Today's red post collection includes a brand new Yasuo Figma available for pre-order in the merch shop, ZenonTheStoic discussing upcoming 6.14 Taliyah W&E changes, Meddler noting Talon will likely get a new passive in the assassin update, Definitely Not Dominion returns in RGMQ Friday, and more!
- Champion & Skin Sale 7/5 - 7/8
- This Week in Esports [June 27th - July 3rd]
- Free Champion Rotation, Week of July 5th
- 7/6 PBE Update: Pool Party Miss Fortune Splash Art, Uncle Ryze Eagle Screech, Ezreal Q Vfx, & more
Table of Contents
- Yasuo Figma Available for Pre-Order
- RGMQ - Definitely Not Dominion returns Friday
- New Talon Passive in Assassin Class Update
- ZenonTheStoic on Taliyah changes for 6.14
- Unintentional Leona Changes in 6.13
- [VOD] Design Livestream w/ Scarizard & CertainlyT
Yasuo Figma Available for Pre-Order
"Honor is in the heart, not the name. In collaboration with Good Smile, we're bringing Yasuo, the Unforgiven, to the figma series. The articulated action figure comes with his sword, flute and a wind tornado, which you can use to create various poses and act out different scenes. Pre-orders will come with an exclusive Yasuo collectible metal card. The Yasuo figma is estimated to ship in December 2016."
RGMQ - Definitely Not Dominion returns Friday & Updated Schedule
Here's the updated RGMQ schedule, which includes two mysterious bombs for July 15th through 18th and 22nd through 25th followed by Legend of the Poro King from July 29th through August 1st.
While it is only a guess, the two bombs seems likely to be the new NEXUS SIEGE mode that has been testing on the PBE over the last two cycles.
New Talon Passive in Assassin Class Update
With the assassin class update planned for later this year, Meddler noted that it is very likely Talon will received a new passive:
"Quote:
Why Talon's passive?Frankly it's a bad passive on anyone. It's not a high enough value to be very meaningful choice wise. Even on a really auto attack centric champion it wouldn't add much gameplay at 10%, given you generally want to CC people you're auto attacking anyway.
It's not appropriate to just buff it on Talon though until it's relevant, given he's not weak. We'd have to strip power out of other parts of his kit to do so. Instead it's a prime opportunity to just do something better. I expect that, regardless of whether Talon's one of the assassins we do bigger changes to or just one who gets smaller changes, that we'll give him a new passive in the pre-season update."
ZenonTheStoic on Taliyah changes for 6.14
[NOTE: While this was already posted in the last red post collection, adding it in again here for visibility and to include ZenonTheStoic follow up replies!]
"Hello friends of the rocky weave!
Taliyah has been out for three patches now and we've had ample time to look at what worked and what didn't. Having looked at a stupid amount of games myself, I've come to the conclusion that I was wrong about the W. Here's the TL;DR: we're switching the W to a vector cast*, removing the spell lockout before eruption, and nerfing the E to go along with those changes.
(* vector casting is the casting paradigm that Viktor's Death Laser and Rumble's Equalizer use)
If you're still with me, let's talk about why we're making these changes, what I learned from the W, and what this means for the future of Taliyah.
First of all, why are we making these changes? It comes down to one very simple thing: using the spell with the constraints I put on it in the interest of game health proved too frustrating for too many people. I made a bet that most players would be able to accept these constraints (particularly the lock-out delay), and I was wrong. So we're changing it!
Let's talk for a second about what the lock-out delay was, why it was in there to begin with, and then loop around to double-cast vs vector cast.
Right now on Taliyah as of patch 6.13, after you cast W you cannot cast further spells until after the W delay is over; this is what I mean by lock-out. The thinking was that the W-E combo would have been too strong if we allowed you to get it off whenever you hit the W. The difference here is that on live in order to toss people into your minefield, you have to cast the minefield first, committing more resources and putting the enemy on notice. There's no question this is healthier for the game as a whole as it provides the enemy with more of a chance to dodge, and it also allowed me to make the impact of landing a E-W combo much higher. (The math here is simple: the more infrequently an effect occurs, the stronger the effect gets to be, up to a limit).
Feeling locked out of spells that should be available to you (because they're not on cooldown and you have the mana for them) just feels awful. Players have told us loud and clear, so after much discussion with other designers I made the call to remove this lock-out and look for ways to nerf the W-E combo. Before I talk about those nerfs, let's touch on vector cast real quick.
