7.22 PBE Cycle

Previous PBE Cycles in 2017

[7.1] [7.2] [7.3] [7.4] [7.5] [7.6] [7.7] [7.8] [7.9] [7.10] [7.11] [7.12] [7.13] [7.14] [7.15] [7.16] [7.17] [7.18] [7.19] [7.20] [7.21]

Table of Contents

• New Skins
• Lancer Rogue Blitzcrank
• Lancer Paragon Blitzcrank
• Mecha Rengar
• Victorious Graves
• New Chroma
• Mecha Aatrox
• Mecha Kha'Zix
• Mecha Rengar
• New Summoner Icons
• New Ward Skins
• 2017 Victorious Ward
• Essence Collector Ward
• Glorious Legend Ward
• Honor Wards
• Rune Enthusiast Ward
• Urfwick 2017
• New Login Theme
• Preseason Healthbar Update
• Catch-Up Experience and Jungle Changes in 7.22
• Continued Runes Reforged Testing & Changes
• Ascension returns for PBE testing!
• Balance Changes
• Patch History

New Skins

Lancer Rogue Blitzcrank

Lancer Paragon Blitzcrank

"Fired up and ready to serve." 

Lancer Rogue Blitzcrank and Lancer Paragon Blitzcrank have arrived on the battlefield as the opposing forces of darkness and light! 

For more information about the development of this imposing pair, check out the Nexus article HERE! 

Features:

• All new models - Steely dark grey and amber versus shining bright white and jade!
• All new recall animations - Rogue drills through the ground itself, and Paragon flies skyward!
• New W and R animations - Charing forward with his lance primed, and a striking shockwave of electricity!
• All new VFX - Deep violet and auburn electricity versus brilliant teal and turquoise sparks!
• All new SFX - Magical electricity surging with power and heroism! 

We always love hearing your feedback and feelings! Everything helps us make these skins even more awesome. We may not be able to respond to everyone individually, but we're always listening."

Mecha Rengar

Here's KateyKhaos with a bugs & feedback thread for Mecha Rengar:

"INITIATING….. Mecha Rengar 

A true predator always returns to the hunt.

• New models and textures - This knife cat is suited up in copper armor and armed with blue blades!
• New VFX - Shiny new orange and blue VFX for all skills; normal spell is blue, empowered is orange!
• New SFX - Metallic SFX for all spells, and Mecha VO processing!
• New animations - New transforming recall and recall winddown animations!

Mecha Rengar is now available to play on the PBE! As players who experience a firsthand look at this content, 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! ^-^ 

Mecha Rengar is set to be 1350 RP. 

* Prices are subject to change.
Note: While we do read through all of the comments and feedback left in a post, we aren't always able to reply to everyone individually. We'll do our best!"

Victorious Graves

Here's Riot LoveStrut with a bugs & feedback thread for Victorious Graves, as well as more information on each of the chroma.

""Feelin’ lucky?" 

Get those last ranked games in because it’s almost the end of the line for Season 7, and Victorious Graves is already quickdrawing onto PBE! 

Victorious Graves - Obtained by achieving Gold or higher on any queue. 

Victorious Graves (Flex) - Obtained by achieving Gold or higher in Flex.

Victorious Graves (Solo/Duo) - Obtained by achieving Gold or higher in Solo/Duo.

Victorious Graves (3v3) - Obtained by achieving Gold or higher in 3v3

Buckshotted Bulletpoints 

• All new model: Fitted with a lion-headed pauldron, a victorious cape, and a sleek new look for Destiny.
• All new animations: Shoots a discus out of the air as rose petals fall and a pedestal props up his foot.
• All new VFX: Blues, purples, and golds in classic Victorious fashion.
• All new SFX: Audio fitted for a victor. 

We always love hearing your feedback and feelings! While we do read through all the comments here, we unfortunately aren’t always able to reply to everyone individually. We’ll do our best! All bug reports and thoughts help us make these skins even more awesome, so please keep 'em coming!
Thanks, cuties. <3 

PS: There are some bugs on him currently, mainly around his gun rigging during his walk/run, taunt, and joke animations. We'll be fixing these soon!"

Riot Stellari also noted some changes that will be coming in a later patch:

"Based off feedback, we've made an adjustment to Graves' cloak to match Victorious Sivir's more - you'll see more tweaks on PBE"

New Chroma

Three skins have new chroma on the 7.22 PBE, including sets for Mecha Aatrox, Mecha Kha'Zix, and the new Mecha Rengar:

[Note: Videos will be added at a later date!]

