6/14 PBE Update: New Emotes, Rift Rivals 2018 Login Theme, and 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.)

[Still Image / Music]

Aatrox
(late addition!**)

• The Darkin Sword (Q)
• Damage to minions increased from [55 - 100% based on level] to [65 - 100% based on level]
• Additional AD to monsters lowered from 20% to 15%

Jinx

• Zap! (W) AD ratio increased from 140% to 160%

Master Yi

• Alpha Strike (Q) 
• cost lowered from 70/75/80/85/90 to 50/55/60/65/70
• [Removed] No longer deals bonus damage to minions

Nunu

• Blood Boil (W) AP lowered from 40% to 20%

Context & Notes

1) Here's Meddler's quick gameplay thoughts for June 14th, incuding more context of the fighter items that didn't make it to 8.12, crit ADCs, 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 

8.12 Fighter items 

We came to the conclusion at the start of this week that we should pull the fighter item changes out of patch 8.12, despite the patch being about to go out and a lot of work/testing having been done on those items. Our belief is that they're good designs, but that the timing's wrong for them, both in terms of current power of fighters and amount of change we've put into the game recently. Hoping to still do them at some point, with pre-season being the most likely option. 

Our apologies to those of you who were looking forward to those, would expect their removal to be pretty frustrating for some players, especially if you play fighters who aren't among the stronger ones right now, or who don't have a broad enough range of itemization. Building up expectations around content like this going out, only for it to then be pulled away, is something we try pretty hard to avoid. In this case, despite the pain that creates, we felt we needed to pull them out though. 

Crit ADCs 

We're working on buffing the performance of some ADCs in 8.13. That'll be focused on those who need some help like Trist, Vayne or Jinx. We want to get a range of crit ADCs back to being reasonable choices, at least in regular play, quickly - we have no desire to leave that group of champs without a home anywhere on SR. We also want to try and maintain some of the new diversity we're seeing sometimes in bot lane too though, so are trying not to swing so hard we go back to only seeing marksmen. 

In terms of what's getting played at present, it's not yet clear what optimal is. We're seeing a range of different things tried in pro play for example, with a wide range of success and failure. Also seeing a lot of player discussion around non marksmen dominating bot, though in most MMRs/regions play rates of non marksmen are extremely low still (some exceptions). 

In terms of how we'll be buffing the thing we're planning to target first is the performance of those struggling champs in the 1 to 2 item spike range. Looks like we pulled the crit users back too far in that period, leaving them too dependent on getting to 3+ items to contribute. Given their multiplicative power late game we do believe champs using those builds should be weaker mid game, but not to the extent they are right now. That also ties in with lane diversity, which we think is driven significantly by really early game power, so buffing mid game should be compatible with both putting crit ADCs in a better spot and keeping some increased lane diversity for those who want it. 

Gold Funneling 

We'll be nerfing gold funneling strategies in 8.13. Gold Funneling, for anyone unfamiliar with the term, is where you give one champion much of the gold/XP from multiple positions. Taric Mid/Yi jungle with Yi getting really farmed, or Karthus mid/Nunu counter jungling, with Karthus taking most of the allied jungle, being current examples. 

The gold funneling we're seeing now results in what's usually a pretty interactive, interesting, and often playmaking lane (mid) becoming very passive, with one laner just doing their best to interact with the other player as little as possible and getting rewarded for that. In cases where the mid laner isn't CSing that problems exacerbated further, since CSing does at least create small windows of vulnerability, earlier in the game especially. While there's likely some counterplay to gold funneling that hasn't emerged yet, we're doubtful it's going to be around as easy to execute as gold funneling itself is or particularly fun/interesting in its own right. We held off on changes to gold funneling initially when it wasn't clear if it was a pretty niche thing that would bring some variety occasionally and be worth a bit of game health cost, or something that would become more dominant and need to be addressed even if it offered strategic variety. Pretty clear at this point it's the later. 

In terms of how we'll address it we're still testing exact tactics. Possible changes include returning the overlevelled XP penalty on jungle camps that got removed in 8.10, individual adjustments to champs like Yi (lane minion damage on Q for example), jungle items giving XP penalties for lane minions to offset the increased XP from jungle monsters etc. Should have more details soon."

2) Here's Riot Szymba with the Aatrox Bug thread:

Hello everyone! 

