5/15 PBE Update: Pyke, Dark Waters Diana & Vladimir, New Chroma, Icons & More

The PBE has been updated! As we dive into the 8.11 PBE cycle, today's patch starts the cycle with our new champion Pyke, the Bloodharbor Ripper, new Dark Waters skins for Diana and Vladimir, and much more!
Continue reading to for more information!

Table of Contents

• New Champion - Pyke
• Pyke, the Bloodharbor Ripper
• Stats & Abilities
• Voiceover
• Lore
• Release Skin - Sand Wraith Pyke
• New Skins
• Dark Waters Diana
• Dark Waters Vladimir
• New Chroma
• New Summoner Icons
• New Ward Skin
• ARAM Updates on PBE
• New Tutorials are now live on PBE!
• Balance Changes
• Context & Notes

New Champion: Pyke

Following his champion reveal, PYKE, the BLOODHARBOR RIPPER is headed to the PBE!

Pyke, the Bloodharbor Ripper

Stats & Abilities

Stats:

• Base HP: 600
• HP Per Level: 110
• HP Regen Growth: 0.1
• Base Mana: 380
• Mana Per Level: 50
• Base MR: 32
• MR Per Level: 1.25
• Base AD: 60
• AD per level: 2
• Base Armor: 42
• Armor Per Level: 4
• Attack Speed: .667
• Attack Speed Growth: 2.5
• Base Move Speed: 330
• Attack Range: 150

Abilities:

Gift of the Drowned Ones (Passive)

"If Pyke cannot be seen by enemies, he will rapidly regenerate [30 - 81%] of damage he has recently taken from champions, up to x. 

Pyke converts all his Bonus Health from any source into Attack Damage instead."

• Bonus Health to AD Scaling is [14 bonus HP = 1 AD]

• Regen Rate based on level - 30/33/36/39/42/45/48/51/54/57/60/63/66/69/72/75/78/81%
• Maximum Health Regen = [25% to 50% of HP, scales up with AD - 238 AD to hit cap]
• [238 AD to hit maximum effect of 50%]

Bone Skewer (Q)

Cost: 70 Mana
Cooldown: 16/14/12/10/8
Range: 400

"Choose a harpoon attack: A ranged throw that pulls an enemy or a quick high damage melee strike. Targets hit by either attack are slowed by 90% for 1s. 

Press: Pyke strikes all enemies in front of him dealing x (+x) [115% of HOLD damage] physical damage. 

Hold: Pyke throws his harpoon, pulling the first enemy struck towards him and dealing 75/125/175/225/275 (+60% Bonus AD) physical damage."

Ghostwater Dive (W)

Cost: 75 Mana
Cooldown: 12/11.5/11/10.5/10 sec
Range: 600

"Pyke enters Camouflage and gains 60/65/70/75/80% (+4% per 100 bonus AD) decaying movement speed for 5s. 

Stealth - Camouflage: Pyke is hidden from view while enemy champions remain outside his detection radius. Attacking or casting spells ends Camouflage."

Phantom Undertow (E)

Cost: 50 Mana
Cooldown: 15 sec
Range: 550

"Pyke dashes, leaving a drowned phantom behind him. After a short delay the phantom returns to Pyke, dealing 95/130/165/200/235 (+80% Bonus AD) physical damage and stunning for 1.1/1.2/1.3/1.4/1.5s."

Death From Below (R)

Cost: 100 Mana
Cooldown: 120/100/80 sec
Range: 750

"Pyke strikes all enemy champions in an X, blinking to and executing targets below 185-620 (+140% Bonus AD) health. Enemies not executed instead take physical damage equal to the threshold. 

When an enemy champion dies in the X from any source, an assisting ally also gains full kill gold and Pyke may re-cast Death From Below again within 20 seconds. 

Ally gold granted: x"

• R's base damage scales with Pyke's Level (starting at 6)  = 185/225/265/305/345/385/420/455/490/525/560/590/620 
• Gold granted to ally via an inventory item called "Your Cut". 
• The execute will bypass shields if target is under threshold .

Voiceover

Here's Pyke's voiceover, clocking in at just under 15 mins:
and here are Pyke's Special Interactions:

Lore

[No lore in the files just yet - look for more soon.]

Release Skin

As seen in Pyke's reveal, his release skin is SAND WRAITH PYKE!

New Skins

Two new skins are also pulling into port for 8.11- Dark Waters Diana and Vladimir!


Here's Nurse Flan with a bugs & feedback thread for Dark Waters Diana:

"Dark Waters Diana is the latest Bilgewater-themed skin! Spooky, moonlight dark water themed! 

• New model and textures - Fancy leather, with an even fancier hat!
• New VFX for all spells - Dark, magical water manipulation!
• New SFX for all spells - Underwater maaaaagic!
• New recall animations - Floaty, whirlpool danger!
• New light VO processing - Underwater echo-y! 

As players who get the first look at this in-progress skin, it would be wonderful to hear your constructive thoughts and feelings on the new Dark Waters skin! The feedback and bugs you leave here will help us get a better idea of things we may still have to take a look at. :] 

See you on the Rift!"

Here's Nurse Flan with a bugs & feedback thread for Dark Waters Vladimir:

"Dark Waters Vladimir is surfacing as one of the new Bilgewater-themed skins! 

• New model and textures - He's got that fancy water cape!
• New VFX for all spells - Dark, spooky water.
• New SFX for all spells - Splish splash, he's taking a bath! (aka - water splashies, but scary ones)
• New recall animations - Spooky water manipulation!
• New light VO processing - Underwater ripple-y! 

