1/26 PBE Update: Lunar Revel Login Theme

The PBE has been updated! As we continue the 8.3 PBE cycle, today's patch includes the Lunar Revel 2018 login theme and more tentative balance changes!
Continue reading for more information!

Table of Contents

• Lunar Revel Login Theme
• Miscellaneous
• Balance Changes
• Context & Notes

Lunar Revel Login Theme

A new login theme for the 2018 Lunar Revel is now on the PBE. The login screen features the upcoming Lux, Nasus, and Warwick skins first seen in the 8.2 PBE cycle. 

Miscellaneous 

Master Yi
[Context 1 / 2 / 3 from ricklessabandon]

• Alpha Strike (Q) AD ratio increased from 100% to 110%

• Meditate (W) reverted back to live values.

• Wuju Style (E)
• True damage increased from 14/23/32/41/50 to 18/26/34/42/50
• Active bonus AD ratio increased from 25% to 40%

Nunu
[Note: Hotfixed to live on 1/25]

• Consume (Q) damage lowered from 3/5/7/9/11 (+5 per 100 AP) to 1/2/3/4/5 (+5 per 100 AP)

Context & Notes

1) Here's Riot August with a Rengar changelist for 1/26:

"1/26 PBE changes (In honor of Monster Hunter: Rengar)

P -
Fixed a bug where the %AP boost on bonetooth wasn't working 

Q -
Empowered Q now consumes ferocity on cast (should fix a number of bugs and feel issues) 

W -
AP Ratio:: .8 >>> .7 

R -
Closest enemy leap bonus:: gain 4 Ferocity >>> gain 3 Ferocity and shred the target's armor by 10/14/18 for 4 seconds. 

Cool Stuff -
Tiamat now uses the Q animation
Casting Q before you leap will now cause the leap to use Q animation
We're looking into bonetooth VO spam. No updates as of yet.

Context:
Turns out bonetooth wasn't amping AP. Now it does. This terrifies me. AP Rengar had already been doing well thanks to the E ratio and Q lichbane synergy. I nerfed W AP ratio to compensate. Still worried that AP Rango may not be different enough from AD and will be "just better" if we make it viable. Will continue to validate. 

Full ferocity on ult opened up some cool plays, but due to the timing of the ferocity gain (start of leap) it was messing with Rengar's ability to combo. If he wanted to cast something in air (say Bola Strike) he's be forced to empower it. Hope is that by reducing the gain to 3 it will offer more reaction time for opponents to flash while at the same time opening up a lot of creative combos that will make Rengar feel better as well (air skill into empowered skill). Still curious if ferocity is a good direction for the R. Iteration continues. 

Added an armor shred to the leap on closest bonus because we feel it is important that it empower him MORE vs. the guy he leaps on (was seeing instances of him leaping to a random tank to get the ferocity and then flashing on the ADC to murder them). Lethality Rengar has been suffering in our tests since the removal of the crit/bonus damage so a shred seemed like a good middle ground to help him out. The damage isn't upfront, so he can be flashed, but his followup damage will be much stronger (due to how flat shreds/lethality synergize with themselves). Like full ferocity, this may be the wrong direction, will continue to explore and validate (feedback is appreciated). 

Also noticed that people liked the old Tiamat and Q leap animations so we hooked up new ones with the assets we have. Did we get it right? Particles look weird on Q leap right now, but if the direction is good, those can be cleaned up in the future."

2) Here's context from ricklessabandon on the Master Yi changes and reverts in today's PBE update:

[1] "um, the full answers to those are too lengthy for me to get into right now, but i'll try to give real answers despite trying to keep it short… though i'm pretty awful at keeping things short so it might not matter. also, full disclosure, we don't have enough time to actually get the meditate changes to a good spot so i already pulled them from 8.3 (and there's no guarantee we'll bring something like them back). 

so, yi isn't doing too great right now overall — good opportunity to actually give him attention since no one should really object too much. wanted to do something for the longer term because i'd like yi to be a character that has a happier and more stable future — instead of just raw buffing the most understood yi (let's just say 'on-hit carry jungler' to keep it simple) which we know has to be kept on a tight leash, i was hoping to shift things around a bit such that he might be able to do things like play outside of the jungle, or get closer to having item build flexibility/resilience. adding things like "flat cdr on hit" and "channel time scales with cdr" were meant to take some of those first steps. getting more specific about the meditate mechanic itself, i wanted to give yi players a more clear decision point: either spend as little time in the W as needed for the damage reduction and attack reset, or go for a full channel when it's safe to do so. essentially, i wanted to drain power out of the channeled heal there weren't as many situations where you make a decision every 0.5 sec to channel a little bit more or stop (because realistically you're often supposed to break out of it quickly). the most recent version gave 1 attack with healing/cdr even on a snap cast which helped make that more clear, but that never went to pbe. 

in any case, it's kind of moot since we don't have the time to develop the changes and build confidence in them. hope it was insightful at least!" 

