10/24 PBE Update: Ranked Summoner Icons, Honor Ward Skins & More

The PBE has been updated! As we start the 8.22 PBE cycle, today's patch includes ranked reward summoner icons, Honor reward ward skins, tentative balance changes, and more!
Continue reading for more information!

Table of Contents

• Ranked Reward Summoner Icons
• New Ward Skins
• Miscellaneous
• Balance Changes
• Context & Notes

Ranked Reward Summoner Icons

New ranked reward summoner icons have been added this cycle, one for each rank and queue:

New Ward Skins

Three new Honor reward ward skins are now on the PBE:

Miscellaneous 

• Rune stats are working on the PBE today!

• Program Nami chroma spotlight:

Pyke
[Pyke has other changes in testing on the PBE!]

• Ghostwater Dive (W) 
• Mana cost lowered from 75 to 50
• Movement speed changed from [60/65/70/75/80% (+4% per 100 bAD)] to [30% (+2% per point of Lethality)]
• (max 178% Movespeed)

• Phantom Undertow (E)
• stun duration changed from [1.1/1.2/1.3/1.4/1.5] to [1.1 + .1 per 10 Lethality]
• (max 1.84 seconds)

Context & Notes

1) Riot Rovient provided a changelist for Dark Harvest coming to the PBE today:

"A new version of Dark Harvest hits PBE tomorrow. Read the image for a more complete picture, but base damage is 30-180 (based on level) (+4 x Souls) (+25% Bonus AD) (+15% AP). This damage is Adaptive."

He also noted changes for Fleet Footwork:

"hmm. Nope! I'm pushing a nerf to AP Fleet Footowork to PBE today. The previous version granted you healing equal to 50% AP, which was designed to compensate mages for having to take precision. Now that's no longer the case, they only get a 30% ratio."

2) Riot KateyKhaos noted changes coming for Program Nami and some of the other skins this cycle in the next few days:

[1] We're working on some tweaks for Program Nami (and other skins, but I'm QA on Nami, so hi!). We had some feedback that Aqua Prison's ground decal was too loud/obvious, so we're toning it down a bit to align it more with what we have on other skins, like SKT. 

[2] We're also thickening Ebb & Flow's VFX so it feels a bit more impactful like base! 

[3] These will be on PBE tomorrow, along with some other changes for other skins! (:

3) Here's Riot NeuroCat with a thread on Karma changes coming to the PBE in a later cycle - Karma Gameplay Change Preview:

"Hi all, 

Today, I have some changes to Karma I want to preview to you. As a note, these changes are work-in-progress - we’re still creating the visuals and tuning the numbers, so they won’t be hitting the PBE with pre-season update. When these changes land on PBE eventually, we’d love to have you test them out and give us your feedback at that point. 

First, let’s talk about some of Karma’s issues, and our goals with these changes:

1. When compared to other champions, modern Karma doesn’t have many defining elements that set her apart, from both a thematic and gameplay perspective. Since she doesn’t really have anything uniquely hers, our first goal is to give Karma a unique mechanic that reinforces a core part of her identity.
2. Karma is a difficult champion to keep in a healthily balanced state. When she is tuned appropriately for the average player, she can become dominant at the pro level. Our second goal is to file down some of the sharper edges on Karma’s existing mechanics to let us buff her elsewhere, making her relatively more powerful for the average Karma player.
3. Karma players can feel like their Mantra choices don’t offer the flexibility promised by the champion, with certain Mantras becoming much more useful for different Karma builds or at different points in the game. Our third goal is to make Karma’s mantra choice feel more meaningful in most situations.

Let’s talk changes, starting with the biggest - we’re giving Karma a unique mechanic in line with her identity. Karma is a spiritual leader of the Ionian people, and like all great leaders, Karma has the ability to see the potential in those she works with and help bring out their fullest ability. Realizing this mechanically, we’ve added a new ally-cast mode for Karma’s W. When she targets an ally with W, she reduces the cooldowns on their basic abilities by a flat amount. The mantra, Harmony, increases the amount of CDR and grants the ally mana. 

We’re pairing this with a Karma-only visual effect - as a passive, Karma will see an indicator representing how far an ally’s spells are on cooldown. In conjunction with W, she’ll have a better idea which allies are good targets for her W at a glance. We hope this mechanic will inspire Karma players to craft unique lane combinations and team compositions. 

With these changes, we also want to level the current playing field between pro players and average Karma players in two main ways: 

1. Much of Karma’s power is rooted in her Mantra usage - optimizing her passive’s Mantra CDR is something pros are quite good at, allowing them to gain significantly more power than the average Karma player. We’re changing her live passive to operate on a charge model similar to Spellthief’s Edge, triggering on any damage on champs or monsters. This will allow Karma players to not have to spend their entire time basic attacking to gain max passive value, freeing up time to reposition, ward, etc.
2. We’re generally reducing the benefit of movespeed in the kit, most notably by changing her Mantra-E, Defiance, to reduce the movespeed given to allies near your primary target (the same as the reduction to shields). Movement speed, especially Defiance’s shared AoE movespeed, is much more powerful in highly coordinated play than standard ranked play, so stripping power out here will free up a lot of power and allow us to buff her elsewhere. 

