5/30 PBE Update: Dark Star Cho'Gath, Sweeper Rammus, Playmaker Lee Sin, New Icons, Chroma, & more

(Warning: PBE Content is tentative and subject to change - what you see below may not reflect what eventually gets pushed to live servers at the end of the cycle! Manage your expectations accordingly.)

1350 RP [Src]
 [NOTE: Purchases from June 21- July 20 go to support charities in your region]
[Note from Mortdog: "The plan is he will be available for 1350 during this time window (100% of proceeds to charity). After that he will go away for a while (exact date not set yet), then he'll come back as a 10 gemstone skin."]

975 RP [Src]

975 RP [Src]

[Video soon!]

Ornn

• HP regen increased from 1.8 to 2
• HP regen growth increased from .16 to .2
• Volcanic Rupture (Q)
• AD changed from [100% Total AD] to [150% Bonus AD]
• damage increased from 20/50/80/110/140 to 70/110/150/190/230

• Bellows Breath (W)
• Self slow when activating W increased from .75 seconds to 1.25 seconds

• Call of the Forge God (R) 
• Slow lowered from 40/60/80% to 20/40/60%

Sejuani

• Fury of the North (Passive)
• Max damage against monsters lowered from 400 to 300

• Winter's Wrath (W) 
• Mana cost lowered from 80 at all ranks to 65 at all ranks
• [New] Now adds 20% AP ratio on flail swing
• [New] Now adds 60% AP ratio on flail lash

• Permafrost (E) 
• AP ratio increased from 30% to 60%
• Damage increased from 20/30/40/50/60 to 30/45/60/75/90
• Tooltip rules updated to note "Enemy champions stunned by Sejuani cannot gain Frost for 10 seconds."
• [no longer applies to monsters]

Context & Notes

Lots to read up on! READ WITH SPEED, OK.

1) Here's an excerpt from Meddler's quick gameplay thoughts for May 25th, going over some of what we can expect in the 8.12 PBE cycle:

"Some things we're looking at for 8.12 

A lot of our time during the 8.12 cycle is going to go to monitoring the impact of the 8.11 midseason changes and making adjustments as needed. We're also planning on doing some other work as well though, some of that below. 

Gifted Shields

• Over the next few patches we'll be looking at Heals/Shields champions put on others. First thing we'll be testing, for possible inclusion in 8.12, is lowering the duration on some shields so that waiting them out's more feasible and timing for the user matters more.

Ornn

• We're potentially doing some work on Ornn. Goal there, rather than increasing or decreasing overall power, is to make him less of a safe pick when you don't yet know who he'll be facing in lane. That likely means giving him a clearer weakness enemy picks can capitalize on and giving him strength elsewhere.

Sejuani

• Sej buffs didn't make it into 8.11 since 8.10 analysis and followup ended up taking more time than expected. They should be in 8.12 instead as a result.

New AD items

• As I'd imagine most of you have already seen we're working on a couple of new items that should appeal to fighters in particular. Balance and polish is still underway, expectation is we'll ship both Spear of Shojin and Atma's Reckoning in 8.12 though. 

Pulling the Ryze and Azir investigations 

A little while back we mentioned that we were going to put less time into trying to close the regular play versus organized play divide on Ryze, Azir and Kalista so that we could put more time into other champs. Before that came into effect we wanted to try some changes we'd been discussing for Ryze and Azir for a while. Those showed some promise, but also looked like they'd require a fair bit more work to ship, with likelihood of some additional followup being needed too. We're iceboxing those changes as a result and won't be working on anything for those three champs that isn't just a regular balance adjustment for a fair while."

2) Here's Meddler's quick gameplay thoughts for May 30th, including thoughts on why the PBE isn't good for judging balance changes, Yorick, and more:

"Hi folks, 

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 

Why the PBE's not good for judging balance 

A question we see crop up pretty regularly is 'why don’t you balance off PBE testing more?'. We'd love to get a better read on balance changes while they're still on PBE so we can catch more things before they're live. PBE's not a good representation of normal LoL play though unfortunately. 

To dig into that a bit more though let's take a look at some data that compares impact of balance changes on the PBE versus those same changes later on the regular servers. The Live servers are the top set of data here, PBE the lower. Champs listed are those we made changes to in 8.9. The Live data's from just after the patch went out, the PBE data's from most of the PBE patch cycle. Win rate differences listed are relative to where champs were during the previous cycle for the respective servers (e.g. PBE Mundo in 8.9 is being compared to PBE Mundo in 8.8, not Live Mundo in 8.8). Apologies these aren’t the easiest to read graphs, they’re just slightly modified screenshots from one of our tools.

As you can see in some cases impact of a change is pretty similar in the data sets (e.g. Talon at +1.5% PBE and +2% Live). Most changes however are pretty different, sometimes extremely so (Shyvana, Mundo, Leona, Rammus etc show very different changes on PBE here versus Live). 