[2] "it wasn’t going to be much of a shift when it was finished, but generally: it buys room for a lower cooldown, and the pre-meditated use gave a lever to make cdr scale more sharply. also helped out laning more than jungle, which i think is helpful in a long-term view for yi. kind of a lot of little reasons."

[3] "the changes i put in earlier today are for his Q and E, and are mostly just damage/scaling increases — i don't plan to do anything to other abilities this patch"

3) Here's Meddler's quick gameplay thoughts for January 26th, covering Precision stats, Bot late in mid-season, & more:

"Hey all, 

Usual Disclaimers 

These posts will often contain talk about future work we're doing, or planning to do, that isn't yet guaranteed to ship. The nature of the work could change or, depending on what we discover, projects mentioned may get put delayed or even stopped. If you'd like to see a Tweet whenever a new one of these posts goes up: https://twitter.com/RiotMeddler 

Splitting Precision's Stats 

At this point it's looking very likely that in 8.4 we make it so Precision splits its stats with your other tree selected. That means Precision primary/Sorcery secondary would give AS and AD, as would Domination primary/Sorcery secondary etc. Same change that was made with Resolve recently, which overall seems to have been a net positive in terms of opening up Rune choice more. It's also got the benefit that now regardless of which combination of paths you're choosing you'll get some of the primary path and some of the secondary (though with Sorc+Domination both are Adaptive AD/AP of course). Not expecting this change to address all the issues with stats in the Runes system, we do think it'll help noticeably though and is something we can change quite quickly. 

While we think it will open up Precision primary to a wider range of champs it does have some downside for champions who want to take Precision secondary but don't want attack speed much. Something we'll be testing as a result is skewing the stats split towards one tree in some cases. Sorcery primary/Precision secondary in particular might end up looking something like 70% AP/30% AS, rather than the straight 50%/50% splits Resolve uses with all the non Inspiration pairings. 

Mid-Season: Opening up Bot Lane 

About a week back we put out a video dev diary covering some of our goals for gameplay in 2018. Worth a look if you haven't seen it: 

https://nexus.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/2018/01/dev-diary-gameplay-in-2018/ 

One thing mentioned there I figured it would be good to talk about a bit more is our plan to open up bot lane to a wider range champions in the farming position. It's something we've been interested in, and talked about, for a long time, but haven't dedicated the needed effort to to properly support non marksmen there. That's meant a game state where marksmen have been effectively a required pick as a result. A lot of players have called us on that, in particular that we've talked of wanting to support more diversity, but haven't opened up the most consistent part of team comps. 

Our biggest goal with mid-season is to change that, make it so it's a really effective choice to sometimes run a comp that doesn't have a marksmen in bot lane, or potentially doesn't have a marksmen at all. It's kind of workable at present, but we agree should be a lot more so. That's likely to involve work on items for non marksmen bot lanes, adjusting some supports so that they've got stronger synergies with non marksmen, maybe changes to things like how towers take damage even. We generally want to stay away changing individual champs so that they go bot though, this is about opening up the position to other classes, not putting mechanics on champs that are bot lane specific. 

Details overall still being worked on - we're just kicking off planning and investigation right now. 

It's likely that, at least initially, we're supporting a range of non marksmen in bot, but that a number of other classes still don't have a way to succeed there (e.g. a lot of mages might be effective choices there, but skirmishers not). Assuming the initial opening up worked well we'd then want to continue to gradually open the position up over time. 

Spell Agro Fallout 

Very early days on this (writing when we've only seen about 12 hours of play or so). So far though it doesn't look like any champ's got hammered too hard by this change. Pantheon looks to be one of the most affected, but, at least off early data and observation seems to be a fairly mild power loss still. More thoughts to follow once the change has been out for a decent amount of time, no compensation changes planned yet at least though."