Narra-futs

Patch 25.23 Preview! Apologies for the late preview, was on a plane! Hope you all enjoyed Worlds and the games, getting Silver Scrapes in the finals was such a treat. I'll write up some of my thoughts later this week. Zaahen - Zaahen will also go Live this patch! Hope you're all excited!! - We wanted to have many throwbacks and homages to Xin Zhao throughout his kit, while also giving him that Darkin flair (eg. vamping, lifesteal and revive?!) - Interestingly, Zaahen started out as a support! But after some testing, we pivoted him to Top lane as it would allow him to better execute on his power fantasy - We think the revive this time will be better balanceable as the "on demand" nature of previous revives was typically what made them problematic to balance and he does have to either fight for a long time or land a lot of multi-hits to trigger it, which if he's doing that, we think is probably deserved - The team really cooked, we're so excited for him - I'll add a few more thoughts and behind the scenes insights tomorrow Alternate Junglers - This patch, we're looking at a lot of novelty oriented changes around adding new champs into the jungle (and some old ones) - Many regions suffer from high jungle autofill rates and being able to play your mains when you're autofilled we think is overall net positive - Some of these changes are more experimental (we're trying Fizz in the jungle for example), but will be monitoring closely to see how they shake out Mel - Thanks to Faker for raising visibility on Mel, we're making some relatively power neutral adjustments that move power out of some of her high frustration and lower counterplay builds (eg. E max) into other places with higher counterplay and interactivity (eg. Passive) - The E max build in particular is pretty fire and forget and is looking quite a bit stronger than Q max in many situations - This is relatively unintuitive to players and lower gameplay, so we're making adjustments to it Mundo - Recently, the team found a quite impactful bug where Mundo was getting max damage at 30% missing health instead of 70% missing health - While it didn't result in a change in his winrates overall (he was still balanced around this), it did change his overall power budget, so the damage is being adjusted back up to compensate - Despite his recent rise to fame in several series' 🙃, we still think he's overall pretty balanced, but just has pretty sharp success/failure cases which seems OK for now (might re-consider later) Vlad - As one of the beneficiaries of the sustain nerfs in previous patches, Vlad has benefited quite a bit, so we're tapping him down a bit and making him more vulnerable in top lane especially