Surrender at 20: Red Post Collection: TFT Patch 9.15b Notes, QGT: August 2, & More

Today's red post collection includes the TFT Patch 9.15b notes, a /Dev update on TFT Ranked, Meddler's QGT for August 2nd, and more!

Continue reading for more information!

Teamfight Tactics patch 9.15B notes

Here's Riot Beernana with the TFT Patch 9.15b notes:

"Hey Tacticians, welcome to the Teamfight Tactics patch 9.15B notes.

This week we're making light changes to some of the outlier champions and items. We want to see how the meta naturally changes over the course of two weeks with minimal input on our end. We're pretty happy with the state of the meta at the moment as we're seeing different compositions compete at all levels of the game. Some of the highlights: Karthus and Kayle are losing some power as they're just too strong. We're also upping the damage of Runaan's Hurricane and few other items to give you more choices in that department.

Now, let's get into it.

Blake "Riot Beernana" Edwards

Champions

Blitzcrank

Fixed a bug so that other allies properly prioritize the target of Blitzcrank's ability...again.

Elise

Attack Damage: 40 ⇒ 45

Spiderling Attack Damage: 40 ⇒ 50

Karthus

Ability Damage: ~~400/700/1000~~ ⇒ 350/600/850

Ability Targets: ~~5/9/13~~ ⇒ 5/7/9

Kayle

Mana required to activate ability: ~~100~~ ⇒ 125

Pyke

Stun Duration: ~~2/2.5/3~~ ⇒ 1.5/2/2.5

Rengar

Ability Attack Speed Bonus: ~~0.4/0.7/1.0~~ ⇒ 0.3/0.5/0.7

Twisted Fate

Health: ~~450~~ ⇒ 500

Attack Damage: 40 ⇒ 50

Veigar

Ability Damage: ~~300/500/700~~ ⇒ 300/550/800

Items

Guardian Angel

Health on restoration: ~~1000~~ ⇒ 800

Guinsoo's Rageblade

Attack Speed per stack: 4% ⇒ 5%

Morellonomicon

Burn Damage: ~~25%~~ ⇒ 20%

Phantom Dancer

Now allows the holder to dodge critical strikes from abilities.

Runaan's Hurricane

Bonus Damage: ~~25%~~ ⇒ 75%

Statikk Shiv

Fixed an issue where it would deal more damage than intended when less than four targets where available.

Sword of the Divine

Chance to activate: 5% ⇒ 7%

Bugfixes

Fixed a bug that delayed players loading in to game until after the first carousel round. This was fixed last week."

Teamfight Tactics — /dev Update: Ranked Changes

Here's Riot SapMagic with an update on TFT Ranked:

"Hey tacticians, Ed "SapMagic" Altorfer here on behalf of the Teamfight Tactics team. Ranked‌ ‌has‌ ‌been‌ ‌out‌ ‌for‌ ‌a‌ ‌little‌ ‌while‌ ‌now,‌ and things are looking pretty good overall. Even so, we’re‌ ‌taking‌ ‌stock‌ ‌and‌ making ‌a‌ ‌few‌ ‌tuning‌ ‌adjustments.‌ Specifically, a couple ‌inconsistencies‌ ‌have‌ ‌made‌ ‌it‌ ‌a‌ ‌little‌ ‌more‌ ‌forgiving‌ ‌than‌ ‌we‌ ‌intended,‌ ‌so‌ ‌we're‌ ‌making‌ ‌the following changes which are heading to PBE for testing before we push them to live:‌ ‌

Demotion Protection

In TFT, you’re supposed to demote if you lose at 0 LP in any given division (barring a few rare exceptions) as a tradeoff for the lack of promotion series you see in other League ranked queues. Due to a bug, we weren't demoting players during their first couple games after promoting. From now on, you'll be demoted if you lose LP if you were at 0 LP when the game started.

Challenger/Grandmaster Demotion Protection (Also Affects Other Ranked Queues)

For players in Challenger and Grandmaster, you’re supposed to demote into Masters if you are at 0 LP at the end of the day, and then demote back to Diamond if you lose at 0 LP in Master. However, when there aren't enough Masters or Grandmaster players, it results in a situation where Challenger players can't demote. Moving forward, when you lose LP while at 0 LP in GM or Challenger you'll immediately be demoted to Diamond 1. One last note—we're making this change across all ranked queues, not just TFT.

LP Adjustments

In concert with the changes to demotion protection, we're making a few other tweaks to LP calculations to prevent extreme edge cases where you could gain more LP than you should. For the most part, you will not see or feel any changes based on this optimization.

And that's it! We're still building this thing with you, so please continue sharing feedback as we go through the first beta season of Ranked. Don't forget to have fun, and we'll see you in the arena!"

Quick Gameplay Thoughts: August 2

Here's Meddler's quick gameplay thoughts for August 2nd:

"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 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

Rate of Balance Changes in TFT

We're at the point now where we're planning on slowing down on rate of balance changes in TFT. Until now we've been making pretty frequent and large changes trying to get everything broadly in line. From what we're seeing balance is getting close to a point where natural meta evolution's going to counter a lot of things though. Changing too quickly undercuts ability for that to emerge and can make it feel like whenever you're starting to master things that expertise gets reset too much with new patches all the time. 9.15b next week's likely to be pretty small as a result and current thinking is 9.16, while it will introduce new content with the Hextech Champs, shouldn't be as heavy on raw balance as 9.15. Plan is to still act swiftly on anything really degenerative or straight out bugged of course.

