Red Post Collection: Elementalist Lux Login Dev Blog, Mordekaiser bugs, 2016 EU LCS Christmas Special, & more

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Table of Contents

• Making the Ultimate Lux Login
• Riot Jag on Potential Camille Nerfs
• Mordekaiser Bugs & Fixes
• Reav3 on Champion Updates
• 2016 EU LCS Christmas Special
• /ALL Chat: Happy Holidays!
• Quick Hits:  Tower First Blood, Beware of Scams, & more
• REMINDERS

Making the Ultimate Lux Login

A new Nexus article is up detailing how artists created the Elementalist Lux login screen:

Elementalist Lux Login: Water Form

Elementalist Lux’s story is one of internal struggle, and each of her ten forms was deliberately crafted to embody a particular emotion. Trying to capture the subtlety of sentiments in a typical login animation presented a challenge. In past login screens, champ’s were often portrayed from a distance, making it difficult to read their facial expressions. To better communicate Lux’s emotional journey, artists created League’s first portrait-style login animation. 

WAIT, IS THAT LUX? 

When looking at a champ’s silhouette, there are visual clues that help distinguish one from the other. An oversized pair of gauntlets lets you spot the Piltover Enforcer at a distance, just as a lamp post indicates you’re looking at someone who lacks a real weapon. Without these iconic characteristics, it might be difficult to differentiate, say, Poppy from Tristana at first glance. 

Artist Suke “hugehugesword” set out to capture Lux’s essence in a still-frame without relying on her complete figure or iconic wand—core components of her recognizable silhouette. After creating an rough version, he approached other Rioters with a question: Does this look like a League of Legends champion, and if so, who? 

For the first few rounds of drawings, people sporadically identified the Demacian mage, but many felt she was missing what made Lux feel like Lux: a bubbly, amicable persona.

Elementalist Lux's Light Form: Work-In-Progress

Armed with this feedback, Suke revisited the artwork, highlighting the lights in her eyes and the smile on her face. When he showed people the new drawings, they saw more than a just beautiful face. They saw Lux. 

In each image of Elementalist Lux, Suke wanted to portray a specific feeling. Her light form is an embodiment of hope, seen in the brightness in her eyes and light dancing on her face. Fire was built on fury, with dramatic, contrasting colors in her hair and an angular face shape to subconsciously convey harshness. Tranquility guided water form, seen in Lux’s restful expression and the cool, calming color scheme.

When an illustration is finished, it’s split into layers that motion graphics artist can individually control. For example, Lux’s hair can catch in a breeze without her shoulders and face also being affected by the movement. Some underpainting between layers is often needed so things can move freely without revealing unillustrated areas. 

Lux’s eyes were created in their entirety to avoid seams from appearing as her gaze shifted. When Suke went back to design Lux’s eyeballs, he was amused by the overlay and sent an image to his team—an internal meme was born. 

Here's a handful of the many layers that exist  within Lux's light form... and then there's that

MAKING MORE BY DOING LESS 

When motion graphics artists Adam “AdamKadamon” Oliveira and Timothy “BumsAreCool” Weiser began working with Suke to add movement to the artwork, they weren’t sure how to bring Lux to life without detracting from the portrait’s intimacy. The previous approach to animating login screens by adding dramatic animation to a ready-to-brawl poses wouldn’t work. The focus was shifted to subtle facial animations, background movements, and transitions.

By attaching levers to specific points of the image, artists can adjust Lux’s facial expressions

It wasn’t an easy adjustment. In the first attempts at adding motion, Lux’s eyes seemed to scan the room rather lock onto the viewer. “People consistently gave this feedback, ‘I almost wish she didn’t move at all,’” Adam says. The movements were so dramatic that it didn’t feel like she was maintaining eye contact. Giving her eyes more subtle, natural twitches re-established the connection between Lux and onlookers while still adding life to her face.

Lux’s Eye Movements: Work-in-Progress and Final

Tim and Adam also used motion to amplify the emotions captured in each image. Ripples of light softly reflect on to Lux’s face in water form, while lava cascades dramatically through her hair in fire form. Magnifying hope in light form was a trickier, but Tim was still excited. “I don’t have many opportunities to be like, ‘Make this cute as hell!” Tim says. “Light blooms, rainbow stuff, glitter in her hair—I was going ham on it.” 

WHEN A PLAN COMES TOGETHER 

Combining three unique images into one coherent, looping animation was tough. “We wanted the transitions to look like they’re a part of Suke’s art, like they’re just changing it over time,” Tim says. Early versions of these transitions, especially for fire form, featured drastically contrasting colors in an aggressive overlay. It was definitely fire, but it didn’t match with the more abstract, soft art style of the original. The transition felt natural once it mirrored the original color saturation levels and focal point.