Here's Riot Orphyre with a bugs & feedback thread for the Mecha Chroma:

"Hey everyone! 

We’ve got a huge lineup this time around with some new chromas coming up for Mecha Aatrox, Mecha Kha’Zix, and Mecha Rengar. Check ‘em out! 

Mecha Aatrox Chromas - 290 RP each, or 2910 RP for the bundle (585 RP if you already own the champion and skin)

• New textures - The skies are his!
• Obsidian - Perfect for nighttime reconnaissance
• Pearl - Is he man, machine, or deity!?!
• Tanzanite - The Darkin inside cometh

Mecha Kha’Zix Chromas - 290 RP each, or 3340 RP for the bundle (1110 RP if you already own the champion and skin) 

• New textures - “Consume and adapt”
• Pearl - Try not to scratch the metal
• Catseye - “Ah...delicious”
• Sapphire - There’s quarry in the ocean
• Emerald - “I sense worthy prey”
• Tanzanite - “Fear the Void”
• Rose Quartz - “They’ll never see me”

Note: Some of these assets are not up to date, check in-game for their most up to date textures! 

Mecha Rengar Chromas - 290 RP each, or 3340 RP for the bundle (1110 RP if you already own the champion and skin)

• New textures - “Tonight, we hunt roll out!”
• Ruby - Bleed some more, he won’t mind
• Obsidian - Easy prey...They’ll never see him coming
• Pearl - Ready to race?
• Tanzanite - Kha’Zix will never expect this
• Aquamarine - Not even the highest mountain creatures can hide from me
• Citrine - Time for a drive back home to Shurima 

The chroma sets are now available on PBE! We hope you all will enjoy the new sets, but we’re also looking forward to hearing your constructive feedback. I’ll do my best to answer and reply to your questions and feedback! 

Thanks! 

Riot Orphyre"

New Summoner Icons

New Ward Skins

Six new ward skins are now on the PBE:

Honor 3 Ward, Honor 4 Ward, Honor 5 Ward

The rune themed ward first showed off in the 7.19 PBE cycle has been updated, and now has a name - the Rune Enthusiast Ward!

Rune Enthusiast Ward

Urfwick 2017

An in-game crown, splash art tweak to include that crown, and special loading screen border for Urfwick was added for those who owned the skin originally & prior to his upcoming return in the limited blue essence store.!

A golden crown has also been added to the model for original Urfwick owners.

A spectacular new recall has been added to both versions of URFWICK.

Over on reddit, RiotMEMEMEMEME confirmed:

"OG owners get the in game crown, loading screen boarder, and splash adjustments with the crown. 

Each version of Urfwick has the recall."

For more on the upcoming IP conversion and Blue Essence shop, see [this post].

New Login Theme

A new Preseason login theme featuring the Ezreal art from the Preseason page is now up on the PBE.

Preseason Healthbar Update 

Here's Rayven with more on healthbar changes that are now enabled and in testing on the PBE:

"Hey folks, as part of preseason, we’re updating League’s healthbars and I want to give you some conte- Wait! You don’t have to relearn anything and you’re getting some new toys. 

Y Tho? 

The purpose of the health bar is to give players the information they need to make tactical decisions—who they can kill, who they should run from, etc. With this update, we’re adding more tools to help teams coordinate attacks and play around important timing windows (please stop hitting the Rammus when Defensive Ball Curl is up). 

A general rule is that the more impactful a mechanic, the more visually notable it should be. League has a few massively impactful mechanics that are basically invisible: shreds, defensive buffs, auras, and more. Others like extra life would benefit from standardization and clearer visibility. 

In order to create more interesting tactical choices for players around these systems, we need to communicate them better than they are on Live. The difficulty of League of Legends should stem from making the right decisions, not battling the interface. 

This is just the beginning—we plan on following up with an additional batch of features including heal over time, damage over time, and more. 

Visually, we’re all used to what’s on Live, but there’s a big disconnect between what we as players know is a big moment and what gets displayed. We want to start bridging that gap beginning with new supporting animations on events like burst damage and tower destruction. 

Show Me What You Got 

Champ Burst

Heals

Moment of Death - Structures

Invulnerable

Defense Up and Armor Shred

Extra Life / Unkillable

Themed ammo

Non-champ bars

Sacred Minotaurs 

Rest easy, we are going to great lengths to ensure that we don’t mess with actions where you’ve built up lots of muscle memory and mastery around, such as last hitting or objective takes. In the new system, lane minion healthbars are identical to live and objective healthbars (red, blue, dragon, etc) are the same width. Colors are generally similar as well. 