Other than being fairer to the enemy, the W lock-out allowed me to design a version of vector cast that didn't put as much pressure on the player to chain their inputs together as quickly as possible. By saying "don't worry when in the delay you decide which direction you want to throw people to, you've got time" I wanted to give players something more learnable. It's hard to track this, but anecdotally the W seemed very easy to pick up and use. It's only when you start trying to optimize around it by chaining other spells into it that you run into the frustration of the lock-out. This new cast type of "press the button twice, but the delay starts after your first button press" was useful only in a world where there was no external time pressure on the player to execute quickly. Now that we're dropping the delay, it becomes the optimal play to input W as quickly as possible so that you can chain E and Q into it (you can cancel the E's animation with your Q). This means the double cast type becomes a hindrance, not a boon, to the player, so we're removing it in favour of vector casting.
In this new world, a Taliyah who can hit her W can spike an enemy HARD. She can chain the E into it, getting the initial cast damage plus the combo damage out of it, and she can instantly start pelting the enemy with her Q. That's a LOT of burst damage for a character who shouldn't be mostly about burst damage (as a disruptor Taliyah should deny the enemy certain zones and bring a constant stream of damage). This means we had to nerf something.
What we landed on for now is nerfing the maximum damage you can get out of a perfectly played WE combo. The way we're doing this is by introducing falloff damage to the E. Your first hit of the E will do the same damage as currently on live (so if you're just casting it on the backline of the minions to push the wave, nothing's different), but every further hit will do 10% less damage. So if you hit a unit with the initial cast of the E, then drag them through the maximum of 4 mines, each mine will do successively less and less damage. This works out to about a 150 damage nerf in the best case, but do keep in mind the best case situation of the rank 5 E has 720 base damage.
We're hoping to ship these changes with 6.14."When asked about additional nerfs for Taliyah, ZenonTheStoic added:
"Quote:
You're probably going to have to end up nerfing her more anyways.
ZenonTheStoic continued:She was already looking just a little teensy way too goddamn strong after people got used to playing her (seriously, she's got a 63-64% winrate for the more experienced players mid lane, and her early-mid game is alllll the way out of line), and now you're giving her a full burst combo to optimize as well.This is quite likely. We wanted to keep this changelist as simple as possible, but we're already looking at Q mana and W CD."
"Quote:
What are you reading? Her playrate is 64%, her winrate is only 53%, and that's only from a pool of 9000 players, as compared to Ashe's 54% winrate from 49000 players.Let's be careful with numbers here ;)
Her play rate is around 5%, which is pretty low. Her win rate in plat+ is around 53%, and her experienced winrate (after 30 games) is between 58 and 59%. This latter is the highest in the game, and that's the big problem we have with her and the reason we may have to nerf her more."Shortly after the post ZenonTheStoic returned to the thread to reply to feedback regarding the changes, expanding more on the why and how of the change:
"Hi Mac2492!
I think a lot of your concerns and worries in here are spot on. Particularly this bit is almost verbatim what I said myself when this was first suggested:
Right now she requires careful positioning to poke with Q. You drop an E to zone and/or setup for a kill combo. If they don't run, you W them into the boulders and make them regret it. After this change, Taliyah will just stand somewhere without Worked Ground and focus on landing a single Seismic Shove to get the rest of her kit for free. Most of the intricate strategy involved in using Taliyah has gone out the window.While saying that all strategy has gone out of the window is a little exaggerated, you are right in that the tactical complexity of pre-placing E was a very useful limiter on Taliyah's top potential.
Before I go on I should give you full context: the change described in the OP has been locked in as of last Friday; we are 100% shipping this in 6.14. I know this must be a disappointment as you sought to change our minds with your well-argued post, but let's instead talk about what we will do going forward.
First of all, I'll re-state the very obvious reasons why we pulled the trigger on this change:
- Taliyah's play rate is very low for a champion this new
- Her mastery curve is the steepest in the game
- Anecdotally players struggled with the lockout without understanding the exact rules around it and why it was necessary for game health. All they felt is that the champion didn't let them do what they wanted to do, so they stopped playing her.
Now not every champion needs to be a new Lee Sin or Thresh in terms of popularity, but we feel we should at least make champions that a reasonable segment (mid-lane players, control mage players, etc) of our playerbase can enjoy playing. All our data suggest that this wasn't the case for Taliyah. We needed to do something to make her more fun to play as, and the W lockout was the obvious candidate.