Transition to Fire Form: Work-in-Progress and Final 

Besides literally connecting three disparate images, the transitions intensified the emotions embodied by each form. The heat of fire is so intense, for example, that the transitional overlay is powerful and dramatic, while the serenity of water warrants a smooth, rippling effect. 

The instant Lux shifts from feeling the fury of fire to the tranquility of water can be seen in her eyes. Adam says, “There’s this moment, less than a second, in fire form where Lux aggressively closes her eyes, like, ‘ARGHH!’ Then, she lets go and finds peace.” Similarly, when Lux opens her eyes after leaving water form, it’s to literally let in the light. This final addition made the transitions feel more than logistic: they represented Lux’s ongoing search for her true nature."

The login’s video was created at the same time as the music, yet the transitions still aligned with the beat. “It was meant to be,” Tim jokes.

Riot Jag on Potential Camille Nerfs

In response to a reddit thread inquiring about future Camille nerfs and offering many suggestions, RiotJag noted it is likely she will be nerfed and added:

"Quote:

I've spammed the ever loving hell out of camille lately and have just recently hit mastery 7 on her, and I can confirm that she is busted. However I feel like what riot generally ends up doing is just nerfing the base stats or damage of a champ like her until she is effectively gutted. There are less drastic ways to nerf her that will still keep her as a viable pick, but not as oppressive. 

The main thing with her that makes her hilariously busted in my opinion is her ability to trade for free in lane with little to no counterplay for most opposing toplaners. Unless you are playing jax, poppy, or fiora, camille's lane is almost as abusive as renektons with her also scaling better into the game. The main issue is the q2 prep e-aa-q combo, which can deal an upwards of a third of someones health with absolutely no way to deal with it. 

So what are the best ways to nerf her? 

-Increased e cooldown in the early levels by a lot, I feel like a ~20 second cd will keep her ability to trade for free down 

-Remove attack speed buff on e, its a completely unnecessary stat boost and I'm not quite sure why its there 

-Make her shield health percentage scale by level, starting at 10% and increasing to 20% 

These nerfs will serve to bring her back in line without going too far, if she still needs nerfs after that she can get looked at again

Agreed, Camille will need some nerfs. 

-Hookshot (E) CD is something we're looking at. Looking at mana costs here too. 

-The bonus Attack Speed on her aggressive uses of E serves a very clear purpose - to make Camille use her gap closer in order to be effective in combat. The less offensive power the E has, the more people will use it as an escape, and the less overall counterplay exists to take advantage of her downtimes. We may reduce the net AS gained but we're extremely unlikely to remove it as a mechanic. If anything, we'd further hit her raw AS/lvl (which is already fairly low compared to other AA-based duelists like Jax, Fiora, Irelia, etc.), which would retain reliance on using her best escape to score kills, even while ahead. 

Small rant here, but every fighter in this class that has potent free-target move blocks which are strong in escape cases tend to get their offensive use weighted extremely favorably. Examples: Fiora Q: Free Vital proc, on-hit proc, big damage, extremely large CD reduction. Vi Q: Insane damage (have you seen those numbers?), AoE CC, Passive proc, extra W proc. Jarvan E-Q: Huge damage, armor shred, AoE CC, AS aura to allies. Ekko E: Effectively double dash if used offensively, bonus damage, applies on-hits, Ludens, and Passive 

So you can make the argument that Camille's E is overloaded, but you'd be hard pressed to establish that Hookshot is unique in that regard. 

-Shield duration already scales with level. The percentage health is worth looking at, but her Passive is among the most useful levers to tune her Top Lane strength vs Jungle since it's champion-focused. This always should be a pretty significant window of power for Camille in a 1v1, even if it's tough for most top laners to deal with - and besides, the vast majority of dedicated laning fighters have a "window of insane trading power" combo too. 

More likely change to look at here will be base HP or HP/lvl, which is too high given her defensive tools. That will actually double-nerf her since her passive defenses will be lower, as well as her Passive shield. Other changes I'm considering are tweaking base HP regen or W mana cost to make damage done outside of her P window stick better. 

-Note on base stats: the community seems to view this as a poor or ineffective tool. That may be because the "sexiness" of such a patch note is low, and as a result when problem champions suddenly disappear (or appear) as a result of base stat changes, it goes largely unnoticed. That being said, these types of changes are among the most targetted and effective changes we can make to champions to adjust raw power level without impacting feel of the champion."

Mordekaiser Bugs & Fixes

In response to a reddit thread offering an extensive report on (mostly small) in-game bugs for Mordekaiser, RiotMEMEMEMEME shared they have time set aside to fix two large clusters soon:

"Replying here since it is the top post! 

