2/21 PBE Update: Kai'Sa, Daughter of the Void + New Skins, Chroma, & More

The PBE has been updated! As we start the 8.5 PBE cycle, today's coverage includes our newest champion Kai'Sa, her release skin Bullet Angel Kai'Sa, Resistance Illaoi, new chroma, and much more!
Continue reading for more information!

Table of Contents

• New Champion - Kai'Sa
• Kai'Sa, Daughter of the Void
• Stats & Abilities
• Voiceover
• Lore
• Release Skin - Bullet Angel Kai'Sa
• New Champion Skin
• Resistance Illaoi
• New Summoner Icon
• New Chroma
• Bullet Angel Kai'Sa
• Battlecast Cho'Gath
• Resistance Illaoi
• Open Parties now on PBE!
• Miscellaneous
• Balance Changes
• Context & Notes

New Champion - Kai'Sa

Following her champion reveal, our new champion, Kai'Sa, Daughter of the Void, is now on the PBE for testing! PBE Testers can report bugs in [this thread].

Riot MEMEMEMEME with the bug thread:

"Heyo Friendos, 

Void spotting has hit PBE, and as always there are going to be a few bugs that slip through the cracks. A few of them we are aware of and working on, but even our eyes may have missed a few. Please let us know if during your time playing Kai'Sa, Bullet Angel Kai'Sa, or any of her Chromas. 

Issues we are aware of:

• Leg flaps texture stretching on E
• Missing VFX Asset at the end of E causing some question marks to appear under her
• Kai'Sa can sometimes go invisible until death if your client dysncs when she is respawning or using E.

Thank you for your time and eyes."

Kai'Sa, Daughter of the Void

Stats & Abilities

Stats:

• Move Speed: 335
• Attack Range: 500
• Base HP: 554.4
• HP Growth: 80
• HP Regen: 1.24
• HP Regen Growth: 0.15
• Base Mana: 344
• Mana Growth: 38
• Base Magic Resist: 30
• Magic Resist per level: 0.5
• Base Armor: 33.04
• Armor Growth: 3
• Base AD: 62.46
• AD Growth: 1
• Base Attack Speed: 0.644
• Attack Speed Per Level: 1.8

Voiceover

Kai'Sa has just under 30 minutes of VO:


Kai'Sa also has a ton of special interactions:


Choose VO: "Are you the hunter... or the prey?"
Ban VO: "You wouldn't last a day in the void."

Lore

Kai'Sa's short form lore entry is still missing. While you can expect it to be updated later in the cycle, her lore page in-client currently reads:

"Kai'Sa is the Daughter of the Void."

Release Skin - Bullet Angel Kai'Sa

Bullet Angel Kai'Sai

New Champion Skins

After following her creation through a series of dev blogs, the community voted Resistance Illaoi is now on the PBE for testing.

Resistance Illaoi

New Summoner Icon

A new Void themed summoner icon is now on the PBE:

New Chroma

Several chroma added for Battlecast Cho'gath (5) and the upcoming Resistance Illaoi (7) + Bullet Angel Kai'Sa (8) skins.

Bullet Angel Kai'Sa

Battlecast Cho'Gath

Resistance Illaoi

Open Parties now on PBE! 

Open Parties are now available on the PBE for testing! Here's chupaacabra with more on the upcoming feature:

"/dev: Upcoming Party Changes - Nexus

As you've may have noticed, we've recently made some changes to the old parties system. Before, parties had really rudimentary functionality: You could invite friends to join if they were eligible, you could select your positions and... that was pretty much it.

HEY THERE WHAT’S UP PBE COMMUNITY QA ANALYST CHUPAACABRA HERE AND TODAY WE’RE GONNA TAKE A LOOK AT THE BRAND NEW OPEN PARTIES FEATURE COMING AT YA IN PATCH 8.5 SO SMASH THOSE LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE BUTTONS AND COMMENT BELOW WITH ANY QUESTIONS OR THOUGHTS YOU COOL KIDS HAVE ALRIGHT LET’S GET TO IT FAM 

What the heck is an Open Party and why do I care 

Ever get in the mood to play League with a group but don’t like having to send dozens of invites? Do your friends keep afk’ing to make a sandwich instead of inviting more people? We want to help you with that. 

An Open party will allow anyone in your or any party members’ friends lists to join your lobby. You’ll be able to spot an Open Party in your own friends list through the green highlight that will appear next to friends who are in an Open Party. There will also be information about their lobby in their status message so you know what mode they are playing and how many people they have. 