How much health a player has should ALWAYS be instantly readable and we are intentionally not showing some of the bigger moments on your own healthbar just to play it safe. 

A note about noise: The health bar is not the buff bar. We value an uncluttered game space as much as you do - for example, many of us play with names off. Additions to this space are mainly high impact and low uptime. 

Your feedback is important, especially in a few key areas: 

- Does last hitting feel the same? What about jungle takes?
- Do these identifiers show up responsively enough and clearly enough to understand and react to?
- In what situations do you most notice the changes?
- Thoughts on additional moments to amp up through animation?"

Here's Ququroon with a bugs thread for the healthbars:

"Edit: Health Bars are missing on 10/24 due to a bug. They will be up tomorrow. 

Salutations, Summoners! 

As you may have seen in this post, we're updating the health bars, and adding several new features! 

This change will be on PBE for two patch cycles (four weeks or so), as we want to make sure we're shipping a bug free update that works the way you expect. Bringing this back to today, we still have some features in development, and some bugs (both wide and niche) that we aim to fix prior to shipping. 

Notable Known Issues:

• [TOP PRIORITY] All Health Bars currently draw over the Minimap
• Shreds have some broken functionality
• Several issues relating to resolution changes mid-game
• Kled/Skaarl's health bars aren't properly colored, and aren't showing Health Bar animations properly

We will be checking this thread often over the next two PBE cycles, so please post any bugs you find into this thread so we can make sure they're good prior to launch! 

Thank you very much, and I hope you have a nice day. o/"

Catch-Up Experience and Jungle Changes in 7.22

"Hi Summoners!, 

Wanted to give an update for some changes coming to PBE in the 7.22 cycle that will probably sneak under the radar. We’ve heard players’ laments about catch-up experience and taken them to heart. We don’t like the overall potency of catch-up mechanics available. Players that establish early game leads should not feel cheated out of their advantage by mostly invisible systems that are difficult to intuit. At the same time, these mechanics serve the important role of making it so games don’t seem over at the outset, and often drive a lot of action. With that said, in most even-ish games, we expect our changes to have minimal actual and perceived impact. 

Not going to get too technical or specific about the changes, but wanted to touch on some highlights that indicate our direction: 

Catch-up experience is only granted on Large or Epic Monsters. The amount per large monster kill is up, but the overall generated catch-up experience is going to be down substantially. Equally as important, there’s a clear path for an opponent to keep their enemy down further: don’t give them access to large monsters. 

Wolf camp at level 1 will grant a full level. This was a casualty of there being too much experience in the jungle at the start of S2017. We’re hoping some routes are opened up as wolves are more relevant and razorbeaks are less so (catch-up experience changes make mini-razorbeaks no longer the only optimal XP path). 

Rolling back the bonus teamwork catch-up experience we introduced in 7.4. In 7.4 we introduced some measures so that players that were substantially lower level than their team would get a boost in experience. Upon reflection, this acted more as a snowball mechanic than it served its original intent to provide a safety net for experience starved roles.  

Poacher’s Dirk buffs. The Poacher’s Dirk no longer has a cooldown between enemy camps stolen, allowing for quicker stacking. For most of League’s history, counter-jungling’s main purpose has been to set the enemy jungler way behind. This is one exploration into a world where counter-jungling gets the successful jungler ahead in a meaningful way.

Jungle camps are all worth the same creep score. One consistent issue in judging the impact of a jungler v. jungler match-up is that creep score can mean vastly different things. This is especially true if one champion specializes in single target camps while the other is an AoE monster. Now each camp in its entirety will grant 4 creep score, which generally matches the camps’ value and should provide for easier comparison of a jungler to their direct opponent. 

With these set of changes (and a large number of supporting ones), players should feel like their leads gained are more meaningful. Particularly junglers should be able to flex their advantages into feeling they have a larger impact on winning the game. In addition to being more impactful, it should be understandable how and why a lead exists and less of a mystery when an opponent overcomes their early disadvantage to draw even. We’ll be watching closely over the next couple of patches and ensure a variety of roles still feel like they can contribute from the jungle, and that the jungler is engaging frequently with enemy champions."

Runes Reforged Continued Testing

Rune Reforged, the new combination of runes and masteries into one new system, continues testing on the PBE this cycle - including runes themselves, the runes panel, the client run inventory and editing UI, base stat and jungle tuning, & more.
First up, here is a document that we will be keeping updated with rune changes throughout the cycle, due to the massive amount of information.

[Check out the Runes Effect and Value Listing here!]

Check out the gallery below for a look at what the new Runes UI looks like: