Surrender at 20: Red Post Collection: Mystery Skins & March Bundles, March 16th Patch Update, Meddler on Shen, and much more!

Tonight's red post collection includes a look at limited time March bundles and mystery skins available though March 24th, the patch update from March 16th, info on the conclusion of the two week Party Rewards test, Meddler discussing tentative plans for Shen, a guide to Champion Mastery from Riot support, and Riot Jynx with a bunch of Bard fan art!

Continue reading for more information!

Mystery Skins and March Bundles

It's been a while but here's WizardCrab with details on three new limited time flex bundles that are now up in the shop, as well as the return of self Mystery skins through March 24th!

"Rise up against the dragon horde, run rampant as an unstoppable automaton, or roll into ranked with five of the most contested champs in LCS.

Snag these limited time bundles or treat yourself to a Mystery skin now through March 24.

Mystery Skin - 490 RP
Score an unowned skin worth 520 RP or more for one of your champs.

Dragonslayer Bundle - 50% off at 2789 RP (4551 RP if champs needed)

Dragons shmagons. These guys literally wear dragon scales as clothing.
Skins included:

Dragonslayer Braum

Dragonslayer Pantheon

Dragonslayer Jarvan IV

Dragonslayer Vayne

Champions included:

Braum

Pantheon

Jarvan IV

Vayne

Wards and Icons included:

Dragonslayer Ward

Dragonslayer Poro Ward (Legacy)

Dragonslayer Poro Icon (Legacy)

Mecha Bundle - 40% off at 2964 RP (4485 RP if champs needed)

Unstoppable force meets explosives and titanium plating.
Skins included:

Mecha Aatrox

Mecha Malphite

Mecha Kha'Zix

Champions included:

Aatrox

Malphite

Kha'Zix

Wards and Icons included:

Mecha Ward

Mecha Icon

LCS Outlaws Bundle - 50% off at 2623 RP (4872 RP if champs needed)

Just because they don’t make it through picks and bans in LCS doesn’t mean they won’t in ranked… hopefully.

Skins included:

Blade Queen Lissandra

Shockblade Zed

Rumble in the Jungle

Darkforge Jarvan IV

Ravenborn Leblanc (Legacy)

Champions included:

Lissandra

Zed

Rumble

Jarvan IV

Leblanc"

3/16/2015 Patch Update

The official 5.5 patch notes have been updated to include a hotfix that went out on 3/16 to fix the new animated Victory and Defeat banners!

"Victory/Defeat Banners

"Animated Victory/Defeat banners have been activated!"

Pencils down: Party Rewards test concludes

As previously mentioned, the two week Party Rewards live test has concluded and the bonuses are now disabled while the team sifts through all the data.

"Party Rewards may be headed back to the workshop, but we’re curious about your thoughts on the system. We’ll take a look at the results of the test period and report back soon. We’re hopeful that Party Rewards encouraged more games with friends and more friendly games.

Thanks for testing and we’re looking forward to sharing the results!"

Meddler on Plans for Shen

When asked for an update on the balance teams plans for Shen, Meddler commented:

"Current thinking is that we'll test out a reduced CD on his ult (given it's extremely high and was made that long back when teleport wasn't as accessible a counter as it is today). Still talking about whether we might want to test anything else in conjunction with that or not."

He continued:

"Having Shen land between his target and the nearest enemy champion (like Braum W) sounds like a good change. We'll throw that into testing. Unlikely we'll be buffing Ki Strike at the moment at least - we'd prefer to focus power into the more distinct parts of Shen's kit (hence the ult buffs here and previous small buff to Shadow Dash)."

Updated Player Tooltips to other servers later this week

With the updated player tooltips / hovercards live on EUW as of yesterday morning, MattEnth commented on reddit regarding when the new feature will be rolling out to other servers:

"Not on EUNE yet :-\ We've been slowly rolling out so far to make sure that our behind-the-scenes tech stays healthy. We'll hopefully be picking up the speed for the remaining regions this week."

He continued:

"We have a slight bug where ARAM games are being over weighed in the calculation for Recent Playstyle. Hopefully fixed in the next patch."

Gypsylord on Evelynn PBE Changes

Gypsylord also swung by the boards to offer his thoughts on the recent Evelynn PBE changes:

"So I played a good amount of Eve last season and have been helping Jag test the Eve changes internally. Here's some of my thoughts on the changes having played her in a number of playtests:

The thing I'm personally most excited for is the passive CD change. It makes you super sneaky in a late game fight that gets drawn out. As long as you don't die instantly it's pretty easy to get in, deal some damage, and get out back into stealth to hide/search for your next opening.

