7-13 News: Patch Preview, New Skins, and Loads of Red Posts

Lots of news today! Aside from the late night PBE update, we have new patch previews, two new skins in the store, a ton of discussion about champion balance, a tidbit about Dominion balancing, and a heads up on a certain snake lady receiving new particles.

First off if you missed my gigantic post about last nights PBE update, you should give it a looksie. I made fancy little images detailing the Eve, Twitch, and Xin remakes, as well as compiled pictures and videos of all the fancy new skins and doodads included within the patch.


The biggest bit of news from today was the Mid July Patch Preview. Included within the explanatory video are changes for Sona, Malzahar, and Xin. Also mentioned were a small change to the Jaximus and links to the thread detailing the Evelynn and Twitch reworks.

To catch a recap of the patch preview, head on over to my earlier post about it.


The second big bit of news, to already hit today, was the release of Infernal Alistar and Scorched Earth Xerath! These two skins are available in the in game store and can be yours for 975 Riot Points each. Check out my post earlier today for screen shots and videos of the skins in action.



There is a lot of champion disussion raging across the forums at the moment, so I'll try to handle this as neatly and quickly as possible.

Elaborating just a little about Malzahar stuff mentioned in the patch previews ( which is also available for testing on the PBE),  Xypherous mentioned an additional change for for Malz, saying  "... Voidling AI/Q usability/W useability and a little thing on his R to ignore movement commands that would break his ult in the first half second or so." He also mentioned some improvements for Call of the Void. These improvements include more consistent delay, edges dealing damage, more "forgiving" damage, and vision granted between the two bubbles.

On the the state of Darius, Morello had this to say: "I think Solcrushed wants to do some work on making the ult less forgiving and frustrating when he's done with Xin."

On the long awaited buffs for Garen, Morello commented "Not in the next patch, but still a thing we're doing. Xypherous is locked-in on doing this right now."

While I'm not sure if its intended to be taken as "we are working on it" or "I personally would support some buffs for her", Morello also said he thinks Lulu needs a little positive attention in the buff department.

Don't forget guys! Dominion is still a thing! Sites like Dominate Dominion have been pushing the envelope for high level Dominion play.

If you've been following RiotNome, you'll know that he is currently working on Dominion and Twisted Treeline. We don't typically hear about many changes influenced by Dominion imbalance, but he confirmed that the upcoming changes to Kassadin, Urgot, and Yorick were. He says "Dominion was the impetus for a lot of the upcoming Yorick, Kassadin, and Urgot changes, yes. I didn't make these changes myself though--that's the domain of live team in general. But yes, we'll be keeping Dominion balance in mind now."

While this skin is beautiful, Summoners were upset that she includes no new particles or animations!

Moving away from balance on on to the graphics department, here is something I mentioned in the PBE post and I feel needs more exposure. In a thread about the upcoming Exalted Cassiopiea skin not having new particles, ricklessabandon mentioned that Cass will be receiving new default particles ( much like Singed's new poison trail in the Jayce patch ). He says, "we agree that her current particles could use some love, so in addition to the changes unique to exalted cassi we're planning on implementing some particle changes across all of her skins (similar to what we did with singed recently). none of her particle changes are on pbe, if i'm not mistaken--only the new model is in the pbe build at this time."



The last tid bit of information isn't really anything newsy at all, just something I thought was sort of interesting. The picture above, screen capped from Guinsoo's twitter account, is him tossing out a few scrapped mechanics - abilities or concepts that didn't make the cut into a champions kit.  There are some interesting things in that tweets, things that I would have been interested to see make it to live. What do you guys think?