If you hover over the player with an Open party in your Friends list, you’ll see more information in their hovercard that tells you who is already in the lobby. This way you can avoid that dingus friend of a friend you really don’t want to play with.

To join the party, simply hover over the player with an Open party in your Friends list and click the Join button. You’ll be taken to that player’s lobby! 

How do I control whether my party is Open or Closed? 

This is you, a Party captain in an Open Party. As you can see, you have a Party card in the Social panel that indicates what type of lobby you are in and how many people are in it. You can see the Open Party toggle at the top right of the lobby, next to the invite button. Clicking that toggle will close the party. Once you toggle your party Open or Closed, we’ll remember that setting for you until you change it. That way you won’t have to deal with Open parties if you don’t want to, and you can leave Open parties on if you wanna lure in more party members. 

This is what it looks like when you are in a Closed party. If you want to reopen it, you can simply click the toggle.

Note that only the Party captain can change whether a party is open or closed.
That’s about it - we’re looking for any bugs or problems you encounter with Open parties while on PBE, or if you have any feedback on the visuals. We thank ya kindly for the help!"

Galio

• Justice Punch (E) cooldown increased from 12/11/10/9/8 to 16/14/12/10/8

Nocturne

• Shroud of Darkness (W)

• [New Effect] In addition to blocking enemy ability with W shield, fearing monsters now also cause the passive attack speed bonus to double for 3 seconds.

• Paranoia (R) enemy vision reduction duration increased from 4 seconds to 6 seconds

Olaf

• Vicious Strikes (W) active duration increased from 6 seconds to 7 seconds

• Ragnarok (R) 
• bonus resistances increased from 20/30/40 to 20/35/50
• active duration increased from 6 seconds to 7 seconds
• bonus AD increased from 40/60/80 to 40/70/100

Context & Notes

1) Here's Riot MEMEMEMEME with a thread on changes coming to the audio engine this PBE cycle - this means a large PBE deploy and possible bugs for the 2/21 update/8.5 cycle.

"Hey Friends, 

We are making a fairly significant update to our audio engine in this patch (8.5), if you want more details we will be posting an article later this week that will go over it, and some other changes on the horizon. Things to be aware of for this PBE Deploy: 

You will be downloading almost every audiobank in the game, be prepared for a large download.
There will be missing sounds, we have been testing this change for a while now, but there will always be bugs that slip through. If you notice any missing sounds/VO while playing on PBE please let me know so we can resolve it asap. 

Types of issues that you may see: 

• Audio missing on abilities
• Audio playing two times when it used to play once
• Missing VO
• Missing music
• This will not effect LCU sounds. 

Thank you for your ear time, and patience."

2) Here's Fearless with a context post and changelist for support item changes that are tentatively slated for 8.6 - "Changes to Support Items (Removing Bandit for 8.6)"

"Hey all, 

We’ve got changes today that remove the Bandit mechanic (both the gold on minion death and gold on attack) from the support item chains. We’re simplifying the support items, pushing more gold into the skill expressive minigames, and hopefully reducing poaching of the items. These changes are currently targeting 8.6, but we wanted to get extra time for player visibility and feedback. 

Before we get to the actual changes, a small note. This is a shift from our normal values for the item system. Generally, we want items to invite exploration, and we seek to create building blocks that allow champions to find inventive, flexible builds that can express different power for different players or in different contexts. We should be delighted when players find new ways to gain power from the item system. 

However, the support items have a lot of work to do that is important to the structure of the game. When these items can be poached, it weakens our ability to improve the support position, and reduces our ability to ensure that farming champions have beneficial amounts of risk and reward to their play. The support items have had a lot of smaller changes attempt to build controls, but they’ve frequently been ineffective and painful to adjust to over and over. These new changes attempt to go a bit harder, and build stronger protections against farming champions gaining significant benefit. 

Changelist:
Targon’s Brace & Upgrades
GP10 = 4 up from 2 

Frostfang & Upgrades
Gold per tribute = 20 up from 15 

Nomad’s Medallion
Gold per gold coin = 45, up from 40
Expected coin drop down, to 8.5 per 10 minutes from 9 (still to do) 

All lines:
Charge generation, charge usage,and GP10 deactivate after killing minions or monsters. These penalties are increase dramatically for streaks of CS. (still to do, exploring different ramping models) 

Goals: Attempting to equalized the average incomes of the lines, which had previously been rather divergent, and very safe for most patterns. We’re pushing more gold into risky/skill expressive actions, so that supports that play their income interactions well will see more significant income leads and therefore faster question completion and first item spikes. Targon’s wasn’t lacking in risk so we’ve instead opted to give it a bit more baseline, which should also help with the dramatic income fall off the item line experiences in mid and late game. 

