Surrender at 20: Red Post Collection: ALL-STAR 2015 Details & Voting, 11/13 Patch Update, Continued Preseason / 5.22 discussion, and more!

[NOTE: There has been a correction - tickets for 2015 ALL-STAR go on sale on 11/16 at 10 AM PST!]

Today's red post collection includes a look at the upcoming ALL-STAR 2015 event and player voting for teams & a new skin, details on the November 13th patch update, a look at the upcoming hotfix planned for Warlord's Bloodlust mastery, ample discussion on preseason and 5.22, context on a few recent PBE changes, a brand new Kindred themed /ALL CHAT, and more!

Continue reading for more information!

11/13 PBE Update: Balance Changes, New Summoner Icons, new ALL-STAR team ward skins, and more!

November 13th Patch Update

The official 5.22 patch notes have been updated to reflect a hotfix that went out to fix up several bugs!

"11/13/2015

Masteries

HEY, LISTEN - Added a prompt on login for players to update their masteries which will appear once per account, per computer

Summoner's Rift

ZOOM ZOOM - The start-of-game movement speed buff now lasts its full intended value of 16 seconds

Jungle Items

SORRY, IONIA - Fixed a bug where the mana regeneration effects of Hunter's Talisman and the Tier 2 jungle items was applying to energy regen as well

Phantom Dancer

QUICKSTEP - Fixed a hitching issue with the new Phantom Dancer, which has now been enabled!

Enchantment: Distortion

OVERLY DISTORTED - Fixed a bug where, under specific circumstances, Enchantment: Distortion could completely remove Ghost's cooldown

Master Yi

ALPHA STUCK - Fixed a bug where reaching full Energized stacks (ex. Statikk Shiv) by usingQ - Alpha Strike could prevent Master Yi from proccing Energized attacks until he died

Shyvana

SHOPKEEPER THEFT - Fixed a bug where attempting to buy Tiamat or its upgrades while in Dragon form would take the gold but not grant the item

Tahm Kench

REGURGITATED - Clones eaten by W - Devour can no longer turn invisible when spat back out

Twisted Fate

DECK CUTTING - Fixed a bug with W - Pick a Card where, while a card was selected, Energized autoattack procs (ex. Statikk Shiv) would fire before the autoattack itself"

ALL-STAR 2015 Details, Ticket Information,and Voting

The LoL Esports site has been updated with a ton of information on the upcoming ALL-STAR 2015 event!

Taking place in Los Angeles, California December 10th through 13th, this year's ALL-STAR event will pit the player voted TEAM FIRE vs TEAM ICE in various types of matches for your entertainment! At the end of it, the regions from the team with the most points will also get an IP boost!

The event will include several different types of games between the two player voted teams, including:

Regional Matches - standard 5v5 with normal rules.
Fun Game Modes

Pick 10 - players vote in 5 champions per team to play with
Marksman Mode - everyone on each team only playing marksman
Assassin Mode - everyone on each team only playing assassins
One for All Mode - everyone on each team playing same champion
All-Star All-Stars - best of the best fan voted five players from each team
Tandem Mode - each champion controlled by two players: one on mouse and one on the keyboard.

1v1 Tournament - 30-man 1v1 bracket!

Event information & scheduling is available here.

Ticket information is available here. $15 outside and $30 inside tickets are available and the tickets will go on sale November 16th at 10 AM PST.

Player voting is also now open! Head on over to the vote page to cast your vote for which players will make up TEAM FIRE and TEAM ICE!

TEAM FIRE will be made up of players from LCK, LMS, and NA LCS teams
TEAM ICE will be made up of players from LPL, EU LCS, and IWC teams!

After voting, you can check on the current results here.

As mentioned in the help section, you'll also get a FREE ALL-STAR summoner icon just for voting!

On November 30th, voting will also open for players to decide which champion - Nautilus, Diana, or Teemo - will have a skin created for them based on the 2015 ALL-STAR winning team (Fire or Ice)!

