10/11 PBE Update: New Summoner Icon and Emote, Skin Tweaks, Continued Rune Testing & More

The PBE has been updated! As we continue the 7.21 PBE cycle, today's patch includes a new summoner icon and emote duo, skin tweaks, continued rune testing, & more!
Continue reading for more information!

Table of Contents

• New Summoner Icon and Emote
• Skin Tweaks
• Continued Runes Reforged Testing & Changes
• Miscellaneous
• Balance Changes
• Context & Notes

New Summoner Icon and Emote

Skin Tweaks

Miscellaneous 

• The Runes ward we saw testing in the 7.20 PBE cycle seems to have had some tweaks, but is bugged at the moment! Pictures will come later this cycle when it is corrected.

[** Note: Looks like a lot of base stat changes again today, but seem to just be rounding the numbers. Here is Aatrox for example. The full list will be updated on the Current PBE Cycle Coverage page later tonight!]

**Aatrox

• Base damage lowered from 68.38 to 68
• Base armor lowered from 33.38 to 33

Context & Notes

WIP!

1) Here's Meddler with his quick gameplay thoughts for October 11, covering base stat adjustments, Ardent Censer, more ping changes, and more:

"Hi all, 

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 

Base Stat Adjustments and Runes 

We're still working on base stat and ability changes that will accompany the other pre-season changes at the moment and more of those should be back on PBE this week. One thing I figured it would be good to talk more about there though is what our goals are with those changes. In particular, we're not trying to offer every champion the same gold value of extra base stats. What we are trying to do is give each champ what they'll need to be successful post runes changes. Based off how other changes impact them champs may need more or less base stats added than others to put them around the same spot they were before. Magic damage dealers for example benefiting from MR removal from old runes effectively gain extra power that way, even if they're not directly getting extra stats. Some champs may need much more specialized adjustments, whereas others may be fine with just a bunch of armor. Some champs will also benefit more from the new runes system than others. 

The adjustments that go in 7.22 will also just be round one. They're our best estimate of what's needed to begin with, the real polish and tuning will come afterwards though once we've seen where champion balance actually lands, rather than having to just work off predictions. As with every pre-season patch there'll be some champs that have a rough time for a little bit, or do really well, and we'll likely need to further adjust base stats on a number of them at that point to get things where they should be. 

Ardent Censer 

Looking back we definitely misread how impactful Censer would become and should have nerfed it quicker. We're talking about it a lot at present, including discussion on whether after the 7.19 changes it's still too strong. The version in 7.18 we're seeing in Worlds is definitely out of line, somewhat harder to get a good read on the 7.19 one given how much Worlds impacts what gets played in regular games/what gets talked about, even though they're different patches. At a minimum we'll be both assessing it in 7.21 and looking at it again after pre-season goes out. 

Non LoL: the concept of 'piggybacking' in design 

This isn't LoL specific, but mentioning it since I know some folks also have an interest in game design in general. There's a lot of good writing around that talks about various game design principles. One example of that I really like is Mark Rosewater's talk about what he calls 'piggybacking' in the blog post linked below. Piggybacking is a way of communicating a lot of complex stuff to the player quickly and easily by using their existing understanding of things. Well worth a read if that sounds interesting even if you're not familiar with Magic the Gathering which is the game Rosewater generally talks about. 

https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/piggybacking-2012-08-16 

Few more ping changes coming 

We're getting a few more item specific pings in, hopefully for 7.21. Stuff like letting you ping stack numbers of Tear or whether Duskblade is currently detecting something or not (as per the icon on the buffbar already). If you've got thoughts on item specific info it'd be valuable to be able to share with your team would love to hear them."

2) Playtest Penguin with context on some of the Lethality changes this patch:

"to TL;DR the problem with ~some~ context I have: 

We did some systematic DPS testing, and squishy vs squishy damage was noticeably lower than it was on live (somewhere from 10-12% lower) and so these Void/Lethality changes are a starting point to tune them back towards their "correct" spot."

3) KateyKhaos on changes to Death Sworn skins from feedback:

[1] "We appreciate the feedback on the Death Sworn skins so far! 

Some changes already: 

- Darker Zed shadow
- Removed character inking on Kat"

[2] "Removing character inking means that her hair won't look wonky. 

- Going to change up Kat's on kill VFX, too

We're discussing other feedback"

4) AzuBK provided more context on the changes to magic pen items in today's PBE update:

"This is on the right track, but it's not quite as 1:1 of a correlation as that. We're doing whatever tuning is necessary to keep Runes Reforged champion damage similar in the average case as compared to the live game, and trying to minimize splash damage to other systems/classes along the way. It's not just a matter of penetration - champions are also losing a number of universally-taken damage amps from the mastery system (double-edged sword et al.)."