Red Post Collection: More on Soraka and Viktor reworks, TB Role Icons up on EUW, Your Skin Ideas, and more!

Tonight's red post collection features Vesh with more discussion on the upcoming Soraka rework, new details on Viktor's upcoming gameplay update,  a heads-up that the Team Builder role icons are now live on EUW,  IronStylus looking for your skin ideas, and much more!
Continue reading for more information!

• Red Post collection: Viktor up for a Gameplay Update, Vesh on Diana, WC2014 Schedule
• 8/6 PBE Update: Riot Kayle Sounds
• Debonair Ezreal and Debonair Vi now available

[Continued] Soraka Rework Discussion

Picking up where he left on the discussion of Soraka's upcoming rework, Vesh replied to a summoner upset that Starcall ( Q ) is being significantly changed:

"I'm sure there are people who like starcall. There are going to be people who generally like any given spell on a kit. However, ramping damage in a PBAoE around Soraka is a tank pattern and honestly can't exist on a character like her."

He continued:

"Ramping PBAoE says stand in the middle of a fight for a long time. Standing in the middle of the fight for a long time says build defenses. A character who is incredibly tanky/builds defenses can't also be leagues best healer. You can't kill her allies because she heals them, and you can't kill her because she's tanky. It creates a situation with no clear optimal choice and feels bad for the entire enemy team.

There are other problems too, but we want Soraka to be an incredibly powerful healer but also someone who can just get blown up if she misplays. She will definitely be more high risk/high reward when it comes to healing."

Vesh also commented that Q will be on the spell with new targeting and how the rework will influence Soraka's difficulty.

"To give some context, the heal itself is not a skillshot. Overall the only spell that had it's targeted type changed was Q, so while the champion is technically more hard to play from an inputs standpoint, she's still substantially easier than most of the champions in our game. 

The thing that makes her harder is that she will require a great amount of judgement and awareness to play properly. She will still be a character that newer players can be somewhat successful with, but that is not the primary goal of the update. For a character to be "simple" or "easy," what you're actually saying is one of the following: 

1) Very simple mechanical paradigms (which generally don't have many points of mastery) 

or 

2) Extremely direct pattern with little to no decision making required. 

At the end of the day, our player base has become much more mature in terms of what they expect from gameplay, and I would not feel comfortable putting out a champion update that fit strongly into one of those categories.

I will say though that Soraka definitely has much greater mechanical simplicity than an average release and the tradeoff is that she has much more decision making and situational choice."

[Continued] Viktor Gameplay Update

To expand on the news that Viktor is getting a gameplay update, Solcrushed jumped on reddit to share that it is mostly centered around his Q and passive.

"On the scope of the upcoming GU, its not intended to be a full scale rework and is geared mainly toward his Q and passive. W E and R will remain quite similar to their current form (although with tweaks)"

Team Builder Role Icons on EUW

After a few delays, the new Team Builder role icons are now available to EUW summoners!

Over on Twitter, Riot Draggles announced the good news:

"Team Builder icons are now available on EUW! Go get'em!"

You can catch up on what caused the delays over in the EUW forum thread.

[PBE] Lulu Polymorph Clarification.

For anyone who may have seen the last PBE post early or hasn't checked back in regarding the update, be aware that Riot Hongyou has confirmed Lulu's polymorph's tool tip was the only thing updated and that there was no actual gameplay change for her in the 8/6 PBE update.

Regarding Lore

In light of recent comments regarding LoL's lore, Riot MilkManiac popped on to the NA boards to share his thoughts on the game's lore, player expectation, and what is in the works:

"I'll take a shot at this. For clarity though, I am not on the lore team. However, I am a huge lore geek. I, like many of you, love books/movies/games with massive, fully fleshed-out worlds (Kingkiller Chronicles anyone?). So obviously, when I joined Riot, one of the first things I did was to gobble up any lore-related information and understand what's going on with it. 

Here's what I learned: Lore is by no means forgotten. I'd like to draw a comparison to the Summoner's Rift Update. Around winter a lot of players started asking why there was no winter-themed Summoner's Rift. Some players assumed Riot just didn't care about the map anymore. However, by now it should be apparent that we didn't ignore flavoring the map, but instead we had most of our environmental artists working on SRU, which in my mind is much more important than having a winter-themed map. In fact, I would argue that making a skin for an older map, and delaying a newer map to do so, would be a disservice to players. 

Getting back to lore, I know that since Freljord, there's be almost nothing related to lore that has come out. I also realize that many players, such as yourself, have determined that we are starting to "get cheap" with our lore and our world, and given the visibility you have, that's an understandable conclusion. But let me pose a different theory. What if the Lore is like the current summoner's Rift: It's functional and has some really cool features, but it also has some glaring bugs and is by no means as pretty or as flushed out as it could be? What if the reason why there are no Journals of Justice or any lore updates of any kind are because everyone related to lore is working on stuff that takes priority? 

How cool would that be ;)"

Regarding the lack of transparency, he continued:

"A lot of the reason why we're so "Hush Hush" is that we have so much going on at once, and the last thing we want to do is to tell you about a work in progress, only to have it get cancelled or changed, and then crush your expectations (because... lets face it... we've done that in the past). It may be a slow journey, but there is most definitely a light at the end of the tunnel."

IronStylus is interested in your skin ideas

Continuing his stay on the boards, IronStylus has created a thread for summoner's to share their very favorite skin ideas on the forums!

"Yup! I know there's a lot of individual threads with suggestions. However..
I'm looking to doodle some skins in my spare time. I know there's a TON of great community concepts out there. Some are serious, some are silly. I'm interested in what's floating around. Got any suggestions? I know there's individual threads, but sometimes it's hard to skim through them all D: 

TO CLARIFY! Ideas floated have no guarantee of actually happening. I'm just overall curious to see what shows up in this thread and what rises to the top, as well as maybe messing around with some ideas on my spare time. 

Some pro-tips:

• While trolly ideas are great, but think of things that would really appeal to a wide variety of players. "Cool" is a subjective term, but ideate on things that would feel great on existing characters and would really add something special and appealing.
• Think globally! That's an important aspect of skin development. While NA is where a lot of us on these forums live, we want to show love to the entire world! How cool were the Warring Kingdom skins? Wasn't River Spirit Nami gorgeous? Those are ideas inspired from cultures from around the world. If you are thinking of ideas that are more NA/EU derived, think of things that still appeal to the rest of the planet. Pool party skins are great examples. Everyone loves a pool party!
• Preserve the character. While Eternum Lux might be a neat looking idea, does that fit Lux's personality or core character? Is it complementary or does it distract? Additionally, preserve the characters graphic reads. You probably don't want to change the size of Draven's blades too much, or make Jarvan's lance really skinny. You probably don't want to give a character that doesn't have a helmet something that blocks the face too much.

Anyways, give it some thought! I'd love to see what the cream of the crop ideas of the community are! 

And as always..."

ARAM being looked into

"We agree that something could be done to make ARAMs a more balanced and cohesive mode. We're still working towards identifying an end solution so I can't share any specifics at this time, but I want you to know we are on the case! :)"