Upcoming hotfix changes for Warlord's Bloodlust

Riot Stashu has taken to the boards to post an upcoming hotfix change the team is planning for the newly introduced Warlord's Bloodlust keystone mastery! Assuming all goes well, they will be changing it so only critical strikes on champions heal and grant the attack speed.

"Hey all!

Before releasing it, we understood the possibility of Warlord's Bloodlust hyper-synergizing with a couple of champions (Tryndamere, Yasuo). Now that it's been out for a bit and has proven to be abusive in some cases, we're going to make some changes. This won't ship until we're done fully testing everything that we wanted to bundle into the hotfix, so expect to see it sometime early next week.

Changelist: Your critical strikes on enemy ~~units~~ champions heal you for 15% of the damage dealt and grant you 20% attack speed for 4 seconds (2 second cooldown)

We believe the majority of the abuse/frustration from Warlord's Bloodlust came from the enormous lane-attrition advantage it provided to champions who have access to early crit. Example: Previously, Tryndamere could dash at his lane opponent, take an unfavorable trade, full heal on minions with Warlord's Bloodlust and his Q, and then rinse and repeat until the opponent had to leave or die. Now, like the rest of the Ferocity Tree customers, Warlord's users will actually have to expose themselves to significant threat (PvP) to access their power.

Champions who do not have crit built into their kit only start to benefit from Warlord's around the team-fighting phase of the game where they will often be fighting enemy champions anyway, so we do not believe this nerf will affect them, (notably, ADC's) nearly as much as it does Trynd/Yasuo. Further, it is much more difficult for melee champions to basic attack enemy champions, and we tend to only grant 'free crit' to melee champions, so we believe Warlord's Bloodlust will still be a potent tool on ADCs. If this turns out to be untrue, we'll definitely do more follow-up to get it into a good place.

-- Stashu"

Stay tuned for more information and we'll be sure to mention it when and if this hotfix goes out next week!

Champion Resizing on PBE

Ququroon has tweeted out that a wave of champion resizings are currently testing on the PBE:

[1] "For those that missed it, Champion Resizing is currently on PBE! Here's a comparative shot. #LeagueOfLegends"

[2] "And in case it needed to be said: this is not a substitute for full Updates in the slightest. Yes, Malphite still looks like a nose."

[3] "Yup. Around 40 champs are affected."

When asked about Renekton

[4] "He's slightly larger. For the most part, these are just feel things, not really noticeable."

and Kayle:

[5] "Unfortunately, Kayle requires proportional changes. This is more of a scaling change. I did make Aetherwing slightly larger."

and Battlecast Kog'maw & Final Boss Veigar:

[6] "BC Kog is currently the same size (smaller tomorrow though). Final Boss Veigar is currently smaller."

Context on Mordekaiser Q PBE Changes

With Mordekaiser haveing a few Q changes on the PBE, FeralPony stepped in to share context that they are mostly looking to streamline the numbers and, while it may have missed the 11/13 build, Mordekaiser's Q AP ratio will also be going up to keep the over all 3 hit damage similar to live.

"I'm not sure if it made that build, but the AP ratio is going up to .6 from .2 on the base Q. This keeps the numbers essentially even as the AP Ratios on the swings are as follows

.6/.6/1.2 <-New
.2/(.4-.6)/(.8-1.8) <- Old (depends on ranks)

For a total Ap ratio of the following assuming you can land all 3 incremental hits.
.6/1.2/2.4 <- New
.2/(.6-.8)/(1.4-2.6) <- Old

The goal is to pull some of the Q3 power into the Q1 and streamline the numbers a bit, not substantially reduce his overall 3 hit damage output."

ricklessabandon on Sejuani & Attack Range Revert on PBE

When asked why the recent attack range increases for Sejuani were reverted on the PBE, ricklessabandon shared that they may still be on the table:

"need to see about getting animation support—that change made some of her animations look like they didn't quite reach which goes against part of the reason we made this pass—sej and a few others are on a short list of "let's see about getting them in a wave 2.""

