Morello on Kayle, Xin, Eve. and the Stealth Remake.

Morello has been quite the chatty Kathy as of late! During a posting spree over the past two days, he's given us a lot of information on upcoming champion remakes/updates and helped soothe the complaints about the age old Stealth Update. While nothing profound was divulged, it's still awesome to see what Riot thinks of certain champions and what is coming down the pipeline.

This is going to look messy, but here are some of the more juicy posts..,

[On Kayle's Status and the possibility of a new rework]

Chainsaw to Kayle, and agreed it needs a lot.

I'm done pussyfooting around this champion when we work on her. No mercy for what's there, I want an awesome, Zealous angel champion

[ETA on these new Kayle changes?]

Unsure still, behind Stealth, Katarina and Karma at least.

[On Xin Zhao kit changes and why he needs them]

Xin's a good candidate for a bit of skill rework (not total kit, since he's fun and with adjustments, could be made to be good), but he's in that old Tryndamere spot - specifically if he's good, he's too good, and if he's not too good, he's not usable.

A few primary problems with Xin's kit from a high level:

* "Flatness" syndrome. Since Xin was created when we were in "holy **** how do we make melee effective" stage, he has a little of everything, sort of like Irelia does. This creates an experience of things being very muddy and getting a bit of power from a lot of sources, making balancing more difficult

* CC Potential: Xin's CC scaling is pretty insane when he hits critical mass, which greats a situation where his damage/CC/durability ratios are spread out, and making any of the others good results in a problem.

* Lack of Counterplay: This is my biggest issue with Xin. His suite of abilities don't leave much room for back and forth, or smart counter-play. This puts him in a state of "Yi balance" where you either kill him, or he kills you without recourse. That, added with the Flatness effect, creates a difficult champion to balance for high-level play without having him be a steamroller in non-professional games.

Classick and I have talked about this one and agree something should happen here, but it is lower priority than champions who've needed the work longer, or need it more (Eve, Katarina, etc). Though I agree with you that this is something we should address.

[On Eve's balance and the new stealth system]

While there's no comment other than "it's done!" I can give that will make people feel good about this, let's be frank for a moment;

* Yes, the stealth rework was a majorly mismanaged project that took far too long. We own up to that.

* Eve is purposefully nerfed to being as poor as she is - her damage to how badly she was kicking new players out of the game in frustrating was beyond unacceptable. Not optimal in any means, but the right decision overall. Our plan was to not take forever, which was the failing point. This is the only thing we've ever nerfed this hard on purpose.

* Talking about progress is meaningless until I have real, concrete information for you, which I don't at this time.

* We won't disable her because some people have fun with her, despite peer pressure. You're speaking to a player behavior problem that needs to be fixed (there will always be a weakest champion - whether real (this case) or perceived.

* We understand that you're frustrated and why you are, and luckily, we've stopped mismanaging and incorrectly prioritizing this set of work - unfortunately, it's a lot of work.

That's all I can add that's useful, currently.

[On the new stealth system's play style]

Frankly, the new stealth is weaker, but less binary. The reason is basically that the current stealth hold the rest of the kits back and forces them to be weak - this is a necessary cost to us being able to make these character good, fun, and balanced at more elo levels.

- Morello, Lead Champion Designer, via the official forums.









Edit:  Thanks to a wonderful reader, I've been alerted to one more post. Morello comments about the AD Caster ( an item for champs like Talon or Pantheon ) by saying "AD caster item incoming this patch (I think!)". Weeeee.