11/3 PBE Update: Chroma Assets, Loading Borders & More

Table of Contents

• Chromas
• Miscellaneous
• Balance Changes
• Context & Notes

Chromas

Miscellaneous

• Ultimate Spellbook is back on the PBE for testing! Here's Riot Reinboom with a bugs & feedback thread:

"Hi again! I'm Reina Sweet (aka Riot Reinboom), Lead Game Designer for Modes. 

Ultimate Spellbook will be reenabled on PBE soon. The mode will be active on PBE all through this patch cycle (and into being released!). Since 11.22 had a fairly short run, I will be including those changes and the 11.23 changes together in this post. For 11.23’s cycle in particular, there’s a few additions to the available ulternate summoners and a new system for handling Smite. There’s also been a fairly significant number of bug fixes throughout. 

New Ulternate Summoners

• Akali
• Blitzcrank
• Caitlyn
• Camille
• Dr. Mundo
• Evelynn
• Jinx
• Kindred
• Orianna
• Seraphine
• Urgot
• Vex
• Vi
• Viktor
• Xin Zhao

No Longer Available Ulternate Summoners

• Malphite 

Ulternate Summoner Balance 

All changes here are inherited from changes to the original spell, except the reduction of Bonus Ability Haste for Ashe R.

• Ashe R:
• 35 Bonus Ability Haste → 20 Bonus Ability Haste
• 100s / 90s / 80s Cooldown → 100s / 80s / 60s Cooldown
• Amumu R:
• 1.5s / 1.75s / 2s Stun Duration → 1.5s Stun Duration
• Jarvan IV R:
• 150% Bonus AD Ratio → 180% Bonus AD Ratio
• Jhin R:
• 20% Minimum AD Ratio → 25% Minimum AD Ratio
• 80% Maximum AD Ratio → 100% Maximum AD Ratio
• Lucian R:
• 20 / 40 / 60 Base Damage per Shot → 15 / 30 / 45 Base Damage per Shot
• 10% AP Ratio per Shot → 15% AP Ratio per Shot
• 22 / 28 / 34 Number of Shots → 22 Number of Shots
• NEW EFFECT: Number of shots is now increased by 1 per 4% critical strike chance.
• Smite → Auto-Smite 

Junglers will see a new summoner spell, “Auto-Smite”. Whereas non-Junglers must take the Placeholder summoner spell on Ultimate Spellbook, Junglers must take Auto-Smite instead. Auto-Smite will get replaced by your selected champion Ultimate and, upon doing so, you will gain a buff that, when you attack an epic monster, scuttles, or allied buff monster in which Smite could destroy it, Smites that monster. Similar to regular Smite, Auto-Smite is upgraded by a new Jungle item “Obsidian Edge”. 

Dragon and the Map 

Ruined map elements, and the Ruined Dragon, are no more. Instead, Ultimate Spellbook will be much more similar to base Summoner's Rift except that the final elemental dragon will always be the Chemtech or Hextech Dragons. In addition, taking any epic monster will now grant your team a stack of the Ruined Dragon’s tower damage buff. Albeit, at a lower amount at 0.3% damage per second instead of 0.5% damage per second. 

Dragon Environment On/Off Context 

Memory usage is an area that we try to be very careful with across League. A small increase in RAM usage can result in a significant number of players being unable to play. For Ultimate Spellbook this means we need to make sure there’s room for the 10 Ultimates each player gains and to do that we need to disable things elsewhere. 

With the last release of Ultimate Spellbook, we used smoke (from the shadow isles) and mirrors to hide what we were doing here. By having a non-changing Ruined environment we could secretly remove a lot of overlapping elements on the map. And by having only a single dragon we could remove the textures of the others (and model for Elder dragon). 

With this release of Ultimate Spellbook, however, we’re aiming to edge as close as we can get to base Summoner’s Rift gameplay for dragons while still fitting within our memory budget. We’ve done changes elsewhere to get memory back, from optimizing how emotes load across League to better chunking for Ultimate Spellbook’s audio banks, but it may not be enough. In the case that more memory is still needed… the dragon environment changes will be the next to go."

Context & Notes

• 11/2 PBE Update: Cafe Cuties,  Arcane Jinx + Caitlyn, Caitlyn Art Sustainability Update, & more!