As you've probably noticed, Aatrox's update is now available on the PBE! We're still busy knocking out the last few assets, and are steadily burning down our bug count as well. If you happen to come across something odd during your time playing as, with, or against Aatrox on the PBE, please let us know through the Report a Bug Tool with a description of what happened and whatever other information you can provide. 

I'll be looking through this thread and the reports from the tool for the rest of the 8.13 cycle and beyond. 

-Szymba"

Early Snowball 8.13 

Here's a thread from PhRoXzOn about changes to help reduce early snowball in the 8.13 PBE cycle:

"Hello, 

Since it missed Quick Gameplay Thoughts, we are looking at reducing early snowball. Target is 8.13 and the changes are intended to be relatively low disruption (not particularly noticeable, but have good impact). 

We have seen early snowball increase slowly, but steadily over this season. As I pointed out in a reddit post earlier this week, this could be due to any number of factors that our data analysts are picking apart and will hopefully share when we have stable results. 

Some of the tactics we're looking at:

• Re-introducing the bounty on 2 kills and potentially a small increase to bounties 3 and above.
• Early death timer reductions from levels 1-7, while keeping an eye on what this does to teleport summoner.
• Outer turret global gold reduction 100 >>> 50. 

What we're not looking at for this pass:

1. Towers getting more tanky, especially in laning phase. 

I know this is a common complaint, but we have reasons to believe that elongating laning phases is not the best course of action right now. This is partially because having elongated laning phases means more chance for lanes to snowball out of control without meaningful chances for other lanes to intervene as well as just reducing the amount of game variance (through interaction with other champions). I personally think the average length of laning phases is about right at the moment, but the standard deviations (the length of the longest laning phases or the shortness of the shortest laning phases) are too large. This can result in some unsatisfying laning phases where the first turret goes down as early as 7 minutes. 

It also has the tendency to make games stall out even longer when already won, so I would want us to have a more robust (and flexible with game state) solution. Examples here could be: killing towers doesn't grant as much gold (which is frontloaded snowball), but instead grants a deferred or distributed bonus of some sort. Tower fall times could also be regulated more strictly (ie. very hard to drop before a certain time and easy to drop after a certain time)."

PBE Chat with the Playtest Team - 8.13

Here's Riot Novalas with the 8.13 PBE cycle PBE chat with the Playtest team:

"Hey guys! 

I’m Riot Novalas. I'm a QA Analyst on Riot’s Playtest Team, a group of high elo players who work on Core Gameplay playing new and in dev content before they’re released. It’s our job to test the changes that our designers come up with to ensure that we’re introducing positive changes to League in terms of both balance and fun. 

Lots of changes are planned in the upcoming patches and a lot of content is or has been on PBE for awhile. We’d like you guys to talk to us about your questions or concerns with upcoming content - We’ve tested a lot of it and would be more than happy to give you guys insight on how the changes are panning out. If you’d like us to test something in particular out - let us know and we can try to get it into a playtest. 

We've got a new and improved challenger coming to the rift on the PBE this patch. It's not Bbtrox or Cctrox. We've got Aatrox and he's undergone a large VGU. Myself and Riot Endstep were the primary playtesters for Aatrox so if you want our insight on favorite runes, builds, and optimizations, ask away! 

Let's make Patch 8.13 launch as smoothly as possible! 

Here’s a link to the content currently on the PBE.
https://www.surrenderat20.net/p/current-pbe-balance-changes.html 

• Brandon "Roku" Davis
• Chris “Auberaun” Roberts
• Nick “Riot Endstep” Frijia
• Sigmundur “GangIeri” Helgason
• Arnor “Riot Hjarta” Halldorsson
• Miktat “Riot Koyuncu” Koyuncu
• Brian “Riot Madness Heroo” Pressoir
• Nabi “Riot Novalas” Barak
• Dan “Riot penguin” Hardison
• Robert “ROBERTxLEE” Lee
• Louis "nubblez" Carpetto"

Check out [THIS PAGE] for a comprehensive list of the new content & changes currently on the PBE as a part of this cycle or catch up with the individual update links below !

• 6/12 PBE Update: Aatrox Champion Update, God-King Darius and Garen, new icons, & more!
• 6/13 PBE Update: Lion & Wolf Ward Skins, New Icon, & More