7-26 News: More on Diana, Eve buffs, Viktor's Augments, and more.

Posted on at 8:06 PM by Moobeat
 Edit: Looks like we'll have to wait another day for all the juicy PBE info. The Diana PBE patch, which was planned for the 26th, has been rescheduled for the 27th due to technical problems.

As the next PBE update is looming over head, I've decided to bring you today's news and red post  recap earlier than usual. Below you can find a handful of red posts about Diana, Viktor, and Evelynn, along with a few other small news bits.
Diana, between her teaser and reveal, has been the talk of the rift since last night. If you've missed either of those, I'd like to introduce you to her amazing splash art.
"Just like the teaser, which is a moment in Diana's story, the splash is also. The teaser is the beginning of her embrace of the lunar heresy, the splash image is the result of her surrendering to the power that it affords her, and the repercussions of her actions" - IronStylus via the GD forums.
Looks menacing, right? Well, I also have new red posts that shine a bit of additional light on her kit, role, and lore.

Volty, the designer behind Diana, commented about her first ability by saying:
"The Q, Crescent Strike, has a fixed arc to it in that the radius of the arc is constant. The farther away you target it, the more of an arc you're going to get.

We made a special targeting indicator for it, to help convey what's going on. But since it will always end up on your cursor it's not difficult to smartcast it either."
Volty also chimed in by describing her role as "Fighter/Mage/Jungler", saying that both AP and Tank builds are viable, and revealing she uses mana as a resource. Similarly, Statikk shared his thoughts on her kit by saying "I played her a lot internally. She's an AP jungler".

In one of the threads, Volty highlighted how Diana's ultimate functions. Her Q ( and only her Q ) apply a moonlight effect, which is consumed when you cash R on the afflicted unit. This means an exchange would go something like:
  1. Q an enemy
  2. R to them, consuming the moonlight debuff when it hits.
  3. Now you can either R them again ( since it is cooled down now ) or wait for Q to come back up to chain the effect again.
This is sort of hard to figure out by just looking at the skills recap, but was readily available in the block of text included in her reveal.

A close up of the Solari Mark of the Heretic that is branded into Diana's forehead.
In the final chunk of Diana news, IronStylus, while fending off Summoner demands to remove the moon tattoo on Diana's forehead, commented about the mark saying "Sorry, that's not going anywhere. It's the Solari mark of the heretic. It's sorta thematically appropriate."



Moving along, we had some confirmation that Evelynn buffs are on the way! Here is what Statikk, the game designer behind the recent Eve changes, had to say about the Widowmaker:
"We agree we released Evelynn a bit on the weak side.

What we also believe though is that this new Evelynn still has a large learning curve and things may look worse at the moment to some players than they really are.

We're overall happy with how she is functioning, though she definitely needs some fine tuning. We're confident we can get her into a good place without something as drastic as say re-introducing a stun on the kit.

There are 2 primary buffs we plan on pushing next patch for Eve:

1) Reduce the time she needs to get back into her stealth
We built enough natural counter-play to her stealth that this just seems excessive in disallowing her to play the game she was meant to play.

2) Significantly reduce her ultimate's cooldown
We loaded a ton of her power into this spell, and Eve is very reliant on good use of this spell to succeed in all phases of the game.

Let's see how this affects things and move on from there."


In a thread about the viability of Viktor's augments and how only Augment: Death is ever actually used, ricklessabandon stopped by to say:
"agreed. this is something that will be addressed at some point, but several other live design projects need(ed) the attention first--eve, twitch, and xin are good examples.

the power and gravity augments will likely be reworked to some degree (and definitely should be, imo) so any changes will have a longer development period than a numbers tweak. due to that, any updates likely won't be finished for a while."
Solcrushed, a live game designer, followed up saying "I've started to look into this as my next project after Xin"



If community interactions and contests are of your interest, I urge you to check out the results of the recent Songs of the Summoned III contest. Below is my personal favorite ( on one of the grand prize winnders! ) from all the offerings of League of Legends themed compositions.



Rounding out today, we have another upcoming champion and skin sale that's trying to separate us from our precious Riot Points from us. The discounts between July 27th and July 30th include Nasus ( 292 RP ), Pantheon ( 487 RP ), and Ahri (487 RP ). as well as Vandal Twitch ( 487 RP ), Major Ziggs ( 487 RP ), and Big Bad Warwick (260 RP ).


Be sure to check back in later for  comprehensive post about the upcoming PBE patch, which we can only assume includes Diana.