The W change overall has felt like a pretty big in/out mobility buff in mid-late game AS LONG AS YOU GET A BIT OF CDR (magus anyone). You trade some training potential (especially in the early game) but having that slow cleanse up every few seconds to escape/close is invaluable given the new passive CD.

Also note that these are intended to be buffs so if we're off the mark here and she loses power from the W change we'll follow up on it.

To answer your thoughts about the lowering of her early game chasing power and R CD:
Eve is a character who brings something INCREDIBLY powerful to the game, the ability to dodge wards. This gives her a massive advantage when it comes to ganking unwarry opponents. I can just run up to a guy, sit behind him, wait for him to burn an important spell, and then engage with my allied laner and demolish the fool :D.

So since Eve has such fine control over when and where she starts a gank we feel like it's appropriate that her actual contribution to ganks isn't as powerful as say, a Vi R. With that in mind, lowering that training potential on the W in the early game to make room for mid/late game buffs (where she tends to fall off) seems appropriate to us.

Thinking about Eve's R 150 sec CD, we tend to give long early CD's to ultimates that enable hard to avoid gank and kill situations in the early game so as to create some downtime between "I'mma kill you now" moments. Vi R is an obvious candidate for a long cooldown given its range and guaranteed nature. Globals are another big one since they let Pantheon be in your lane whenever he wants. Less obvious are the ults on champion who can reliably dodge wards like Eve and Rengar. At the end of the day, not having any way to see Eve coming creates similar situations to TF porting in behind you, there's an extra champ in your lane that you didn't prepare for. It may not be Assault and Battery but Eve's ult does give a significant boost in ganking power. I'm not saying Eve's R is in a perfect spot or that we'll never change it's cooldown but it does make sense to me why it is as high as it is"

For reference, the current Evelynn PBE changes are:

Shadow Walk (passive) re-stealth time reduced to 6/5/4/3 at levels 1/6/11/16 from 6 seconds at all levels.

Dark Frenzy (W) Passive has been changed to changed to -"Passive: Evelynn's spell hits on enemy champions reduce Dark Frenzy's cooldown by 1 second" from "Evelynn's spell hits on enemy champions grant her 4/8/12/16/20 Movement Speed for 3 seconds (effect stacks up to 4 times)."

Champion Mastery Guide and discussion

Just in case the recent Q&A didn't answer all your questions, Riot support has published a guide to the upcoming Champion Mastery feature.

Check it out for a look at :

Examples of the loading screen mastery badges (and the new position for honor ribbons!)

The in-game multikill announcement banners

and more!

In a reddit thread about the article, Riot Socrates popped in to answer a few additional questions:

When asaked about the grades and if the system is based is meant to suss out how good you are with a champion or how much you play them, Socrates noted:

"The grades you get at the end of each game are purely skill driven based on performance percentiles. So if you just want to know how awesome you are with a champion in an objective sense that's probably the part of champ mastery you would care about. "

The grade, persistence, and a few other factors, determine how quickly you level up but it's definitely not a ranked system.

When asked to elaborate on how the system measures performance, Socrates explained:

"At the end of each game, we look at what champions were played and where they were played. From there, we look at a number of game metrics and create performance percentiles. So we go "Tryndamere tops performance like this". Then, after a player plays a game we look at how they stacked up to the global averages. If you played like a complete badass, you get a high grade, if not you get a low grade.

Some cases are a bit tricky, like jax poppy bot, or similar off meta things. For them we use some special case logic, but they're still covered."

When asked why premades receive a bonus to champion points, Socrates noted:

"The system is a performance / progression hybrid. Playing with a premade requires a greater degree of teamwork and coordination than going solo, so we wanted to give something extra for parties.

We are still tweaking numbers, so the bonus values may change."

As for why wins award more champion points than losses, Socrates shared:

"The risk we were concerned about is if didn't respect wins / losses as part performance, you create some weird situations that could lead to team infighting.

At the end of the day, it's a team game and you win and lose as a team. That said, it's totally possible for your team to lose and you to get an S+. It'll just be worth less points."

When asked if they will ever use the champion mastery in conjunction with a leaderboards type system to see who has the most mastery or consistently high grades on a champion, Socrates noted:

"We may explore position or champion leaderboards at some point, potentially even using the technology we built here for the performance component that drives grades."

When asked if they consider profile banners - such as the ones that come with ultimate tier skins - as potential champion mastery rewards, Socrates noted:

"This is something we're looking at, not sure if it'll happen though."

Awesome Bard Fan Art!

Riot Jynx is back with another round of community creations, this time taking us on a magical journey through Bard fan art!

"The Wandering Caretaker’s arrival has triggered a cosmic amount of community creations! Check out all the awesome Bard fan art below, and click the artist’s names to see more of their work.