Red Post Collection: 2/19 Gameplay Fixes, Vel'Koz Lore Style, 4.3 Itemization Updates, Warwick Tidbits, and more!

She continued, talking a bit more about Vel'Koz's flavor:

"That's the tricky thing about Vel'Koz - he learns through destruction. He has to make very deliberate decisions as to what's worth incinerating or not. Most of what's in Runeterra, yeah, totally not necessary to exist anymore, and at least he can learn about it at the same time. But what happens when he comes across something that's valuable or particularly interesting? He might have to take that risk to know everything about it, or choose to leave it be.

I'm sure he doesn't see other champions as valuable while living, though. They can all be reduced to dust. :)"

She continued, discussing Vel'Koz 's goals and more on the void:

"Vel'Koz was made this way. He was designed for this purpose - to learn, and his method of absorbing knowledge is through vaporizing it. It's instinct, and he's driven to use his lasers to do it. We could have made him just a scientist character that literally "observed" but we wanted to give him a bit more of an "evil science" edge to him. So we made the laser -> knowledge absorption thing a part of his makeup.
You also touched upon this a bit: the Void is all about consumption. Void creatures like to eat/consume, and Vel'Koz consumes in his unique way (which is by vaporizing and absorbing what would be creatures' "nutrients" except it's all their information).

I hope that explains a bit of our reasoning. It might totally suck. I'm sure someone else could articulate it better, haha. When it comes down to it, we wanted him to be fearsome, powerful, and intelligent, and totally melting something instead of interviewing you for information seemed ... compelling."

Riot Opeli continued:

"Sorry, I didn't mean to insinuate Vel'Koz was "built" or anything. Void creatures all share the common theme of consumption, so that might show what the Void is interested in doing in the bigger picture. 

Kog'Maw is similar to Vel'Koz in that way. From his bio: "he explored the fruits of the strange world the only way he knew how: by devouring them." Cho'Gath is also similar, but a little less fleshed-out in his bio. Kha'Zix is driven by evolution, but he does this by consuming other things. Vel'Koz devours things... with eyebeams. So, they can all be natural creatures, but Vel'Koz might be, like, a different tier of Void creature or from a very different "family" of Void creature.

I don't solely decide Faction stuff, so take all this with a grain of salt. :D There's some speculation on my end, too! I'm glad you don't want to wait, though. That makes our team feel good."

Ransom also joined the thread, demanding:

"So why don't you cut the ****, Opeli, and tell the players what they REALLY want to know? 

Whom do you ship Vel'Koz with? Do you SEE romance in his future? Who INTRIGUES him? Who does he have his EYE on? <3 

And why isn't there a "Lovers" section on all of the champion pages next to the bio?"

Skarner buffs on PBE

As you also may have noticed, Skarner got several buffs in the 2/19 PBE update! 

Here's Riot Scruffy with a bit more context on those:

"Hey, the patch deadline came fast for us so we were only able to do low scope balance changes (no mechanics), but here's what is on pbe: 

-Q mana cost reduced from 20/22/24/26/28 to 16/18/20/22/24
-E slow amount increased from 30/35/40/45/50% to 45/50/55/60/65% 

These are up on pbe, so check him out and bring your feedback back about the changes.

-Scruffy"

Context on Prospector Item PBE Changes

Speaking of context on PBE changes, ManWolfAxeBoss commented on the recent changes to the Prospector ( Dominion exclusive ) items:

"tl;dr - Prospector items stats are being brought in line with season 4 stat values. P.Blade change (LS replaced with AS) gives a small boost to ADC and small nerf to AD bruisers/assassins. P.Ring regen change means that mana costs will actually be meaningful now. Prospector items are still a great start, highly cost efficient, but these changes do open up starting builds a bit"

Updates on planned 4.3 Itemization Changes

Xypherous is back on the PBE community with an updated on the 4.3 Itemization changes he's been discussing and testing on the PBE recently. 

"Hey guys, thanks for all the feedback you've given me over the past couple of days in this thread: Previous 4.3 Items Thread 

Wasn't able to act on all the feedback but I'd like to give you a heads up over what we changed and kind of the reason one way or the other. 

Going to go over some of the more pressing points that I heard about which a lot of you wanted to see action on:

[ Boots of Lucidity ] 

Changes Reverted 

So our original goal here with Lucidity boots was to finally clean up CDR as well as offer a really cheap boot option for Support players. As for actual usage rates, Lucidity Boots are picked up in one in four games by non AP users. 

Although many of you have correctly pointed out that the actual cause of the mess in CDR is masteries and how granular they are. 

This is fairly annoying as they should ideally be tailored towards Supports and Tanks and are mostly being picked up on AD Glass DPS that then become even squishier and more annoying when they do. 

But in any event, it's not the time or the place to fix that and certainly much too soon.

 [ Ancient Coin ] [ Nomad's Medallion ] [ Talisman of Ascension ]

Several of you have pointed it that it's incredibly silly that the Coin line has even more mana regeneration than the Spellthief line, a line intended for mages. 

We've bolstered the coin line to be more about recovery and regeneration and lowered the high-end mana regeneration of the item. It now gives equivalent mana regeneration to the Spellthief line at the highest tier. 

Talisman of Ascension: 15 MP/5 --> 10 HP/5 Favor now grants 10(+5) health when a nearby minion dies that you did not kill. (Roughly equal to 10 HP/5) 

We also reduce the amount of passive gold generation that the item gives you from 4 GP/10 to 3 GP/10 - simply to create a better risk to reward structure between all three items. 

Spellthief's is the riskiest item and has the most rewards. Targon's has some moderate risk and has moderate reward. Coin is now a safe option and has lower rewards than the other. 

