1/9 PBE Update: Six New 1350 Skins, New Chroma, Icons, Emotes, Lunar Revel Nashor, & More

The PBE has been updated! As we start the 8.2 PBE cycle, today's patch includes a total of six new 1350 RP skins: Arctic Ops Gragas, Sweetheart Xayah and Rakan, Lunar Guardian Warwick, Lunar Guardian Nasus, and Lunar Empress Lux. We also have oodles of new chroma, icons, emotes, login themes, a Lunar Revel Baron Nashor, and much more!
Continue reading for more information!

Table of Contents

• New Skins
• Arctic Ops Gragas
• Sweetheart Rakan
• Sweetheart Xayah
• Lunar Guardian Nasus
• Lunar Guardian Warwick
• Lunar Empress Lux
• New Chroma
• New Summoner Icons
• New Ward Skins
• New Emotes
• Lunar Revel Baron
• 2018 Season Login Themes
• Changes to Sightstone/Support Items coming to PBE 
• Skin Collections Tab: Skin Descriptions Feature Feedback
• Miscellaneous
• Balance Changes
• Context & Notes

New Skins

The new year brings us 8.2 with SIX new skins on the PBE including Arctic Ops Gragas, Sweetheart Xayah and Rakan, Lunar Guardian Warwick, Lunar Guardian Nasus, and Lunar Empress Lux! 

Arctic Ops Gragas

Here's Riot LoveStrut with a bugs & feedback thread for Arctic Ops Gragas:

"https://imgur.com/PucSDJV 

As part of an elite task force, Arctic Ops Gragas emerges from his trusty submarine to body slam through any mission. 

Frigid Features 

• All-new model: Geared up and ready for arctic operations.
• All-new animation(s): Radios in his submarine for a quick recall.
• All-new VFX: Volatile, subzero chemicals swirl within his barrel.
• All-new SFX: Icy and explosive audio with processed VO. 

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" 

Sweetheart Rakan

"https://imgur.com/Tn5QK6E 

Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Xayah, my love,
I’ll protect you. 

Fall in love with the love bird, Sweetheart Rakan! 

• New model and textures: A charming new look for the Charmer himself!
• New VFX: Pretty in pink!
• New SFX: Magical harp sound effects!
• New animations : A new recall in typical Rakan style and duo recall with his other half! 

A bit of context as to why Sweetheart Xayah/Rakan don't have 1:1 making color schemes: As with their base skins, Rakan is meant to be the flashy one (lighter/brighter), and Xayah is a darker tone. With their similar silhouettes (capes), it's important we differentiate w. color. 

Sweetheart Rakan is now available to play on PBE! As players who experience this content firsthand, your constructive feedback is appreciated. Feel free to leave it in the comments below! If you have any questions, you can also drop them below and I'll do my best to answer them! ^-^ 

Sweetheart Rakan is set to be 1350 RP.
*Prices are subject to change"

Sweetheart Xayah

"https://imgur.com/9HcNQ3M 

Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Don’t be mad at me
‘Cause you’re 0/2. 

Fall in love with the love bird, Sweetheart Xayah! 

• New model and textures - A new Valentine’s Day look for the Rift Rebel!
• New VFX: Pink, purple, and glittery gold feathers, and a new, less aggressive taunt decal. <3
• New SFX: Melodic harp sound effects!
• New animations - A new recall with some forest friends and a duo recall with her other half! 

A bit of context as to why Sweetheart Xayah/Rakan don't have 1:1 making color schemes: As with their base skins, Rakan is meant to be the flashy one (lighter/brighter), and Xayah is a darker tone. With their similar silhouettes (capes), it's important we differentiate w. color. 

Sweetheart Xayah is now available to play on PBE! As players who experience this content firsthand, your constructive feedback is appreciated. Feel free to leave it in the comments below! If you have any questions, you can also drop them below and I'll do my best to answer them! ^-^ 

Sweetheart Xayah is set to be 1350 RP.
*Prices are subject to change" 

Lunar Guardian Nasus

"https://imgur.com/k355TC1 

Lunar Guardian Nasus Solemn and quietly powerful, he annihilates all who threaten the kingdom with: 

• New model and textures: Adorned in golden armor, with an even more regal ultimate form.
• New VFX: Beautiful jades and golds!
• New SFX: Shimmery, metallic sound effects, perfect for a stoic guardian!
• New animations: A new recall for the stalwart protector. 

Lunar Guardian Nasus is now available to play on PBE! As players who experience this content firsthand, your constructive feedback is appreciated. Feel free to leave it in the comments below! If you have any questions, you can also drop them below and I'll do my best to answer them! ^-^ 

Lunar Guardian Nasus is set to be 1350 RP.
Prices are subject to change"

Lunar Guardian Warwick

"https://imgur.com/lNqLsz9 

Lunar Guardian Warwick relentlessly pursues the darkness to the ends of the world. He brings: 

• New model and textures: With armor as ferocious as it is ornate!
• New VFX: A new kit full of wild jades and golds!
• New SFX: Shimmery, metallic sound effects befitting a beastly demigod!
• New animations: A new recall for a ferocious guardian. 

