Red Post Collection: Masterwork Chests Now Available, Remaking Irelia: Behind the Scenes, & More

Posted on at 11:56 AM by Aznbeat
[Added in a note on future Karma lore changes.]

Today's red post collection includes the release announcement for Masterwork chests, a behind the scenes video on the Irelia Champion Update, Team Liquid joining the International Medical Corps charity effort, and more!
Continue reading for more information!



Table of Contents


Masterwork Chest Available Now

Here's Bilby with a release announcement for Masterwork Chests:
"Cosmetics-filled Masterwork Chests are now available in the store for 165 RP and in the following bundle sizes: 
  • 1 Masterwork Chest and Key Bundle – 225 RP
  • 5 Masterwork Chests & Keys + Bonus Essence! – 1125 RP
  • 10 Masterwork Chests & Keys + Bonus Set! – 2250 RP 
What's in a Masterwork Chest?
Bonus drops
Head on over to our Hextech Crafting Player Support Page to see the full breakdown of the loot tables and learn more about the special rules that govern hextech crafting.

*Gemstones have a chance of dropping as a bonus alongside normal chest content. Gemstones have light "bad luck protection," so you can't go more than 50 boxes without getting a gemstone. Together this results in a 3.6% chance of getting a gemstone. Gemstones can also drop from bonus chests, bringing the overall drop rate up to 4 percent."

Remaking Irelia: Behind the Scenes

Check out Remaking Irelia: Behind the Scenes, covering Irelia, the Blade Dancer, and how she was reworked!

"Follow the journey of Irelia’s update in this behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to update a League of Legends champion."

Liquid joins Team Up for Charity! 

Here's Cut and Shoot with an update on the International Medical Corps charity effort, adding a new shirt for NA LCS Spring Split Championship winners, Team Liquid!
"The newly crowned NA LCS Spring Split Champions Team Liquid are joining five of your favorite community creators in support of International Medical Corps. 
Team Liquid has come together to support International Medical Corps—a nonprofit that works to relieve the suffering of those impacted by war, natural disaster, and disease by delivering vital health services. IMC is currently responding to hunger crises in Africa and Yemen as well as the global refugee crisis, and is active in over 30 countries. 
You can bid on a one-of-a-kind shirt signed by all the members of Team Liquid, over at Ebay for Charity. 100% of proceeds from this auction will go to International Medical Corps. 
Team Liquid shirt auction goes LIVE on April 11, and bidding will close on April 16. 
Mid Shirt - Team Liquid 
Signed by: Impact (Top), Pobelter (Mid, Finals MVP), Xmithie (Jungler), Doublelift (ADC), Olleh (Support) 
Auction page 
Don’t forget that your favorite community members Boxbox, Trick2G, Scarra, Phreak, and Lilypichu are also auctioning off their own autographed, one-of-a-kind shirts, with 100% of proceeds going to International Medical Corps.

Here’s a look at the other shirts up for auction: 
These auctions went LIVE on April 7 and close on April 15.
   
International Medical Corps is currently responding to hunger crises in Africa and Yemen, the global refugee crisis, and is active in over 30 countries. 
If you’re interested in making a difference and bidding on one of these exclusive shirt you can head on over to eBay for Charity today! Good luck and happy bidding!"