Meddler on Preseason & 5.22

In a boards post discussion the turbulent time that is preseason, Meddler popped in to comment:

"Quote:

I think I realized the balancing strategy based on the last couple Red posts. While they tried to balance some things, for the most part they are throwing out a bunch of changes, expecting a lot of balance problems and such. Then they are going to nit pick through the system and solve issues that pop up until we end up with a changed, potentially better League of Legends. At least, that's what I see going on here.

That's the hope. Preseason's a bit different to other times of the year, in that we're much more focused on getting bigger changes (new masteries, big sets of item changes, game pacing etc) as good foundations to support balanced characters, than in trying to give each individual champion exactly the right numbers on day one. Foundation building, with a focus on the longer term, rather than a patch that focuses on short term balance. That's an approach that's normally not appropriate, given there's ranked play and the various competitive leagues being played on a regular patch. Preseason's the time where we can make bigger, long term improvements, even if that means some disruption in the short term though. Demonstrating what the effects of healing via crits are for example, to set up work for the coming year, is more important than a handful of champions being suddenly too strong or weak for a patch."

When asked about his opinion on the larger marksman updates that went out in 5.22 after being live for a few days, Meddler shared::

"Quote:

Meddler, what is your opinion on the other 4 ADCs that got big updates (MF, Cait , Quinn and Corki ) ? You said Koggy is going to need some help and Graves is going to need nerfs, but what about the other 4, what do you think of their state of balance ?

Disclaimer: This is a really, really rough early assessment.

MF - Potentially too strong
Cait - Seems to be in a reasonable spot so far?
Corki - Seeing really variable performance so hard to say anything yet (some people using the changes well, some failing pretty hard)
Quinn - Seeing people struggle a bit given how her pattern's changed, some people utilizing it well are very effective though. If I had to guess I'd say she might be on the strong side, that's very much a personal guess though."

As for thoughts on Kindred post 5.22 changes, Meddler noted:

"Quote:

Thoughts on our jungler adc, kindred.The whole set up seems to have hit her hard.
Kindred was way too strong in 5.21 when played well. She's certainly lost a noticeable amount of power, initial reaction is that that's not a bad thing at all though."

When asked about the tower changes that went out in 5.22, Meddler commented:

"Quote:

One issue might be that they DON'T have twice as much health. By the patch notes, the outer towers got NEARLY doubled (75% increase), but no other tower comes even close to that kind of increase.
My bad, just spoke with the folks working on the tower changes and there was a reduction to tower health in there I wasn't aware of. We'll be looking at that this week and early next week, assess whether or not it's doing good things and whether we need to make follow up changes."

Meddler also replied to a question about shipping so many changes at once in a single patch:

"Quote:

Why would you intentionally make the game agonizing to play for several patches instead of making small, good changes as time goes on?
The changes in the preseason are all pretty heavily intertwined. Some things can't be broken down into smaller chunks. Doing just a couple of new items at a time won't work without the appropriate adjustments to the rest of the item system for example, since the new ones will be either too good or too weak if they're not in sync with the overall system. Additionally many components are heavily dependent on others. Marksmen kit updates for example are dependent on overhauling AD itemization and vice versa for example - the new items were developed with the updated kits in mind, and those kits were developed within a context of improved AD itemization. Things like Masteries could have been separated out, but that then means going through a period of significant disruption, balancing the game after those changes and then doing the same thing again shortly after. There's a limited window we've got where we're not impacting ranked or pro play, so getting stuff in right at the start of that and then taking as much time as available to improve's really valuable."

When asked about Tryndamere and Yasuo in relation to Warlord's Bloodlust, Meddler explained:

"Quote:

A lot of people have been complaining about Yasuo and Tryndamere's synergy with the new crit healing mastery, but I think a lot of people missed that Ashe's passive was changed to not be broken with it. Was that change made specifically to fix her interaction with the new mastery and , or was it changed for another reason and those are just happy accidents?
We were extremely confident Ashe would be a problem with Warlord's Bloodlust, so that was a major factor in updating her passive.

