Red Post Collection: Team Builder AMA on 11/7, "New Game Queues on PBE" just for QA, and more!

Here's a short and sweet red post collection to kick off the day!
Check it out for posts concerning the upcoming Team Builder AMA, a confirmation that the "new game queues" on the PBE aren't any sort of leak of preview of an upcoming feature, a handful of discussion on post rework Heimer and Olaf, and more!

Recent News

• Preseason Leagues Improvements
• 11/6 Provider and Platform Maintenance - Kindlegem fix!
• 11/5 PBE Update - New model for Warding Totem ward

Team builder AMA on 11/7

Good news for those eager to learn more about and discuss the new Team Builder feature - Riot will be hosting an AMA over on reddit on November the 7th!

"Team Builder’s a new feature in the works that lets you queue up for a specific role, champion and position, then get connected with four teammates that also preselected their preferred role. On Thursday, November 7th at 12 pm PST, Lyte and others from the Team Builder team will be hosting a reddit AMA to field your questions about the feature and how it can help lay the foundation for better teams and better teamwork. "

As usual, I'll be sure to post a summary when it ends!

"About Those New Game Queues on the PBE"

Regarding the recent, strange game queues on the PBE - including things like 6v6 Howling Abyss and 1v1 ranked for Summoner's Rift, Riot Pwyff confirmed they are just for QA purposes and are not leaks or confirmation of upcoming features.

"Hey all, 

It seems like a lot of you have noticed the new queues on the PBE (and the errors that come when you try to load up a game on them…) – just wanted to give a heads up that we actually use those for QA purposes and they’ve been in the build for over a year now. We just accidentally deployed them to the PBE, hence why they’re showing up as queues but crashing when you try to fire them up. 

Sorry to get your hopes up! We mentioned a while back that we had game modes in development but these are not the ones you are looking for (I’m trying to slip a Star Wars reference in here but I think I’ve failed) – they have more to do with our platform QA. 

THAT IS ALL!"

Heimer Discussion

Now that Heimer's 3.13 rework has been out for a while, 20thCenturyFaux had a few things to say about how the changes are panning out.

He started off commenting on the popular choice of R > W and Heimer's balance.

"People gravitate toward the RW both for playing as and playing against Heimer, it's just really sexy and overt about what it does. I think over time turret centric strategy will become more common as people get used to the rest of the kit.

Balance is about more than winrate, but that said I'm also pretty happy about where his winrate is right now. It'll take time for strategies to emerge for how to play and counter Heimer, and it remains to be seen which side will win that arms race. So far I haven't seen a good reason to change his power level, I'm just having fun watching the live server and seeing youtubes ^^"

When asked for his thoughts on the tankiness of Heimerdinger's turrets, 20thCenturyFaux commented:

"Turret tankiness is definitely balanced on a razor's edge, but I feel good about where they are now. 

Specifically for AE in teamfights, the main thing to watch is if they can hit turrets + other stuff in an AE. If they have to choose between hitting the turrets or hitting your team, you've done a good job. If multiple turrets are dying to the same AE, they've successfully outplayed the turrets. As a general rule, the turrets come out and hit hard; they sort of "become CC" if they get attacked, since spells and bullets spent on turrets (ideally) aren't hitting champions.

As an aside, by the teamfight phase Heimer is able to deploy 3 turrets ahead of time; he's at his strongest when he's fighting in a full turret nest and he has 3 kits still on his person. That's not easy to do, but in those fights he's terrifying because he'll just replace the turrets as they die and turrets spawn with 2/3 of a beam charge."

When asked if it was possible to give R > E a quality of life tweak to let it be able to be cast beyond the cast range ( resulting in it casting as far as possible ), he commented:

"I just went ahead and put it in. Also on PBE Heimer turrets should show which turret was placed first when you mouse over the Q button "

SmashGizmo on Olaf

Continuing the discussion on post rework Olaf , SmashGizmo commented on Olaf's available build options

"Yea, I'm fairly happy with how he's able to build in practice. I think Hydra's the optimal first offensive item on him in terms of potential, but I find myself building BotRK because it gives you reliable sticking power and a very potent turn around heal when used when low HP with W (and it still syngergizes well with high AS). I do think he does enough damage on 1 offensive item right now and it largely feels like a toss up between the reliability of BotRK vs. the crazy high-end potential on Hydra. I also think Maw of Malmortius is pretty crazy on the guy, but I rarely feel like I can build it except vs. double AP teams since Spirit Visage is usually enough MR to keep you covered and he benefits so greatly from everything on visage."

He continued, discussing Olaf's current win %:

"I'm guessing you're talking about last week when the week long data on lolking was still taking his winrate from last patch into the average. Now that the buffs have been out for a week, he's moved up to ~46-47% (13th lowest right now, but that data is constantly fluctuating) and that's still likely to move around some more as people get used to playing as/against Olaf again. It's also worth noting that we don't balance strictly around winrate because winrate doesn't tell the whole story of a champion's power, i.e. Olaf was sub 50% overall and still a giant problem in competitive when he was originally nerfed"

Scrapped Revive Iteration

When asked about ideas to spice up Revive, Xelnath shared a scrapped revive iteration he had tried out:

"No. I tried experimenting with a model where Revive had 3 charges, each one reducing the respawn time by 20 seconds. 

This would effectively mean you get extra revives in early game and only 1 big revive late game.

It worked. It also felt terrible to be unable to exploit your opponents death. Frankly, the spell doesn't add strategic value to SR, just cheese factor." 

Bringing Armor Below 0

When questioned about it being possible to bring jungle creeps below 0 armor, Xypherous shared a few comments on the race case of negative armor amping damage

"This is working as intended. 

Negative armor will amplify the damage dealt to enemies by the inverse of the armor reduction formula. -100 Armor = 100% bonus damage - note that penetration cannot reduce values below 0, only flat reductions. 

This has been an intrinsic mechanic of the game - but it's very rare that you can actually do it to anything. If you'll note though, we use negative MR on some of the larger beefier jungle monsters / superminions to make them more sucspetible to mages."