As players who get the first look at this in-progress skin, it would be wonderful to hear your constructive thoughts and feelings on the new Dark Waters skin! The feedback and bugs you leave here will help us get a better idea of things we may still have to take a look at. :] 

See you on the Rift!"

New Chroma

New chroma were added for upcoming skins this cycle -  Dark Waters Vladimir (x5), Dark Waters Diana (x5), and Sand Wraith Pyke (x7)!

New Summoner Icons

Along with the new champion and skins, a fleet of five new summoner icons are now on the PBE:

New Ward Skin

Along with Pyke, A new ward skin is now on the PBE:

The Ripper Ward

ARAM Updates on PBE

Here's Riot Popc0rner with more on changes testing in ARAM:

We've got some changes to ARAM coming to PBE! 

Here's a quick list of what's new. We'll be posting a full /dev article on the Nexus that breaks down the reasons behind some of these changes (and more) soon.

• You now start with the correct amount of experience for Level 3, instead of starting with no experience
• Warmog's Armor has been removed
• Dark Harvest soul drop amounts have been reduced from 5 (takedown) / 4 (cannon minion) to 4 / 2.

We've added 3 new experimental items to ARAM:

• Ghostwalkers
• Bloodletter's Veil
• Spectral Cutlass 

Go check them out, and keep an eye out for the Nexus article, where we'll be going into much more detail. 

Catch you out on the Abyss!"

Here's a quick look at the three new items + the new component item. See the balance section for more!

New Tutorials are live on PBE! 

Here's Riot Bazaam with details on the new player experience changes, first mentioned in /Dev: New Player Experience, that are now testing on the PBE:

Hey folks! 

I'm Riot Bazaam, coming to you from the New Player Experience team at Riot. Ya, we know, this has been a long time coming... but today, our brand new tutorials are ready to see the world on PBE. This set of 3 tutorials will replace the old HA Tutorial and Battle Training. There are still a few kinks we're working out, but we're in the home stretch and getting prepared to release these in the wild. 

Two quick notes!
1) We are not yet rolling this out to all accounts, so your account may still run the old tutorial and battle training. This is not a bug
2) To access the tutorials, go to Play --> Training --> Tutorial and it should take you to our new tutorial menu. If the first card in the selection carousel shows Howling Abyss, unfortunately your account is still using the old tutorials. 

Enjoy, and of course post any bugs and questions below. RIP Thornmail Ashe

-=Riot Bazaam"

Aatrox
[Context]

• Base AD lowered from 70 to 68
• Attack speed increased from .651 to .703

Context & Notes

1) Here's Riot Maple with context on Aatrox and other champions base stat changes (separate from the marksman base stat changes testing on the PBE):

"We figured it might look a bit awkward, but we're just doing a bit of a pass on champs that have high enough presence in the jungle currently who are hit disproportionately by the AS removal from machete. He's one of the ones that fell into the bucket and we figured helping him still feel good in the jungle was pretty important for folks before the rework lands on live."

2) Check out Meddler's Quick Gameplay Thoughts for May 11th for more on what to expect in 8.11:

"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 

More solo carry potential work 

We're continuing to work on changes that get a bit more solo carry potential back in the game. 8.10's got the bounty changes (solo gold, not team gold) and jungle changes (junglers not being able to level 3 gank as early). For 8.11 we're looking at shifting some tower gold, on both outer and inner towers, from team gold to solo gold, focus that increased power more on whoever's gained that advantage for their team. 

One important thing to note is that increased solo carry potential is going to result in more cases of single champions snowballing and deciding the game. We think we've pushed too far on teamplay, hence some movement back in the other direction. Does mean there'll be more cases of one person doing well, getting fed and dominating though. If your actions as a single player can carry the game, so can other people's. We think that’ll be good overall, but will come at some trade off. 

Other 8.11 Changes 

Banner of Command:

• Looking to make it less rushable. We think Banner creates some cool strategic play post laning phase. During lane though it tends to just somewhat degrade laning interaction, particularly on champs who use all of its stats pretty well (hi Sion). Might do something like make the bonuses it gives minions scale with champion level as a result.

Celerity

• Celerity's currently a strong all purpose choice in its row that drowns out other options too much. As always on movement speed it also contributes to creeping up average speeds. We were going to make some changes to it in 8.10 with the other minor runes balancing, but concluded something a bit larger was needed than just numbers tweaking. Going to be looking at modifications like MS only in combat, or after every ability cast, rather than on all the time as a result.

Shurelia's

• Currently looks too good on a few champs using it primarily personal power (Vlad, Singed etc) and not good enough on those picking it up to help their team (supports for example). Going to look at equalizing that a bit (team users stronger, other users weaker, or at least not stronger again).

Champions

• We'll continue work on Taliyah and Kha'Zix that was started during 8.10 but didn't make the cut off for the patch.
• Other champion balance changes to come too, we're currently trying an approach where we focus on systemic stuff (items, runes, jungle etc) early in the patch and then champion balance implementation kicks off a bit later. More details to come as a result.
• Likely for smaller changes we take a look at at least Sejuani (hit too hard by recent changes) and Zyra (seeing what we can do to make plants a bit better without putting them back in 'it's not worth paying the cost to kill these' land).

Sterak's 

We'll be holding off on Sterak's changes (e.g. decoupling it from TriForce builds somewhat) until we know where other possible fighter item changes are up to. Will revisit in a few patches as a result."

3) 8.11 is set to include a ton of marksmen related changes! Catch up with this recent Patch 8.11 Early Look article for more context, tentative changelists, and more.