Trynd and Yasuo were both identified as characters that would likely be too strong, by how much and in what ways we should react wasn't sufficiently clear pre patch to justify changes to them in advance however. In cases like that we feel we often get more valuable from releasing and responding quickly as needed than in pre-empting things, especially since occasionally the need's misidentified. Despite expectations Vlad and Rumble would gain significant power from the AP update in 5.13 for example we chose to wait and assess what changes were needed. To our surprise the performance of both champions actually decreased, leaving us very happy we hadn't preemptively nerfed them."

When asked about the PBE and why some changes like Graves or things that immediately seem too powerful make it to live, Meddler commented:

"Quote:

isnt that more of what PBE is for, though? as far as i know not a single balance change was made to the first set of changes on PBE
PBE gives us some really valuable feel, direction and thematic feedback. It's got a very small playerbase compared to the regular servers though, which tends to lead to some really lopsided games in terms of team composition (e.g. silver and diamond in the same game). That, when combined with the fact that people play much less seriously on the PBE, means its value from a balance perspective's pretty limited. We do get some useful stuff there, and there were changes to quite a lot of preseason elements while they were on PBE, it's not realistic to expect the PBE or internal testing to deliver sufficient balance feedback to polish changes of this scope however."

Continued Preseason General Discussion

In addition to Meddler's comments above, the gang piled also on to the dev corner board to answer more questions on preseason and the future:

[Most recent discussion thread]

When asked if they plan to revamp runes similar to the revamp of masteries, Pwyff commented:

"Quote:

Probably i repeated myself, but do you think you will ever touch runes more in depth? Would you like to?

Let's be clear, i am not asking if you are going to change them, neither i expect promises ( Ironstylus did a nice pic for these cases ) nor i expect stuff written in stone. Just how ya feel bout that.
Something we'd love to tackle at some point in time, but the undertaking is quite significant so any work we do will probably take a while. The keystone mastery system was also a way of testing the waters with pregame options, so how players interact with keystones (particularly if/when we add additional ones) will heavily influence our decision to tackle runes."

When asked about the new trinket upgrades, Xypherous noted:

"It's meant to be more of a sidegrade than anything else - as it costs 0 gold to actually opt into.

I suspect currently that blue trinket might be too powerful atm - but it's a nice change of pace.

The goal is that you should never need to upgrade your trinkets and that the base trinkets are powerful enough to carry you through the game.

The sidegrades are meant to be a side-ways change in the way you intent to use vision."

When asked about not having a cap on the farsight upgrade, Xypherous commented:

"I aggressively pushed the power of blue trinket as I really wanted to see how this kind of warding could be like.

It's likely overtuned at the moment - but I'm glad people are trying out the multi-blue trinket strategy - I'll be looking to bring this in line once I get a better gauge on how powerful it is."

He continued:

"My gut reaction right now - I think the trinket's CD and the ward's vision radius is a bit excessive at the moment - but I do like the coverage playstyle of progressively warding where you will want to be in the future."

As for specific champions combo-ing powerfully with the new masteries, ManWolfAxeBoss noted:

"Quote:

Is there any plans or thoughts on changing / addressing Yasuo's double crit passive in the near future?

With all these new Crit items he can literally get 100% Crit Chance in a couple of items, which lets him pretty much dominate anyone in a straight skirmish and consistently chunk their health down with a single auto attack.
Yasuo, along with many champs, will likely require some tuning with the preseason changes. He benefited quite a bit both from items and the new masteries. No specifics yet."

Xypherous also briefly noted they are looking to tune the magic based damage on jungle a bit:

"(We're probably going to tune the magic damage side of the jungle a bit. Talisman buffs and light MR adjustments on Jungle. This probably won't affect Kha'zix much though.)"

As for Teemo's shrooms not properly procing the Spellthief line of items, Xypherous commented:

"Quote:

Can someone please provide context on the teemo stealth nerfs; frost fang not working with teemo mushrooms anymore resulting in nearly 1000g less per game? intended? reasoning?

