8/31 PBE Update: Tentative Balance Changes

The PBE has been updated! As we continue with the 8.18 PBE cycle, today's patch includes tentative balance changes for Braum, Lucian, Renekton, and more!

Continue reading for more information!

(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.)

Table of Contents

• Balance Changes
• Miscellaneous
• Context & Notes

Miscellaneous

• Partial skin bios for each of the High Stakes skins have been added to the PBE! notquitefrodo noted on Twitter that these are not the full bios, and provided a peek at what they will be:

"If you're among those interested in TASTY SKIN LORE, here are all five upcoming descriptions of the High Stakes skins arranged in order. Each skin is the stanza of a poem styled after Lewis Carroll, and the order is Ez, TF, Morde, Syndra, and Shaco"

Balance Changes

* NOTE*: The PBE is a testing grounds for new, tentative, & experimental changes. Be aware that what you see below may be relative to other changes earlier this cycle! These are not official notes.

Champions

Aatrox

• Umbral Dash (E) heal increased from 20/21.25/22.5/23.75/25% to 20/22.5/25/27.5/30%

• World Ender (R) AD increased from 20/22.5/25% to 20/25/30%

Braum

• Base HP lowered from 576.16 to 540

Gnar

• Base armor lowered from 32 to 28

Lucian
[Context - not final values, more iteration coming]

• Piercing Light (Q) AD increased from 60/70/80/90/100% bAD to 70/85/100/115/130% bAD

Renekton

• Slice and Dice (E) 
• Dice Fury Bonus:
• armor reduction increased from 15/20/25/30/35% to 25/27.5/30/32.5/35%
• damage increased from 60/105/150/195/240 to 70/115/165/205/250

Sejuani

• Permafrost (E) damage lowered from 30/45/60/75/90 to 20/35/60/65/80

Trundle
[Context - not planned to go live, different iteration coming]

• Pillar of Ice (E) range lowered from 1000 to 850

Vayne

• Tumble (Q) cooldown lowered from 6/5/4/3/2 to 4/3.5/3/2.5/2

Context & Notes

1) Meddler noted some context on Trundle and Lucian changes, and noted they were keeping an eye on Kassadin:

[1] We'll be testing a different Trundle E nerf instead of the range change shortly (E slow % and/or CD, range is resulting in really heavy feel hit)

[2] We're looking to put a bit of power back into Lucian, mid game in particular. Probably won't be those numbers though, we're testing a range of things right now. Current values in internal testing are 60-120% for example, that's not final either though.

[3] Yeah, we're looking at him. Giving him a few days to settle, want to see how much of this is initial spike that people will play around better versus sustained power. If he's still looking this strong next week we might micro patch.

After users on Reddit noticed what looked like a Yasuo change, Riot Maple and GreaterBelugaWhale just in to note:

Riot Maple: There's not supposed to be any buffs at the moment. A designer went through and did a bunch of rescripting to his abilities (make them easier to work on in the future), and there may have been something that went wonky with that. We're looking into it.

GreaterBelugaWhale:  "Not meant to be buffed. Working on a significant rescript, some oddities may have affected numbers, but believe this might just be a house keeping/tooltip diff. Will look into it 

There should be very few functional changes from live Yasuo: his e now uses the same spell buffering irelia uses and his passive now scales with % healing and shielding buffs (ie: redemption) 

PS. Please don't build redemption on yasuo"

2) Regarding the relatively quiet PBE cycle so far for 8.18, Meddler tweeted:

"Should see some balance updates for 8.18 start appearing on the PBE today. We've been focusing on preseason work more over the past week, 8.18's getting more focus now though until it locks."

3) Check out Meddler's lengthy Quick Gameplay Thoughts for August 29th for discussion on upcoming changes and a few buffs, nerfs, and talking points as we near Worlds 2018!

4) ICYMI: Riot Scruffy put up a new post on Preseason and what upcoming changes we can expect - Preseason Development Update 1!

5) Earlier this week, DontHassleDaHoff posted an update on the issues with RP grants on the PBE:

Hi all! 

I wanted to give a quick update about PBE and address some things. 

It’s recently been brought to our attention that many of you are running out of RP. As some of you may remember we used to do a daily reset on your RP balance. We’ve made some changes to our systems and the service that automatically reset your balance broke. :/ 

We’re looking into a fix for this, however, it’s going to take a while for this to take place. 

Over the next few weeks we’re going to be going in and adjusting the Blue Essence price of content to make some things more accessible. We’ve started by making champions 1 BE. 

As a reminder, PBE is meant for players to test out new content and share your feedback. Currently most skins, ward skins, emotes and summoner icons are listed with a low Blue Essence price so that they’re more easily attainable. 

With our adjustment to the Champion Blue Essence price, we will be discontinuing the granting of RP by player support."

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