding some more tendrilly, organic feeling chains to Crabgot's ult based on feedback."

2) Meddler with his Quick Gameplay Thoughts for July 11 including a heads up on work for ping system and a few other upcoming changes to look for in 7.15 PBE;

"Morning all, 

Should be back to our usual couple of times a week routine now for a while :)  

Usual Disclaimers 

These posts will often contain talk about future work we're doing, or planning to do, that isn't yet guaranteed to ship. The nature of the work could change or, depending on what we discover, projects mentioned may get put delayed or even stopped.
If you'd like to see a Tweet whenever a new one of these posts goes up: https://twitter.com/RiotMeddler 

Ping Updates 

In an upcoming patch (7.15 maybe?) we have some additional work done on the ping system. As previously mentioned there's a warded ping coming, we'll also be making it so you can ping any item to chat, not just certain ones. We originally only added some items to the pingable list out of a concern there'd be a lot of pointless chat spam from people pinging stuff like Longswords. In retrospect players aren't using the ping system like that much and those that do have plenty of things to spam anyway (Ally dead, Recall ready etc). We'll be removing that restriction as a result to support some genuine cases of communication it currently blocks (e.g. trying to ping meaningful components to signal power spikes to allies). 

We'll also be taking at a look at allowing some skills to display their ammo in chat instead of their CD (e.g. GP Barrels or Corki rockets) since that's the actually relevant part of the spell. Not sure yet if that'll make this round of ping changes or not though. 

7.15 as Worlds Qualifiers Patch 

As previously mentioned 7.15 is the patch most of the Worlds Qualifying games will be played on. That means we'll be focusing more on balance for pro play than usual. Part of that will involve small changes to a large number of champions who are either a bit too dominant in that context or nearly viable but not quite there. Things like a base health nerf to Thresh or higher GP passive damage are possible candidates there. We'll likely have somewhere between 10 and 20 champs getting changed in that way in the patch, though not all will be on PBE immediately. Also worth noting that there's also an assessment of impact in regular play that goes into whether to buff/nerf in situations like this, with some champs who are pretty strong already in regular play (e.g. Panth) not getting buffs even though they're not pro viable for example. 

Other 7.15 Balance Changes  

We'll also be doing some work on other stuff in 7.15 of course. Some of that stuff, even if it appears on PBE, might end up getting pushed back to 7.16 though, given the limited amount of testing time and potential size of the patch. Things we're considering include:

• Nasus - Changing E to % shred and making it so while R is active Q has a lower CD. Intended to be overall buffs, in particular to Nasus's ability to fight other tankier folks (often all he can reach). 

• MF - Potential buffs to her attack speed, supporting more auto attack heavy playstyles. More experimental, so moderate likelihood some or all of the changes don't make the cut.\ 

• Lux - Potential buffs to her teamfighting (looks a bit weak overall, goal would be to put power into her utility more than her one shot ability though). 

More Runes Stuff 

We should have another look at a new Keystone coming this week (probably tomorrow), with a comparison between Perxie, which we talked about previously, and a different Sorcery Keystone. 

For those interested in the development side of Runes we've also just finished running a series of player research labs in Korea, with players who are pros, streamers, ex-pros, managers of community sites etc testing out the new system. Got a bunch of useful feedback from that we're excited to act on. Previous rounds included labs in China recently with randomly selected players in two groups (Silver/Gold and Plat/Diamond) and before that in NA with both the LCS teams and randomly selected other players who live in the LA area. Given how large the impact of Runes is likely to be we want to ensure we're getting in person feedback from a really wide variety of players along a range of axis (regular players and pro, different skill levels, different regions, theorycrafters and non theorycrafters etc). We run similar labs for a lot of other content, including things like new champions/VGUs and features like Tournaments or Honour. Runes is one of the biggest (or possible the biggest) and most global sets of labs we've done though, which has been both very helpful and pretty cool so far."