Quick Hits

  • Scathelock noted more changes would be coming for Karma's bio:
So, let's talk about Karma... 
(SPOILER ALERT: We're going to make some changes) 
We updated the backstories of four Ionian champions to accompany the Irelia VGU earlier this month, including the Enlightened One. As with all of these now-regular faction updates, I hope it's becoming clear that there is no template for the type or amount of content we publish - to be quite honest and open, we Narrative folks are experimenting with ways to get new lore out to you... :-) 
I've said this plenty before now, but we genuinely DO welcome feedback, because it helps us to figure out when we're doing something right, and also when you would like us to try harder. 
I try to keep up with posts on here, and on Reddit, Twitter etc, and I know there are some of you who don't like the new Karma bio. Full disclosure, we had intended to deliver some more story content for her at the same time, but that didn't happen - we have limits on time, resources and promotional space that we have to bear in mind when working on this sort of thing. 
And, in this case, the plan changed mid-flight. We ended up not telling her whole story, and that's not good enough when so many players are so invested in her as a champion, and as a character in the wider Runeterra setting. 
So we're going to update Karma's lore again. No, we're not going to retcon it - we're going to improve it. 
Will we do this for any/every champion that gets negative feedback? Heck no. Sorry. Sometimes we're doing something for a specific reason, with a specific goal in mind... but in this case, my personal feeling is that we only delivered half the picture in Karma's update. But, luckily, that's something I can make sure gets fixed. 
As always, we just need to figure out a patch where we can re-release it - that's the only reason it's not coming out today. 
But we hear you. And we're on it."
  • Reav3 noted we would see the next Champion Roadmap and more on Aatrox sometime next week:
"Should be some more info on Aatrox, plus a small teaser, in the next Champions Roadmap. Hoping to get that out sometime next week."
  • Maple Nectar noted upcoming jungle item changes tentatively in 8.10:
"We talked about Runic Echoes in planning for the 8.9 patch last night, we ended up passing for now while we look at a bit of a larger jungle pass to come in 8.10. Don't have much detail in regards to direction atm, but it's on our minds."
"Here are some of the pros/cons I see. 
Pros:
  • We highly prize dynamics of lane play; particularly because being able to make snap decisions about how and where to move adds a bit of richness/depth (if I evaluate that I will move 90% speed through a clump of units, but otherwise 100% by avoiding them and going around the side, which way is better).
  • Taxes ranged, because in lane, they would be too good at chasing uninhibited through a wave in a world without block. This is essentially like a reverse approach velocity for ranged that can be tuned to how much we want to tax ranged aggression, especially against melee without affecting melee vs melee that much.
  • Adds a little more damage to minions when you aggro them without actually adding damage to the minions vis a vis everything else.
  • Adds a bit of reality to the unit (weird to just walk through an object).
  • Means we can use unit size as a lever to allow champions to exercise unique strengths, eg. Chogath is large (80), while Amumu is medium (50) and Xayah is small (35). People feeling large can add to their fantasy while also adding unique pros/cons (Cho can block, but also gets hit by everything).
Cons:
  • Feels horrible in some cases.
  • May feel unnatural when you just float through things; I used to play a lot of Fizz and it can feel a bit weird, especially in melee/melee matchups where I'm just floating through the minions.
  • Is inconsistent and sometimes buggy.
Overall:
  • I think overall, it's neutral, there are certainly some pros for having it, but certainly the mechanics can feel really bad when they occur poorly.
  • I think there's an argument for only applying block to enemy units because those are where the main benefits are coming anyway."
"To start off, you're 100% correct in expressing frustration when you feel the game you play is negatively impacted by balance decisions that are made focused on the highest levels of play. You're opinion is one that's certainly shared by a large group of players, but it's also only one of several of the demographics that make up our playerbase that we're trying to serve with both solo queue and the professional scene. Let me elaborate: 
Group A - Just wants to play League doesn't care about the pro scene
Group B - Enjoys League, tunes in occasionally to watch the pro scene (usually for big things like playoff finals, MSI, Worlds)
Group C - Enjoys League, watches LCS religiously (every weekend they make time to watch every game or atleast the games with their favorite teams.
Group D - Used to play League, doesn't anymore, but still watches the LCS because they like the pro scene
Group E - Never played League before, but I friend told them it was pretty cool and got them to watch a few games. 
*These groups are not all encompassing, but what I'm trying to outline is that the number of people that care about there being some amount of focus put on pro play balance is far greater than just the players that actually play professionally. 
Now, more direct to your point, I have a desire/goal for a future where we don't have to make as many changes to champions based on their performance in pro play nearly as much as we do now. Right now we're beset by two conflicting goals, we (Riot) really want pro play to be as exciting as possible, and professional teams really want to win, more or less regardless of the tactics. Why these conflict is that the path to victory is often one of min maxing for risk/reward - which manifests as choosing more generically strong champions with less pronounced weaknesses, and then out macroing the shit out of your opponent. Why choose Zed when you can pick Ryze who's proven to have far fewer weaknesses when playing in a low ping, highly coordinated environment as an example? In order to make Zed a more likely pick in pro, we'd likely need to buff him drastically to overcome his weaknesses/counterplay - which is a surefire way of putting him in crazy territory for our average solo queue warrior. Since that isn't really a great option, we need to find another way. We're currently putting some brainpower in how we could help shelter pro play from specific points of imbalance, letting us put less focus on pro play in regards to balance and focusing more on the regular game. It sucks to have your champion heavily nerfed, especially when it's for something you don't care about, we totally understand that, and ideally we can find a world where that can become less of a thing that we need to do. Potential avenues could be exploring changes to the drafting phase beyond 10 bans. There really isn't much to talk about yet though. 
At the end of the day we highly value League as a spectator sport, and we'll continue to make changes that we believe help achieve that. We just need to make sure we're doing our diligence when we're making big changes that could impact the way the players actually engage with the game and make sure the cost is worth it. I stand by our decision to remove trackers as an example, as I firmly believe the value in terms of "quality of game" we get both in pro and normal was worth the cost of removing that one item. To close off, we simply can't shackle ourselves by only making decisions that all players will find agreeable, as doing so would mean we should probably just stop making any meaningful changes to the game period, and that's not a world that I think we should be moving towards. 
ps - the archangels change is only archangels. Once it's upgraded to Seraph's you get the full 3% ap again. Right now it's simply too good as a rush item when it's intended to be more mid/late game scaling power spike."
Maple Nectar continued, noting explorations for Sejuani:
"I actually touched a bit on this topic in another post on the boards - this one here 
I think it's highly likely that we take another look at Sej to try to better carve out her niche and better define what exactly she should be good at, and what she shouldn't be. I'd like us to not have to leave her in this state lest she become pick ban in pro again, but I don't have any concrete plans to share at the moment."
  • Maple Nectar also noted possible changed for Rammus and Leona in 8.9:
"We talked about her and Rammus yesterday in planning for 8.9 as two of the notable folks who are now sitting (likely) a little lower than they could be. We're thinking about some potentially small stuff to them this patch. I think we need to be careful with Leona though, she goes from "meh she's ok" to "wtf did that Leo just solo me" pretty quick."
Maple Nectar continued:
"One of the directions we were looking to pull back on was her single target lockdown (E into Ult or Ult into E) with the changes in 8.7. I'm hoping that the change gives us room to buff her elsewhere (either W or Q potentially). I wouldn't be surprised if she still has too much burst through her passive and could see that being another area to pull back on to put power somewhere else. If you were to change her, how would you? I may not be able to reply to your reply, but you can be guaranteed that I'll read it over the next day or two."

Reminders 

To round out this red post collection, here are a few reminders on current promotions or limited time events!
  • [NA] Clash is open for a beta test from April 9 - 15th! Check out the details in this article, or sign up in the Competitive tab in the client!

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