Edit: Oh wait - it turns out it was bugged in 5.22 and it should be fixed for 5.23. Apologies for the inconvenience in the interim. :("

As for why certain champion didn't get mana regen buffs to compensate for the removal of mana potions ,Xypherous noted:

"Quote:

Why didn't Cass get mana buffs?
Based on our internal item purchase data - Cass didn't buy ~2+ mana potions a game which was our internal metric for mages to determine whether or not they used mana potions extensively enough to be heavily affected.

We didn't compensate based on mana consumption - but directly off whether or not they purchased it significantly."

When asked if there are any future changes to vision planned, Xypherous commented:

"Quote:

Sightstone was recently changed. Do you guys plan on making any future changes to vision and sightstones or do you think they're in a good spot right now?
There are planned future changes to vision. I condensed the various trinket options to make room for some experimental stuff which I hope pans out.

I probably won't be touching Sightstone again for a while - but I really want to tinker with alternative pink wards and some more alternative trinket sidegrades in the future.
For the future, I'd like to push vision and map brightness to be less about finding the 'perfect' vision state for league of legends and being a facet of the particular season - not sure that'll pan out."

As for the upcoming changes to minions and the pushing advantage they get if your team is a higher level than the other team, Riot Axes commented:

"Quote:

I want to talk about the changes to minions; they scare me. What worries me is that the subtle and interesting mini game of wave control will be damaged or worst case destroyed.

It's a fascinating and subtle thing to control the minion waves, and when done successful you can set up freezes to deny CS to enemy, or make large waves that damage side lanes as you do objectives. What worries me is that the changes to minions, make them auto push which makes setting up pushes and doing freezes much harder to control.

What is the intent behind the changes, and what is your thoughts about wave manipulation and the new system?

As fascinating and subtle as it is, the net result is that if you're on a team with a substantial lead, it's one big factor that leads to you having a higher net gold flow than the other team provided nothing meaningful happens. You can almost guarantee you'll win the game provided you can drag it out for 15-20 minutes after it's mostly decided... and since you're ahead, avoiding fights that aren't crushingly in your favor isn't all that hard to do.

The intent for the new system is to reverse that - if nothing significant happens, the team that is behind will tend to catch up on gold. At the same time, the team that is ahead gets more opportunities to try to press their advantage. Our goal is that games that are getting out of hand either end faster or experience a comeback faster. Overall comebacks should happen at about the same rate or possibly a bit more often, but if this mechanic specifically reduces the number of comebacks, we have a lot of ways of increasing them without giving up on the advantages we're after with this system.

I don't believe that wave manipulation is totally dead - if you're just a little bit behind, slow pushes and freezes actually work better than before, since having extra minions around far outweighs the advantage - but I do realize it's likely to be more difficult and less valuable than before, at least in snowballed games. On the other hand, rotational play, objective control, and sieging become more valuable in those games."

The team will return on Tuesday for a "How's Preseason Tracking" Q&A on Tuesday, 11/17/2015!

Smite Charge Timer Start in 5.22

In a reddit thread inquiring on the late start to Smite charging following the 5.22 game start time changes, Riot Blaustoise commented

"Hey friends!

I posted in another thread about Bard chime spawns (sorry... I see "chimes" or "meeps" and I'm sucked into the post, can't help it), but this was an unintended change. My current understanding of the issue is that we only put back the smite charge time 10s instead of the full 15s. We'll be fixing this so that the initial smite recharge time will be 15s earlier corresponding to the camps spawning 15s earlier.

Hope that helps. In the meantime, give a juicy leash for your junglers. Especially if you have an Ekko in your game named Riot Blaustoise :D

EDIT: Forgot to mention, I'm checking in on 3 champion-specific spawn changes (Bard chimes, Kindred Marks, and Skarner Crystals). I'll update when I know more.

EDIT 2: It looks like we'll be updating the champion-specific spawns to reflect the 15s camp/minion changes.