Lunar Guardian Warwick is now available to play on PBE! As players who experience this content firsthand, your constructive feedback is appreciated. Feel free to leave it in the comments below! If you have any questions, you can also drop them below and I'll do my best to answer them! ^-^ 

Lunar Guardian Warwick is set to be 1350 RP.
* Prices are subject to change"

Lunar Empress Lux

Groomed from a young age to guard the immortal realm from darkness, the Lunar Empress and her companions are said to stand watch over the world. Lux, though a powerful demigod in her own right, draws aid from the ever-faithful Warwick and Nasus.

"https://imgur.com/oVaMIhO 

Don’t underestimate the power of Lunar Goddess Lux . She shines brighter than ever with:

• New model and textures: Complete with a golden staff and stylish outfit~
• New VFX: A new kit full of bright oranges and gold with hints of jade!
• New SFX: Magic and metal mix to form a harmonious sound!
• New animations: A new recall—Lux is protected by her pups! 

Lunar Goddess Lux is now available to play on PBE! As players who experience this content firsthand, your constructive feedback is appreciated. Feel free to leave it in the comments below! If you have any questions, you can also drop them below and I'll do my best to answer them! ^-^ 

Lunar Goddess Lux is set to be 1350 RP.
*Prices are subject to change"

New Chroma

Nineteen new chroma have been added for both upcoming Lunar Revel 2018 skins and several previously released skins! General chroma pricing information available here.

New Summoner Icons

In addition to the new skin sets, a slew of new Lunar Revel and Valentine's Day summoner icons have hit the PBE!

New Ward Skins

Three new ward skins are now on the PBE: Warwick Puppy Ward, Nasus Puppy Ward, and the Lovebirds Ward!

Warwick Puppy Ward

Nasus Puppy Ward

Lovebirds Ward

New Emotes

A plethora of new emotes have hit the PBE, including eight Lunar Revel and eight Valentine's Day themed emotes.

Lunar Revel Baron

[note: not enabled in game yet.]

The mighty Baron Nashor is all dressed up for the Lunar Revel!

2018 Season Login Themes

Two new login themes are now on the PBE, celebrating the 2018 season! The files names are noted as "season2018-pre" and "season2018-post".

Changes to Sightstone/Support Items coming to PBE 

Here's ItsLowbo with changes for sightstone/support items this patch:

"Hello! I’m Lowbo, a systems designer on the Game Systems team, and I’m here to talk to you about changes to Sightstone and the core support items!
The requirement to buy Sightstone has long existed as a tax on the support position, and while vision is an important element of the game, the way it delivers this has been a drain on satisfaction for a long time. We’d like to lift the obligation while still empowering Supports to be heavy participants in the vision game. 

Quick explanation of change

• Sightstone and all of its upgrades will be removed from the store.
• Support items will gain Sightstone’s active as their quest reward.
• Support Tier 3 items now build out of Tier 2 and a Ruby Crystal, and give you the same stats as their respective line’s “Eye of the __” upgraded Sightstone on live.
• For more context, read below. I’ll go through the goals and reasons behind these changes, and then give the complete changelist.
• NOTE: Current names and icons for Tier 3 are temporary. We’ll have new names and icons for all three lines for Tier 2 after quest completion, and Tier 3 both pre and post quest completion. 

Goals of Change  

• The main drive behind these changes is that we want supports to be more free to pursue their own build paths. Without a mandatory 800 gold purchase in the early game, Supports will be able to make more choices and have more agency over how their power is expressed. We will try to keep Sightstone timings and general support economy to be close to their live values.
• One thing we’ve learned from Ardent Censer over the summer is that Support players greatly appreciated the ability to rush impactful items - they were able to feel like a bigger participant in the game. We’ve also learned that the game still functions well without a Sightstone rush - in other words, the game doesn’t break down from a lack of early vision.
• We would still like Sightstone times to be a reflection of the support player’s skill, so we are putting it on the quest reward rather than just giving it out at a specific game time. We found that for most players, the existing quest rewards were very low satisfaction relative to their power level. We hope that gaining this active is a much more noticeable and satisfying reward.
• Unfortunately, having an active as the quest reward requires us to remove the active branches of the item chains - Frost Queen’s Claim, Face of the Mountain, and Talisman of Ascension. Some of the actives provided important options, and so we’ll be looking at ways to bring Frost Queen’s Claim and Talisman of Ascension back in modified forms. Face of the Mountain’s active will likely not return in the immediate future. 