Not everything you said originally must necessarily come to pass, though. I had the same concerns as you, as I said, but I've been convinced that they're not 100% accurate.
Yes, the scenario you describe where Taliyah players fish for a W and then sink all the rest of their kit into the enemy with little to no room for counterplay is plausible, but I don't think it'll be the only or even the dominant play pattern. There's a couple of reasons:
- W will still be maxed last and as such have a much higher cooldown than the rest of her kit. We're also adding 4s to W's CD at rank 5, so you will almost always have E much more frequently than W.
- W is pretty dodgeable. If the pattern you describe becomes too dominant, we can further tune W dodgeability. Our data suggest that Taliyah players land around 40% of their W casts on enemy champions; this includes farming casts.
- E's slow field makes W hits more reliable. If Taliyah can ever afford it, she will want to throw out E first to guarantee the W hit.
So yes, we will see a lot more fishing Ws into complete deletion of the enemy in that this wasn't really possible before, but our hope is that this isn't the only thing you will see.
Now for your suggestion to make the W->E combo specifically weaker. I like this a lot and have been thinking along similar lines, but for now I want to stay away from, as you correctly pointed out, adding further complexity to Taliyah. While we're not going to attack this right now, one somewhat cleaner way we could do this would be with a prime time similar to Gragas Q: Taliyah's E could, say, only do its full live damage after it's been on the ground for 1s. That way if you cast E first and then W you'd get more damage from the combo. It would also reward smart setup to deny enemy dashes over reactive casts while enemies are already dashing.
Again, in theory I like this idea, but the E is already plenty complex. We'll watch 6.14 and see if further changes are necessary. If so, this is one of many candidates."
When asked about the recent 7/6 PBE nerfs to Taliyah's W cooldown, ZenonTheStoic added:
:For context: she's somewhere around 52/53% winrate (top 10 in the game) and with 30 games experience she gets up to 59% winrate (highest in the game). Much as it pains me, she's too strong and needs a bunch of nerfs.
Additionally we need to do the W unlock change for feels reasons and we realize that's a further buff. If you're buffing a champion who, with 30 games played, is the most powerful champion in the game, something's gotta give. We had to nerf to compensate.
The secondary effect of the W CD nerf is that it desyncs rotations of W and E even further, hopefully counteracting the whole "I only ever E after W" effect of the W change.:
Unintentional Leona Changes in 6.13
"Quote:
Riot Gypsy added:is leona opWe've identified a few things that we believe have helped Leona out quite a bit in 6.13:
We've still got changes coming in 6.14 for her. Original intent of those changes was power neutral, given some of the buffs shipped without any of the nerfs would expect 6.14 to make her weaker than in 6.13. Not certain if that'll necessarily put her in the right spot or not though, systemic changes do seem to have been pretty kind to her, will need to keep an eye on how she does.
- XP changes. She's one of the more XP dependent supports, so increased XP access really helps her out.
- Changes that should have been in 6.14 that shipped early. Specifically, the root on E going to 0.5s from 0.25s and bonus attack range from Q going to 50 from 30.
- More good targets bot lane for her. Leona does well against squishy enchanter type supports and we've seen some increases in play rate for some of those in 6.13.
"What's actually happening is some of the buffs that were going out next patch got into this patch without the accompanying nerfs. Specifically her E roots a bit longer and her Q attack has slightly longer range. Basically, her E-Q combo is a lot more reliable right now."When asked if they will hot fix, Meddler noted:
"Quote:This hasn't been documented in the patch notes. Will it be hotfixed like Sona E recently?We've got two categories of hotfix bug. Those serious enough to justify the risk of a hotfix by themselves and those that are worth doing if a hotfix is already being done. Both the Sona bug and these Leona ones fall into the second category. In Sona's case we had a major hotfix to piggy back on at the right time, in Leona's case we haven't."
[VOD] Design Livestream w/ Scarizard & CertainlyT @ 5 PM PT
[1] "I've got another special guest for y'all today - Infamous designer CertainlyT is going to be on the design stream to do Q&A at 5PM PST!"
[2] "father of Darius, Zyra, Thresh, Yasuo, Kalista & reworks to Mordekaiser, Graves and Caitlyn! (so you either love him or curse his existence)"Tune into the LoL twitch channel for livestreams nearly every day of the week!
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