On live, by contrast, Tier 2 Coin and Targon's are roughly equivalent gold generation while Spellthief's potential gold generation is higher but also manifestly unreachable in most practical circumstances.

[ Spellthief's Edge ] [ Frostfang ] [ Frost Queen's Embrace ] 

AP 

We put a little bit of AP back on the Tier 1 / Tier 2 versions of these items. I could see arguments for this being a good lever to buff the item in the future if it still needs it. 

Tier 1: 5 AP (+5), 2 (-1) MP/5, 5 (+1) Gold on hit. Tier 2: 10 AP (+10), 5 (-2) MP/5, 10 (+2) Gold on hit.

[ Face of the Mountain ]

Active
We reduced the power of this on the AD front and added some AP scaling - The item now shields for 10% of your maximum Health and the damage is 100% of their Total Attack Damage and 30% of their Ability Power. 

...assuming the changes make it in. I'm always slightly out of sync with the normal deploy times.

Other Items 

There was a couple of items that didn't get their costs properly reduced. These were errors on my part. XD 

Rylai's Crystal Sceptre is still kind of glaring at me.

[ Doran's Shield ]

We still want to hit the item pretty hard but many of you pointed out it seemed way too harsh, we raised the HP/5 to 6 - making the item's stats in and of themselves barely cost efficient. 

It's might still be too harsh but the dominance of all-in bot lanes is causing significant stagnation in the amount of picks. (Though, admittedly, spellthief's edge might allow the poke supports to poke back.)

[ Boots of Mobility ]

Not Reverted 

We still believe that for the long term health of the game, Boots of Mobility needs a real tradeoff from the other boot options. 

While several of you have brought up the fact that this causes some Junglers to fall out of favor and won't affect several others - there has been and will be a ton of shakeup in the jungle scene from changes in jungle items to jungle champions themselves that tuning for the environment now makes less sense than tuning for the best possible future. 

Note that this was not true for Lucidity's case. Lucidity's case was tuning for a best possible future - but since the present was relatively static and unchanging it would've just created more damage in the interim with random 5%'s and AD Casters being unsupported in CDR. 

Note: We're out of time tuning for this current patch as we plan to ship this soon - but we'll need feedback and follow-through on this. No doubt that something will need further tuning in 4.4"

On the Teemo R Nerfs

Xypherous also commented on the significant reduction to the AP Scaling ( currently reduced to .5 AP from .8 AP ) on Teemo's Mushrooms that is currently testing on the PBE, discussing  how creating an item based solution is just as much of a temporary solution as the AP nerf.

"While I don't disagree that we need to do something about Teemo - the item based solution is as about as much of a band-aid as the AP one. 

Neither of them do anything about the problem of when there are invisible mushrooms about for some time. Neither of them do anything about the problem that either one side is paralyzed and useless or mushrooms are annoying and useless. 

Mushrooms themselves intrinsically need more counterplay playing against, rather than being seen or unseen. I don't work on champions specifically and from what I can understand. 

Think about how engaging remote mines work in virtually any other game and I guarantee you they do something that Teemo's Mushrooms don't. 

Whether they beep at your for three ticks before exploding (LAM's) - or jump up and appear visible for a short time so you might destroy them (Spider Mine) - or detonate to a poison/vision obscuring cloud (Tear Gas) - most fun mines have some kind of mechanic that keeps them engaging even if you fail the basic principle of 'Oh god, I didn't realize there was a mine there.' 

Fundamentally, the future for Teemo mushrooms has to be a mushroom redesign, rather than a nerf - to get it to a mine that you can fight. Duration, damage - even items that show you every mine on the map is basically a stop-gap measure to cover up just really uninteresting mines. :x"

Tidbits on Warwick

In a reddit thread discussing Jinx's Q passive and how it builds stacks only to have them fall off one at a time, ZenonTheStoic commented he is currently testing out something like this on Warwick's prototyped rework kit:

"I currently stole this mechanic for new Warwick. Autoattacking or Qing a dude builds up stacks of a heal amplifier (self-only SV), up to 10. Stacks last 2 seconds, but once they start falling off, they fall off at 1 stack / 0.75s. 

This is a pretty cool pattern for less than binary ramping threat. 

Btw, this is a very cool and common thing in champion design: one of us (in this case Gypsie) comes up with a cool pattern to fill a specific need on his kit and we all start thinking "where could this pattern fit on something I'm working on?""

ZenonTheStoic ( or @danielzklein on Twitter! ) also tweeted out a few other tidbits on the STILL VERY WORK IN PROGRESS Warwick rework.

Tweet 1: "Today's triumph: realizing that even though Warwick's kit has changed massively, all of his playing / playing against tips still apply."

Tweet 2: "So current prototype for ult slot (THIS MAY CHANGE) is free targeted move block, stops at first champ hit, does the wolf thing"

Tweet 3: ( Responding to a comment about it being a less reliable version of what he has now ) "More importantly, dodgeable."

Tweet 4: ( Responding to a question if this means his ult will be like Vi's ) "Been going back and forth. Unit targeted (Vi) is good because it can't be used as escape, but how much reliability do we want?"

Tweet 5: "I'm making him into an EXCITING drain tank! What did you expect, some kind of were plant?"

Tweet 6: "He gets guaranteed damage over time--a lot of % max hp damage. Fight WW for X seconds and he kills you, 100%."

Reminder: Hexakill starts on Feb 20th

Here's a little reminder that Hexakill, a featured gameplay mode that afds a 6th player to each team on Summoner's Rift, will be starting on Feb 20th and will be available until March 2nd.