That difference between PBE and Live performance is due to a range of factors: 

• PBE has a lot of people trying weird stuff, not trying to win, lots of afking etc
• PBE has low quality matchmaking (very large skill discrepancies between players). That's due to both a low server population and lack of match history for most players to accurately gauge their skill.
• Even if people are trying and are appropriately matched there just aren't enough games on most champs for a good sample size. With a couple of hundred games for a champion margin of error is really large, even more so if a lot of those games come from one or two players spamming that champ.
• We also see a lot of people trying things for the first time (e.g. AP Shyvana in this example)
• Etc 

That's not to say PBE isn't really helpful. What's it's good for though is generally not balance related though. Things like:  

• Identifying and reproducing bugs
• Generating perception feedback on changes, both from people who've tried it in game and those who've read about it elsewhere (sites like Boards, Reddit, Surrender@20 etc)
• Assessing intuitiveness and usability that aren't dependent on the actions of other players much. Does this ability feel smooth to cast? Is this tooltip intuitive? 

Yorick 

We’ve got a change going into 8.12 where Yorick’s summons will update their stats as Yorick’s stats update. In particular that means things that give/remove AD post cast (Sterak’s, Conqueror, Mocking Shout etc) will be more relevant. 

Early Game Snowball 

We’ve seen an increase in early game snowball over recent patches, both statistically and in player feedback. We’ll be looking at that as one of our highest gameplay priorities for a while as a result. Some preliminary details about what we’re thinking later in the week. One of the challenges there will be managing both an increase in solo carry potential (another goal) with reducing early game snowball, given things that do one will often clash with the other."

Cursor Update on PBE 

Here's Riot BadTofu with a thread detailing the cursor changes that should be testing on the PBE today:

Hey all, we’re visually updating League’s cursor! The current one is an old classic, but there are a lot of things we want to improve, so let’s talk context. 

A cursor should always be clearly visible and easy to track on your screen. This one seems obvious, but isn’t always easy to achieve. League often has moments with a lot of visuals competing for our attention, especially in a big teamfights with dozens of spells flying back and forth. 

The classic cursor can sometimes get lost against the background, because its brown and yellow colors are pretty close to a lot of parts of Summoner’s Rift and its rounded, busier shape can be hard to pick out. We’re hoping the new version is brighter and cleaner, making it easier to see throughout the game. 

Cursor Comparisons

To make it even easier for players to always find the cursor, we’ve also added the ability to scale the size up and down - good news for anyone using a 4K monitor! 

A cursor should also give us immediate feedback for our actions. For example, the old cursor changes states (shapes and colors) to acknowledge when we’re doing different activities like hovering an enemy or placing a ward. We are still trying a couple different approaches on how to surface this info, and are looking for feedback! 

Hover Enemy

Hover Ally

Place Ward

Feedback pls!
The cursor is a feature that every player uses throughout their games, so we are going to give this a couple PBE cycles to soak and respond to feedback. We definitely want to hear your thoughts, especially in a few areas: 

Do you feel like you’re getting the feedback on your actions that you’re looking for?
In what situations do you most notice the changes?

But My Bronze Gauntlet? 

We know a lot of people have grown to love the old cursor, so when we ship the update in a few patches, you'll have a "Legacy Cursor" toggle in the options menu allowing you to switch back to... the legacy cursor. 

When 8.12 hits PBE today, the Legacy Cursor toggle will be disabled so we can get as much feedback as possible. We'll add the toggle part way through the cycle so we can make sure that works, too. Once 8.12 gets ready for shipping, both the new cursor and the toggle will vanish from PBE. Then they'll reappear for the 8.13 PBE cycle in a few weeks. We'll repeat this process a few times until the new cursor is ready to ship."

Changes to emotes coming to PBE in patch 8.12 

Here's Riot Pabro with details on changes coming for Emotes in patch 8.12:

"Hey everyone! 

While we love emotes, we’ve been working on a couple of ways to make them better. We’re gonna try these features out on PBE with patch 8.12. 

New: Emote Bubbles
One of the problems with emotes right now is that they’re mostly used to communicate with your lane opponent. Emote Bubbles show each teammate’s emotes, whether or not their champ is on your screen. 

We hope that this will encourage more within-team expression, like high-fiving your Top lane for that First Blood all the way from bot. You can disable Emote Bubbles in Settings if you don’t want to see them. 

New Auto-Fire Slots: First Blood and Ace
It can be hard to remember to use emotes, especially during a fight. So we’re adding two new auto-fire slots (which we tested during the April Fools event, for those who noticed!) for First Blood and Ace, so you can show ‘em how you feel without having to think. 

If you have other ideas for new auto-fire slots, we’d love to hear them in the comments! 

Emote Collection Tab Update
We’ve added some basic quality of life updates to the Emotes Collection tab. We’ve got more changes planned, but for 8.12 we’re making these core adjustments:  

• You can now view emotes that you don’t have and directly purchase them from your collection
• You can now sort emotes alphabetically or by the order in which your acquired them
• New Emote Sounds
• All emotes will have sound effects attached to them for a little extra oomph. 

Mystery Emote Token
In 8.12, we’ll be selling the Mystery Emote Token that was previously available in event loot bundles on its own. This new Emote Token will randomly award an unowned emote and will be periodically available in the store to purchase. The Mystery Emote Token can also drop previous event emotes that are no longer available for regular purchase! 

Emotes Sale ScheduleEmotes will now be a part of the regular skin sale cadence. Expect to see emotes older than 6 months on sale for deep discounts regularly! 

We look at all the feedback we can find, so please let us know what you think of these changes to Emotes while they’re on PBE! 

Pabro"