8/11 PBE Update: Invasion enabled for testing, Emotes, & more!

The PBE has been updated! As we continue the 7.17 cycle, tonight's update includes Invasion enabled for testing, the new emote inventory, and more tentative balance changes!
Continue reading for more information!

Table of Contents

• Invasion enabled for testing
• Emote Inventory
• Balance Changes
• Context & Notes

Invasion enabled for testing! 

"The PvE co-op Star Guardian game mode "Invasion" is now live on PBE for testing! Star Guardians stick together!"- Riot L4T3NCY via twitter.

The new Star Guardian themed co-op mode INVASION is now on the PBE for testing!

Emotes Inventory

[NOTE: Emotes do not seem to be working in-game just yet!]

The Emotes inventory has been enabled on the PBE! This page can be found under collection. You'll start out with one emote and can head over to the PBE shop to purchase the 20 or so options.

Check out the /DEV: Introducing Emotes for more information!

Context & Notes

WOOOOOOOO

1)Here's Meddler with his Quick Gameplay Thoughts for August 11:

Hi folks, 

Apologies for the late post, busier than expected morning. 

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 

Vayne after 7.17 

Almost guaranteed that we won't have Vayne changes in 7.17. We've seen some promising bits in initial investigation (e.g. making Q unable to crit and shifting power elsewhere so she's less bursty, in particular against squishy targets). Won't have enough time in the current patch development cycle, but definitely want to revisit Vayne shortly. 

Also worth noting Vayne wise that yeah, a fair number of players don't like playing against Vayne. Some of that's probably that, even if she's got average overall performance when she does do well she sometimes does extremely well, so her strong games are really in your face. We believe some of it's also part of a wider trend where, with the occasional exception, champions who are primarily or entirely single target damage focused tend to be perceived as much more frustrating than champions who aren't, regardless of their power level. 

Ardent Censer, Janna, Taric 

We'll be nerfing Ardent Censer in 7.17. Because of that we'll likely be leaving Janna and Taric untouched for a patch, see what impact that Censer nerf, especially following the recent Coin nerf, has on their performance. Will then reassess them both during 7.18. Still looking to get some more skill expression into Janna's kit as well at some point, though the team haven't felt the recently tested changes did a great job of that so will be trying some other stuff at some point. 

7.18 Timing 

Speaking of 7.18 there'll be a longer gap than usual between 7.17 and 7.18 of three weeks, rather than the usual two. That's because we need to fit one 3 week patch into the year somewhere to some patch release timing stuff around pre-season etc to work out. 7.17 made sense as a time to do that since it then gives us a bit more time when the game's pretty stable to work on Runes/other pre-season content and do a bit more assessment of final changes for the Worlds patch (7.18). 

Stoneplate Tweaks 

We've got a couple of adjustments for Stoneplate coming in the next patch. The first is a bug fix regarding its interaction with Cinderhulk, where the combination of the two was giving noticeably more health than it was meant to. 

The second, which is still being tested, but likely to ship, is a change where the 100% extra health temporarily granted will be split between base and bonus health, rather than all be treated as bonus health. E.g. a champ with 1500 base health and 1000 bonus health would now get an extra 1500 base health and an extra 1000 bonus health, rather than 2500 bonus health. That impacts cases like Cho and Locket which scale off bonus health, so Stoneplate will likely still be a powerful combo with them but won't be giving as much power."

2) ricklessbandon provided context for the Vayne revert in the 8/9 PBE Update:

"no, they're not completely gone but since we're cutting it close on our 'time budget' for this cycle they're considered something that we'd pick up when have time to finish them. i'm primarily focused on udyr right now, but made some time to kick off some vayne explorations and did some scripting groundwork to make it very easy for anyone to pick her up again as time allows (which could be me or another person on my team). so, we still have vayne changes in internal testing but they won't show up on pbe until we're sure we'll have time to wrap them up -- could be this patch or next, could be after worlds. 

for anyone curious about the changes, the direction that seems promising is removing the ability to crit tumble's bonus damage in exchange for a solid amount of power elsewhere (currently testing an increase to Q's damage ratio as well as the W changes that were on pbe already). absolutely everything is subject to change of course, but that's currently what we're looking into."

He also tweeted about them:

[1] "wasn't sure if i'd have time to finish up the changes (i'm focused on udyr primarily) so they're off of the pbe until we're sure we'd finish"

[2] "there's still a chance the vayne changes ship in 7.17 or 7.18 but again, only if we have the time considering the other changes we're doing"

He also commented on the Udyr work that was seen on the PBE in previous cycles:

[3] "still working on them -- not ready for pbe yet"

3) Riot Axes on Yasuo's shield changes in today's update:

"For Yasuo, you don't seem to have picked up an intended change of his shield value being changed from 100-510 by level to 60-555 by level (break even point of level 10, weaker before and stronger after)."