More Detailed Changelist:  

• Sightstone and Ruby Sightstone have been removed from the store.
• The quest reward from all three gold income item lines is changed to grant Sightstone’s active.
• You will still be required to upgrade to Tier 2 to finish your quest.
• Quest reward thresholds are reduced to 500 gold.
• Your Tier 3 item will build out of your Tier 2 item and a Ruby Crystal, and will give you the same stats as an upgraded Sightstone on live. There is no longer a branching path to Tier 3 - the active variants of the items have been removed.
• Upon quest completion, your Tier 2 item will have a maximum of 3 wards between trips to the store. Upgrading to Tier 3 will give you a maximum of 4 wards stored. 

Timing and Future Work 

• We expect these changes will go out in 8.2, but they might be delayed a patch or two if we hit bugs or snags with implementation..
• We’re still going to be ironing out some details - whether you have to return to the store to stock up on your first ward charges, around what time do we want the rewards to activate, whether this makes Spellthief’s line too risky (as you can get locked out of income generation if laning phase ends early), things like that. We will also be closely monitoring poaching by other laners and junglers. 

Thanks for reading! I’ll be around to answer questions."

Check out the balance changes below for more details!

Skin Collections Tab: Skin Descriptions Feature Feedback

The Skins Collection tab is being updated with short and sweet skin descriptions.

Here's an example using the recently released Snow Fawn Poppy.

"The Poro King's right hand and loyal shield, Poppy enforces her furry liege's decrees and protects him from all harm. She also enjoys Snowdown festivities, a holiday she discovered on one of her many colorful adventures."

Here's Riot Stellari with more:

"Hey all!

We’re really excited to announce that starting in patch 8.2 we’ll be rolling out Skin Descriptions for the Skins Collection Tab.

When we set out to make a new skin, we think a lot about how it fits into the skin’s alt-universe, what the champion’s background might be, and who the champion is in this universe. These conversations and character building inform everything about a skin, from the VFX, SFX, the recall, and of course the splash.

Sometimes we’ve shown you these stories through animations, comics, or short stories, etc… but a lot of times that background story remains head-canon and never leaves our brains...which is a shame. We want to start showing you more skin related ‘lore’ and background information, and adding descriptions to skins is one step in doing that.

We DO try to surface these background snippets in the splash or in-game elements and sometimes we succeed (Omega Squad skins). A lot of ya’ll picked up on the backstory of how Omega Squad Teemo lost his mentors and became the battle hardened Yordle psycho we know.

But sometimes we fail, like with the Immortal Journey skins. Did you know that Eternal Sword Master Yi was in love with an ascended being who guarded the Sacred Sword (cough Janna not Shen)? No? Well, if you did it was probably because you followed me on Twitter or saw my responses here. We didn’t do a very good job of telling that background story, unfortunately.

We hope with this small addition to the Skin Collection tab we’re able to give players who love skins a little bit more into the world they live in. In the future, we’ll also be adding the ability to sort by Skin Universe (did you know Project and Program share the same universe?)

As we have close to 1,000 skins in the game, categorizing and ordering them is going to be an ongoing process. Sometimes we have to go deep into the past: what was the backstory with Dark Candy Fiddlesticks? Did one exist? So this will take some time. But with each patch we’ll be adding a few more until we’re all caught up. With this initial batch, we focused on our biggest thematic sets, but you’ll be seeing a lot more shortly.

Do you have thoughts or feedback on the Skins Collection Tab? Let Riot Jedahs (Skin Collection Tab producer) and me (Skins producer) know! :)"

Miscellaneous 

• Start of 2018 Season messaging now is now on PBE, you should see these when you first log on:

Brand 

• Blaze (Passive) changed from "When Blaze reaches max stacks on a Champion or monster" to "When Blaze reaches max stacks on a Champion or large monster"

Jinx
[Context]

• Get Excited (Passive)
• Attack speed no longer stacks
• Attack Speed uncaps when Jinx is excited

• Switcheroo! (Q)
• bonus attack speed increased from 30/40/50/60/70% to 30/55/80/105/130%
• Minigun attack speed no longer scales with Jinx's level
• "Jinx's first attack after switching from rockets to minigun comes out within .4 seconds of swapping (instead of waiting for her full attack timer).
• "Updated Rocket attack animations to feel snappier."

Context & Notes

WIP

1) Here's Meddler with his quick gameplay thoughts for January 5th, covering upcoming balance changes for Patch 8.2, game pacing, Rengar, 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 

Patch 8.1 

Happy 2018! 

We've been back at work this week and have been looking at what should be in the upcoming patches. Our focus is particularly on what should now be a priority based off how the game played out over the break. 