SR Balance

As mentioned previously we're now in the part of the year where we'll be making few balance changes for a while, keeping the game in a stable state. That means in particular fewer mechanics changes to existing champions and limited systemic changes to things like items, the jungle, runes etc. We'll still have regular balance changes each patch of course, though they'll tend to be more at the level of tuning than big swings at things.

Looking at 9.15 things landed pretty much as expected. We don't have any significant followup planned yet for champs changed that patch as a result. For 9.16 we'll be keeping an eye on Yuumi, Irelia, Karma and Ezreal as all potentially too dominant, especially in a pro play context. Only specific change we're testing for 9.16 so far though is a nerf to jungle Sylas where his Q2 damage will also be reduced against monsters, not just minions. That's aimed at reducing the extra value he gets from being a strong flex pick, hope being that trimming that down will let us leave more power in him in other ways.

How we think about maintaining multiple versions of a feature

Given recent discussion around the Legacy Cursor I figured a bit of visibility into our thought process when it comes to offering multiple different versions of a feature might be of interest. Before diving into that though, for anyone who's missed it the option to use the Legacy Cursor's back in again.

So, first off, general thoughts on benefits and costs of maintaining prior functionality when we update something. I'm assuming here that the output of the feature in question is the same (e.g. a cursor you use to control the game, a patcher that updates the game for you, a particular UI etc). Things like old and new versions of a champion by contrast are a very different case because what one player chooses impacts others.

The benefit side of things is pretty straightforward - it lets us give different groups of players what they want. The cost side by contrast tends to be more complex, particularly depending on what the feature in question is. Meaningful costs we think about include:

The ongoing extra time that will be required to support multiple versions going forwards. Tends to mean things like having to make additional new pieces of art, fix the same bug in multiple places, additional QA testing each patch. For some features that time cost's trivial. For others (e.g. maintaining multiple versions of the in game HUD after its update a few years back) it adds a lot of extra time.

Some improvements that would be great for most users can end up being blocked by the need to support older functionality. Supporting really old operating systems for example can block improvements to things like memory usage for everyone else.

The total size and complexity of the game's code base has some impact on how quickly we can develop new features. Removing anything unnecessary gives us future efficiency as a result, which is particularly important for games like LoL with long lifespans and regular updates.

Looking at the Legacy Cursor as an example:

We shipped an update to LoL's cursor in July 2018. Our belief was that the updated version would be a better experience for most players. That generally seemed to be true, testing did indicate that a subset of players indicated they found the cursor change really disruptive though.

In response to that we added a Legacy Cursor option to allow players to opt into the old functionality. Cost, both upfront and ongoing, of doing so was pretty low and audience asking for the old cursor seemed to be of a meaningful size.

As with any legacy feature we made a note to reassess at some point, see if it was still worth supporting or no longer necessary.

Somewhere along the way we got some wires crossed in our internal communication and the need to assess the Legacy Cursor was assumed to instead be a need to remove it a year later. Cursor gets removed, players get understandably sad.

We then take a look at who's using it, see that it's around 10% of the LoL playerbase, and add it back in. Cost of maintaining it's low and value seems pretty meaningful."

Honor 5 Chroma Update

The Honor 5 chroma post was updated with new info on receiving both chromas this year:

"Update: Lots of you have pointed out that our initial announcement promised both Honor 5 chromas, not just one. To make good on our original promise, this year only, all Honor 5 players will get two Honor 5 tokens instead of one. (This means a first-time Honor 5 player can get both skins this season, or a skin and its chroma.)

If you've been super honorable (and a little lucky) for the past few seasons, you might already have both exclusive Honor 5 reward skins: Medieval Twitch and Grey Warwick. When patch 9.16 launches, we're adding chromas for both skins as a way to recognize the most sportsmanlike players. We'll add new chromas for these skins each season to keep the rewards coming.

THIS YEAR ONLY your 2019 Honor 5 capsule will contain TWO Honor 5 tokens that can be redeemed for Medieval Twitch, Grey Warwick, or one of these new chromas (if you already own the base skin). If Twitch is your one true love, you can go right for his new chroma instead of picking up Grey Warwick! (Sorry, doggo.) Capsules also contain a random emote or ward skin. In future years, Honor 5 capsules will contain one Honor 5 token.

We also know a bunch of you have already hit Honor 5—great work! If you already owned both Grey Warwick and Medieval Twitch when you received your Honor 5 Capsule this year, we’ll send you two Honor 5 tokens during patch 9.16 drops so you can redeem both of these new chromas.

Fight honorably, and we'll see you on the Rift!"

Riot IAmWalrus noted:

[1] If you're curious how the mixup happened, we originally planned to release multiple chromas for Warwick and Twitch this year, with H5 capsules granting one random chroma for each skin if you owned both skins already.

[2] After the first announcement, we decided to upgrade H5 by letting you (1) choose your reward and (2) pick a chroma if you don't want both skins. We also switched to one set of chromas to avoid flooding you with what was way over a dozen options.

[3] The original promise of two chromas got lost in the process of making these changes, so thank you for calling us out on it. As promised, now you'll get two chromas this season!

Miscellaneous

Check out these articles and video content from Riot Esports:

Reminders

To round out this red post collection, here are a few reminders on current promotions or limited time events!

Make sure to check out the LoL Twitch Prime rewards! - "Get up to 3 Legendary Shards, a full Legendary Skin, 7 Skin Shards, and 4 Exclusive Emotes as long as you stay a Twitch Prime member."

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Red Post Collection: TFT Patch 9.15b Notes, QGT: August 2, & More

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