EDIT 3: Hey I also wanted to quickly let you guys/gals know that I'm just a messenger of these changes. I work on the player labs, surveys, and analytics surrounding gameplay so I support these teams, and I'm constantly amazed by the amount of effort and passion that they put in to try to make this game even better for all of us. Preseason brought so many changes... and we know there are issues, bugs, imbalances (cough graves cough cough), and we're gonna tackle them the best we can. Thanks for your support and patience, I love y'all <3 <3 <3

EDIT 4: The scuttle crab spawn (and corresponding Kindred mark) is staying where it is to line up with the Dragon spawn.

TLDR: Brave designers are working deep into the night so that I can have 3 chimes before laning."

Repertoir also confirmed Skarner's initial capture time will be fixed in 5.23:

"Fixed for 5.23. Thanks for bringing this up."

Pathing Changes in 5.22

In a reddit thread inquiring to new oddities with pathing introduced in 5.22, Reinboom noted:

"Pathing was changed and in no small way. Pathing stuck prediction was rewritten almost entirely. This has been on the PBE for 5 months (with only small tunings in that time, last being about 2 months ago), as detailed here: [LINK]

Ideally, it would have a no effect for most people except having fewer cases where the reason you you could be stuck isn't obvious. As this is clearly not the case, I'll test some more forgiving values for how champions regard minions."

Corki's Special Delivery SFX

Riot Eno has posted on the boards that the team is looking into changing the current siren sound effects on Corki's new Special Delivery mechanic.

"Hey gang,

I wanted to reach out and let you know that we've gotten some great feedback regarding the siren sound that plays with Corki's Special Delivery ability.

Admittedly, the reaction that is elicited by this type of sound effect for some players was overlooked by the team, and we're going back to the drawing board on this one.

Thanks to all the players that reached out with their concerns on this. We'll give an update when we're closer to rolling out an update.

Cheers,

- Eno"

[NA] AT&T Peering Coming Online!

For NA players who may be using AT&T, Riot has reached and agreement with the ISP that should improve your connection!

Here's dArtgnan with more information:

"We have made big improvements for AT&T players! Recently, we've reached an agreement with AT&T that should improve connections and help lower ping. To explain what's going on, let's break this down into what occurred before and what will happen now:

Before:

As a player using AT&T, your connection to LoL game servers in Chicago would enter AT&T's network but there was a good chance that your connection would pass through another 3rd party network before making its way to the game servers. This would cause some inefficient pathing and could result in higher than normal ping.

After:

With our agreement with AT&T, when playing League of Legends your connection shouldn't pass through extraneous networks. The result will be a more direct path to our game servers.

So...What Does This Mean?

Beyond a more efficient path and hopefully lower ping, it's much easier for our teams here to identify and troubleshoot issues where players are getting poor ping or inefficient paths. Additionally, once we get AT&T connected to our various Points-of-Presence (PoPs) across North America (currently, Los Angeles, Dallas, Atlanta, San Jose), we will get connections onto Riots Direct Network even faster, giving your connection a highway directly to LoL game servers. We're working to AT&T to get them connected to our PoPs in the near future.

We aren't expecting players to have any issues after these changes, but if you do have problems connecting while on AT&T or suddenly have much higher ping, reply to this thread and confirm your ISP, as well as your location. Our Network team will be keeping an eye on this thread and respond to any concerns."

/ALL Chat | The Lamb and the Wolf

Last up we have a brand new /ALL CHAT, packed to the brim with Kindred content!

"ALL Chat’s back with a Kindred-filled episode of cosplay, art, and more featuring League’s newest jungler! Creators have imagined Kindred from a ferocious death-dealer to an adorable, chibi forest spirit, and we’ve got it all covered. Then, the hosts reminisce about falling in love with their favorite champions and how they connected to their first loves. Which champion first captured your heart and why? Let us know in the comments below!"

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Red Post Collection: ALL-STAR 2015 Details & Voting, 11/13 Patch Update, Continued Preseason / 5.22 discussion, and more!

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