Matt Leung-Harrison@RiotPhroxzon
Patch 26.4 Preview!
Overall
- Things are looking pretty stable; we're seeing some pretty marked game time reductions (probably from) the turret plate bulwarking reductions
- We're still waiting to see the impact of the faelights and early vision changes on Jungle, but need a full patch to draw some conclusions there (and on the early bounty changes)
- After this patch, things are likely to be in a pretty good spot overall, would love to hear from y'all what other things need changing
- We've gotten a few initial surveys back from players and Top and Bot have been reporting higher satisfaction and power, while JG, Mid, Supp have been either neutral or lower sentiment.
- This was pretty much our goal, but there's still some fine tuning to do, expect some of that in some of the coming patches
Systems
- Hexoptics hasn't really managed to pick up much of an audience, so we're making some adjustments to make its damage amp passive more accessible to more champions along with some other tuning adjustments
Champion Changes
- First Stand is coming up on 26.5; we're making a lot of changes for both general balance and hitting a few of the other outliers/forgotten champions
- There isn't really a major theme here, other than trying to adjust some of the outliers that especially have benefited overly from some of the systems changes (items or otherwise)
- Some of our unconventional junglers are also a bit worse for wear, so we're giving them a bit of a bump up
- Mel and Zed are in a decent spot after the hotfix buffs, so we're letting them sit for a bit to stabilize
Challenger+ Ranked
- We made some adjustments this patch to increase queue times in Challenger to get better match quality
- We're going to walk this back a bit as even though match quality has factually improved a bit, players are still feeling like those matches aren't higher quality, while having longer queue times
- Going to walk it back about halfway as a result