Questions for testing:
1. Is everything working?
2. Are any of the lock outs harder to feel or understand and leading to confusion?"

3) Here's Meddler's quick gameplay thoughts for February 21, covering a new Precision keystone, midseason patch size, and more:

"Hey 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 

New Keystone 

As previously mentioned we’ve been working on a new keystone to flesh out the Rune system more. It should be on the PBE sometime this week, though will probably be in 8.6, not 8.5. It's intended to offer a combination of sustained damage and target agnosticism (so good at killing tankier enemies) and at present it looks like this: 

• Triggers the same way Grasp of the Undying does (first auto attack on an enemy champion after being in combat for 4s).
• When triggered gives AD and cause some of your physical/magic damage to be dealt as true damage instead.
• Is found in the Precision tree.
• Fairly short CD. 

Things that still need to be answered:  

• How to ensure it's not too powerful, or only useable when balanced on ranged champions. We're testing a couple of different approaches here, with buff duration extends when really near (~300 units) an enemy champion and buff duration extends on melee auto attack.
• Whether to gate when the true damage conversion turns on, or at what rate the conversion happens. We've been trying mechanics like 'Build X AD and Y HP' to activate the conversion, or a scaling ratio on the conversion based off your AD/HP.
• Whether Precision is the correct tree. We'd previously been trying this in Resolve, on the grounds that it was intended to pair well with long fight times and required being close to the enemy (proximity extension version meant putting yourself in more dangerous spots). That meant there was a lot of synergy with what Resolve offers. That worked ok, and offered really clear distinction between it and other Keystones. Did end up feeling like it blurred the definition of Resolve quite a bit (what do I go there for?). Likely it stays in Precision as a result, unless its functionality changes meaningfully.
• Whether a True Damage conversion is the way to go here. Dual % Pen would give the same gameplay in almost all circumstances (your damage is stronger against Armor/MR stacking enemies). Using True Damage does make it much clearer what's going on, to both user and target. It also comes with a much stronger emotional reaction, both positive and negative, even if the power's balanced at the same point as the pen would it ('True damage is really powerful, nice' versus 'True Damage is stupid, there's no way to place around this Keystone'). 

Midseason's Size 

Midseason's like to be smaller this year than the last couple of Midseason's have been. The amount of change in the Preseason just been was higher than past Preseasons. As a result we're putting more time into Preseason follow up (balance, game pacing, bug fixing, fleshing out Runes gradually etc), rather than working on new projects as much. Still planning some changes to open up Bot lane champion choice more, fairly likely that's the only major set of gameplay changes though in it (which is probably 8.9). 

Mastery Curves 

Mastery Curves are a thing we consider often when looking at designing new champions or working on existing ones. A Mastery Curve is a representation of how much more effective a player becomes on a champion as they play them more. They look like this:

Mastery Curves are different to how a champion's performance changes by MMR. Aurelion Sol for example does better on average at higher tiers, but even high tier players need a lot of games to climb his mastery curve and reach that performance level.
In terms of goals, we think it's important champions have some steepness to their mastery curves. Putting time into a champion should feel rewarding whether you're a new player, or about to break into Challenger. You should be able to clearly notice how you're getting better at them, both during your first few games and when you're many games in,. If a champion has a really flat curve they can sometimes end up feeling pretty unsatisfying to play. 

Volibear's an example of a champion who suffers from that somewhat. That's not to say that there isn't skill to getting better at Volibear, but the skills Volibear tests aren't unique enough to Volibear himself. You're generally getting better at LoL with things like positioning, map awareness, general game knowledge etc, but no growing in your usage of Volibear’s specific abilities as much. Those general skills translate to other champions you play so on average your performance on a champion like Volibear won't be much higher than your performance on other champs, even if you've played a lot of him. Someone like Singed by contrast, who has a really unusual playstyle, has a really steep mastery curve. There's a lot of unique stuff to learn to play Singed well, those skills often don't translate to other champs though. 

Steeper isn't always better though on mastery curves. While a player should get significantly better as they play a champ we don't want them to start out completely unable to do anything in their initial games. They shouldn't start at 100% effectiveness, but 0% isn't right either. (Launch Azir being an example of a mastery curve that was too punishing in the first few games.)"

4) Riot August notes LeBlanc PBE work may come late 8.5/8.6:

"PBE target for LB is late 8.5 cycle or (more likely) 8.6 cycle. Still iterating on her. We don't want to put anything out until we're confident in the general direction."