Hey thanks again for putting this together! We always appreciate these kind of lists, I do have a update as to where these Morde bugs are at since your last post. 

After reviewing the previous thread we noticed there were two clusters of bugs:

1. Ghosts aren't firing using the standard auto attack flow, this would be what causing things like shiv, rageblade ect to not work.
2. We need (and by we need I mean us as designers) a input that is "This spell acts like alt-clicking" which would resolve a ton of the my ghost won't do what I told it bugs.

We have some time set aside to get these two clusters resolved, but that got pushed back a wee bit due to end of year Assassins follow up :(. Part of the reason its taking a bit longer than we had hoped after your last post is the amount of scripting/QA time required to tackle Morde is fairly significant and we would like to do this correctly so fixing a bug does not cause fix/fails (Like what happened when we were tackling Yasuo bugs a few months back) 

Again I can not thank you enough for putting this together."

As for the sheer number of bugs and how they tackle something like this, RiotPhillyBrew also added:

"/u/FX_Wafflefoot and /u/MightyFifi did a great job of explaining their comments. 

We almost certainly know about all or most of these bugs (but posts like these are always appreciated, you could find something we've missed). But it's not a question of "Can someone fix this?" it's a question of "If someone fixes this, how long will it take them and is that more important than this other thing they could be working on?" "Important" here is due to a lot of factors, things like:  

• How expensive is this to fix? Here expense is time and resources (engineers and designers) 

• How many players are impacted by this? Is it 0.01% of players or 100% of players? 

• How often are players impacted by this? Does this bug only occur on TT, when two champions with low play rates ult each other within 0.25s of each other or does it occur whenever a popular champion uses a spammable ability? 

• How big of a deal is it when this happens? Does this ability slow for 15% instead of 20% or accidentally make someone untargetable for the rest of the game?  

The tl;dr is: We try to find the greatest impact we can have on the game given the available resources. So even if we find bugs and know how to repro them that doesn't mean they will get fixed because they may not be as 'important' as other things."

Reav3 on Champion Updates

Next up we have Reav3 with a bit of discussion on champion updates, replying to a thread suggesting on doing more visual only updates rather than gameplay and visual updates (
In response to a large list of champions, Reav3 picked a few out to note they are higher on the list than others:

"Quote:

Amumu, Anivia, Blitzcrank, Caitlyn, Cho'Gath, Corki, Dr. Mundo, Ezreal, Fiddlesticks, Kennen, Malzahar, Morgana, Kayle, Nocturne, Tryndamere, Udyr, Talon Vladimir, Teemo

Could all use a model change with some better animations, to name a few.

Amumu, Cho, Corki, Mundo, fiddle, Kayle/Morg, Nocturne, Tryndamere, Teemo 

All are in the list to get VGUs one day. 

The others will probably end up on the list once we get through every champion we have on the list right now"

When asked about Kayle and Morgana, he added:

"Reworked together since there lore is so intertwined. More would probably get little, if any, gameplay changes."

Over in an associated reddit thread, Reav3 clarified:

"This wasn't a list of the only champions on the list. It was a response to someone asking if these champions can get a VU one day. Those ones are super low priority and it would be a long time until they ever get a VGU"

He added:

"Quote:

I'm really surprised to not see Pantheon or Nunu, they are probably the ones that need it the most right now, most of the champs announced there already look good enough with the new textures, Pantheon and Nunu still look like shit.

They are of course on the list and much higher priority then the ones mentioned in that post."

He added:

"Actually Cho is fairly high on the list"

When asked about someone like Corki - who generally is considered to have good mechanics or be a viable pick - getting a VU, Reav3 explained:

"One of the major goals of champion update is to go through the older champions and modernize them. Obviously the champions with deeper problems usually get prioritized first. 

Corki is mainly on that list because his theme/visuals are pretty dated. He's a very low priority though. 

A VGU is basically when we take a champion and build it from the ground up as if it was a new champion. We ask ourselves "what would this champion be like if we made this champion today, as a new champion?" 

Some things stand the test of time and don't need to be changed while others don't. By the time we get to Corki we could find that most of his kit held up and doesn't need to be changed. Tristana was a full VGU for example that had pretty small gameplay changes. 

A VGU just means that we change whatever makes sense to make a champion feel like a modern, cohesive champion that we would be proud to release today. It doesn't necessarily mean that it needs to have a full new kit (though in many cases with our older champions it does.) 

Also sometimes changes to lore/art/theme requires gameplay changes to make the overall champion feel cohesive."

He added:

"It would be a long time before Corki would ever get a VGU. Who knows how well his gameplay will hold up by then. If it holds up well it could be a Tristana like VGU. He's mainly on the list since his theme, visuals and narrrative are pretty dated."