The last set of changes are a set of tweaks aimed at each of her Mantra spells, to give more flexibility of use in a variety of situations.

• For Soulflare (Mantra-Q), we’re loading more of the damage into the initial hit of the projectile, and less into the detonation damage - using Soulflare to poke should remain powerful even later into the game.
• For Renewal (Mantra-W), we’re changing the scaling to scale both with Missing HP and directly with AP - even if you’re building AP instead of tanky, your healing should be substantial.
• For Defiance (Mantra-E), the shared shield (and movespeed) percentage will be much higher than live, but will be split evenly across all nearby allies - now using Defiance will still be quite effective in a 2v2 or 3v3 scenario.

So with this gameplay update, here’s what Karma will look like overall: 

Passive - Gathering Fire
Kindled Spirit - When Karma deals damage to an enemy champ or large monster, Mantra’s cooldown is reduced by X seconds (to a cap of Y times over Z seconds). 

Souls Alight - Karma can see her allies’ total basic ability cooldowns.

Q - Inner Flame
Functionally, the same as live

W - Spirit Bond
Ally Cast: Karma reduces target ally’s basic ability cooldowns by up to X seconds.
Mantra - Harmony: The cooldown reduction amount is increased by Y seconds. Karma restores Z% of the ally’s max mana. 

Enemy Cast: Karma deals X damage to target enemy. If they don’t break the tether, they are dealt X damage and rooted for T seconds.
Mantra - Renewal: When this deals damage, Karma heals for Y% missing HP + Z% AP.

E - Inspire
Grants an ally movespeed and a shield.
Mantra - Defiance: Grants the target bonus shields. Other nearby allies split X% of the shield and movespeed between them.

R - Mantra
Functionally, the same as live

As for a specific numerical changelist, we’re still working out tunings for the changes, but along with these changes, you should expect a healthy amount of buffs to Karma’s base stats and ability numbers to bring her into a balanced state. 

Thanks for listening! I’ll post another update when we’re heading to PBE. 

-NeuroCat"

4) Check out Meddler's quick gameplay thoughts for October 24th, including a look at top lane Viktor, Lissandra's new passive, and more:

Hi folks, 

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 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 

Top Lane Viktor 

Wanted to share some thoughts about top lane Viktor, given we've seen it picking up some popularity and discussion, in particular off usage at Worlds. Our thinking right now: 

• It's quite strong when picked into the right enemy team and opposing lane (melee that aren't extremely mobile). It's not looking like a good choice so far into other team comps however, so seems pretty risky as a blind pick.
• It's a different enough playstyle and position for experienced Viktor players that we're expecting it to take a while for strong usage to be common in solo queue. Similarly top laners without much Viktor experience will take a bit to build up the experience needed to play it usefully. Some degree of wait and see as a result.
• Preseason changes will likely impact top Viktor's effectiveness. Timewarp Tonic and Klepto changes will potentially shift its viability, given both of those are standard picks at present for it. Additionally wider preseason changes, particularly tower plating, will impact all champions to some degree.
• Finally it's also cool to see a champ getting played in a different way as an evolving reaction to other champs being common/strong. 

Based off all of that we're not looking to make any changes to Viktor specifically at present. We'll see where things end up post 8.23, nothing's currently looking too concerning though. 

Lissandra Passive 

A little while back I mentioned that the Lissandra passive we've been testing (enemy champs killed become frozen statues that slow enemies, then explode) had been running into some issues with reliability. Been testing a range of different ways to address that since and have settled on one that's been really good in testing over the last couple of weeks. Wanted to share an update with you folks as a result:

A few other details to know: 

• Frozen Thralls start off moving really slowly and get somewhat faster over time.
• They'll prioritize running at enemy champions over enemy minions.
• The exact numbers listed here haven't gone through rigorous balance tuning yet (that happens at the end), so could still change. 

Current State of Clash 

A few months back we talked about how we were going to relaunch Clash, with the TLDR being fixing some underlying issues with the platform LoL runs on, then PBE testing, then testing in different regions, then eventually a full launch: 

https://nexus.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/2018/07/dev-the-future-of-clash/ 

We're now at the stage where we've been running mini Clash events in some regions. Tests in Oceania, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and Taiwan have so far gone well, with a few small issues identified we're working on, but nothing serious. Next up we'll be testing in other regions and increasing the scope of those tests a bit as well. Should have a few more details on exactly what we're doing different in an upcoming Ask Riot post too. We're still a while off a full launch, but have made significant progress and things are looking pretty good so far." 

Check out [THIS PAGE] for a comprehensive list of the new content & changes currently on the PBE as a part of this cycle or catch up with the individual update links below !

• 10/23 PBE Update: New Skins, Summoner Icons, Preseason Content, & More