Because of the way patch development works (patches need a lot of testing) patch 8.1 got locked last year just before we went on holiday. That means that, with a few possible exceptions as below, 8.1 will be the same as what was on PBE over the break. Adding stuff this late in the process has the same risk of serious bugs and balance issues as a micropatch/hotfix. We need to be really conservative with both how much we change and the type of things we change as a result. That means we're mainly working on a bunch of stuff for 8.2. 

Things that might get added to 8.1 that aren't on PBE:
A few high impact bug fixes (e.g. Galio W shield, a bug with Revitalize making people untargetable)
Possible Zoe nerfs
Possible Sona buff
Reducing the amount some of the Kleptomancy gained items sell for 

Patch 8.2 

Patch 8.2 by contrast has a full development cycle and there's plenty to be worked on. Some of things we're looking at below. This isn't a complete or final list. Some things will get added and some will get removed as we work on the patch. 

Runes:

• Further Klepto work, likely reducing the differences between best and worst case users (nerf the strongest/buff the weakest).
• Manaflow Band nerf (still reducing need to manage mana too much)

Items

• Runic Echoes Buff (help AP junglers overall)
• Assessment of Relic Shield line on non supports (appropriate or abusive?)

Champion Nerfs:

• Vayne
• Ezreal (if Klepto changes don't look like enough)
• Ornn
• Kha'Zix
• Malz
• Zoe (if not nerfing in 8.1 as above, follow up assessment if 8.1 nerfs happen)
• Blitzcrank

Champion Buffs:

• Nunu
• Viktor

We've also got a range of champs we'd like to get to soon but who didn't make the initial cut for our 8.2 planning. They're probable candidates for 8.3 or 8.4, though it's possible some slip into 8.2 still. Trynd and Yi buffs are in that category, as is a Fiddle buff unless the Runic Echoes change helps him enough. We talked about Syndra as well as a possible buff candidate for 8.2, she's got a lot of bug fixes in 8.1 though, some of which are likely to add some power to her, so we'll see where she's at after those. 

Game Pacing, Snowball etc 

Additionally we'll be taking a look at a range of aspects of game pacing during the 8.2 development cycle (game length, snowball, time to kill etc). Uncertain yet if we'll ship changes during 8.2 aimed at that in particular at time of writing. Identifying balance targets is a quicker process, hence the list above, for a topic like this we need to spend more a bit more time however. More on this next week, well aware it's a topic on a lot of people's minds that's not addressed in much detail here. The thing we'll be looking at first is laning phase and whether that's ending too quickly, with corresponding spread of snowballing across lanes. 

Rengar Q changes 

As we mentioned in December we're planning on changing Rengar's Q back to an empowered auto attack. Timing on that's not certain yet, it's not fully implemented or tested. There are also a few new assets that will need to be made for his Mecha skin, since that didn't exist back before his Q got changed. Should be early this year, though won't in 8.2 at least. Details on which patch it'll be in and whether there are other accompanying changes to come as soon as we've got them. 

Edit: 

Couple of updates worth mentioning since time of writing. We're going to move both the Sona buff and the Klepto item sell amount changes to 8.2, given both are intertwined with the state of Klepto overall. Sona buff currently in testing is a partial revert of the Q mana cost increase from 7.24 (50-70, versus live 60-80 and prior 45-65)."

2) Here's ricklessabandon with context on the Guardian and Aftershock changes in today's PBE:

"yeah, sorry — forgot those would go out to pbe today! guardian: trying to cut power from it without hitting appreciation of the effect

aftershock: making it worse for damage spikes, but more attractive for diving — hope is that it gets taken in more types of situations overall"

3) Here's Riot August with context on the Jinx changes in today's PBE:

[1] "Summary of Jinx changes we're testing on PBE. @moobeat 

Hypothesis: Reverting the minigun AS nerfs from 2 years ago will allow her to better capitalize on leads gained in lane. 

Goal is to make her a stronger pick at higher MMR's without breaking her elsewhere."

[2] "may need to be accompanied by nerfs in other places. May be reverted."

4) Riot LoveStrut with context on the release timing for the skins on the PBE this cycle:

[1] "Sure thing! When we create skins, sometimes they're created as a group with a unifying thematic (e.g. Valentine's, Lunar Revel), and sometimes they're "one-offs" where we just want to make a single skin for a specific champion. Gragas' skin was a one-off, where we just knew that"

[2] "we wanted a more serious, cool skin for Gragas. Because one-offs aren't tied to a particular theme, we can be more flexible with when they're released, and 8.2 just happens to be the patch that works best with the skin's development schedule. :)"

[3] "As for why Valentine's and Lunar Revel content are put into the game build early, that is to get everything ready for our Chinese builds ahead of time because Chinese New Year is coming up, and we want to give everyone time to relax and take days off without stress."

So, only gragas will be released for 8.2 right? The rest for 8.3?

[4] "That's correct!"