The Toggler

@JustLikeBaandi @RiotPhroxzon I've heard he's an actual champion before every mini rework. Issues persist. Right now they've made him a juggernaut kit but with mage itemisation? Just for the sake of support role...

@Manos1321 @RiotPhroxzon You're just a nostalgia ragebaiter. Swain was fucking ass before. Now he's an actual champion. Fuck off honestly

Was fun to chat with Armand again! On League's Many Audiences Wanted to provide more context about rate of change 1. The vocal minority on Reddit, Twitter, Bilibili, Inven, etc. are a very specific (but important!) part of the player base. 2. The energy/investment required to even post at all is too high for most people. This leaves a non-vocal majority that is often not posting on these platforms. 3. We try to get the opinions of these players with surveys and other methods. What we've found is that players who play a lot (streamers, Pros, social media users, etc.) will almost always want more change. They typically often play majority of Ranked SR and play hundreds if not thousands of hours a Season. The majority of our player base are average players that have a higher chance of finding it difficult to keep up with too many large updates (this is not all, but a significant portion). They may have lifestyle commitments like School, Work or Kids. These players might play more normal SR, play more Modes like ARAM and might not be Ranked grinders. As a result, even if the entire vocal minority on social media is saying the same thing (we want more change!), our average players could be saying something completely different (and in this case they are) If we change the game too much, even if the changes are good, they can lead to a significant amount of players feeling like "League changes too much to keep up" and alienating some of that longtime audience. At the same time, if we don't make changes that make the game exciting, fresh and interesting, then the game can become stale. So, we think Season Start is a good time to be making changes that feel exciting, fresh and interesting, but our inclination to do that in the middle of the year has gone down a decent amount as a result of these studies, though maybe that will change in the future On making good changes We also need to make a distinction between: 1. Large changes that are good 2. Large changes that aren't so good It's a fair critique to say if the size of changes are large, but the changes aren't good, then it's not the size of changes that's the problem, it's the quality of the changes. Given League's longevity, the "low hanging fruit" of good changes gets smaller and smaller every year. The ability to both "go big" and "have that be good" becomes harder and harder even with a lot of investment. eg. Look at movies, AAA games, TV shows, etc. At the same time, our job is to find those spaces that are awesome and are surprising even when they're hard to find. But it does mean that if we can't find something, we think it's better to make smaller changes that we think are good than go larger with changes that might be frustrating to players.

@veloraxx @RiotPhroxzon SWAIN TOO

@RiotPhroxzon DO MAGE SKEWED SERAPHINE ADJUSTMENTS SHES UNSATISFYING IN CARRY ROLES

It was really fun to have some transparent discussions with players and get our honest takes back and forth on things, like "why are there frustrating things in games", "whether losers queue is real", etc. The goal wasn't to win the debates, but more to display some of the thinking around player feedback on certain topics and get honest player feedback! Hopefully it was entertaining for folks. 😂

@RiotPhroxzon Can't wait for next season to be about demons, and Phroxzon saying we'll take a look at problematic champions, so that Swain never gets mentioned, not his lore nor his elo skewed problematic design!

Patch 26.8 Preview We have a small patch as we aren't looking to change a bunch of things with 26.9 (Season 2) coming out soon. 26.9 has quite a few systems changes in it and so we expect those to have rippling effects on what champions are strong and weak. There are also a few champions that have been having larger scope changes to them that we're looking to release on 26.9 as well, but weren't quite ready for prime time on 26.8 Fantasy Facing Changes - A lot of the direction of our changes in the near future are aimed at emphasizing the unique strengths/strategic differentiators of champions, even if it will cost some aspect of the champion being flat in winrate across skill levels - In many ways, a champion that has lost resonance with a core portion of their user base, even if they can sit at a higher power level may represent a downgrade in experience for players of that champion - Expect the buffs this patch to translate more of the power budget into the area of the champions that are unique to them and we want to be moving the power of the roster like this over time Yuumi Bugs - We recently discovered a Yuumi bug where her ultimate was healing her attached ally each time it heals another ally - While the number of times you're hitting multiple people with ult are rare, it is a significant nerf to the healing in the best case - We're fixing this bug and compensating the ultimate (and other sources of healing) Mel - Mel's buffs in 26.5 ended up being a bit over magnitude, so we're pulling some of that back - While we think after these changes Mel will be in a balanced state, that is different to whether she is in a state that is sometimes too frustrating for players - We're continuing to evaluate whether making further changes to her is going to be able to adequately resolve "play against" while also remaining resonant and accessible for her Arcane audience - We've been testing a few things, but nothing to share just yet Dr Mundo - Mundo consistently rates at the top of our frustration surveys and he's been overperforming especially in average play jungle - We're tapping down some of that late game damage so that when he's popping off, he can still go where he pleases, but he's going to solo killing champions a bit less while doing so More on the other champs later when the changes are more locked in

@sakiskarpas Νομίζω κάποιος στο προηγούμενο FrameRate το είχε πει, ότι θα μείνουμε σε αυτή τη γενιά παραπάνω από ό,τι νομίζουμε. Νιώθω ότι τα επόμενα χρόνια η ανάπτυξη βρίσκεται στο optimisation και όχι στο hardware.

What? unboxholics.com/news/gaming/13…

#swain #LeagueofLegend

@RiotPhroxzon Swain: (Get him out of bot lane and support please)

Patch 26.7 Preview Thank you to the team for handling the Patch while I was at First Stand! Many of the folks who went hadn't been to Brazil before, including me and the players there were just so passionate, we had a lot of listening sessions with the community, Q&A's, and the event itself was great It was overall an amazing, though short time (only 2 days), but alas, lots of exciting work to be done back home! First Stand - Congrats to BLG and the LPL for winning their first international title in about 3 years! - The First Stand meta ended up being quite good; there was significant diversity in every role between classes - One notable gap was AP junglers and AD mids (related) and so we'll see what we can do to enable some more of those picks heading into the Season - Was especially happy with the Bot meta; Lethality Varus had a 14% winrate and there was a good mix of Casters, Hypercarries and Utility as well as many fringe picks like Zeri, Kog, etc. - Ranged Supports are really starting to get away from the rest of the pack now with laning being a much larger focus due to role quests - Not necessarily a bad thing though, given that we've been in Melee supp meta for many years - Game pacing overall felt good (or at least I thought so) and the lack of lane swaps really allowed each role to shine, with GigaBin showcasing the power of an unleashed Top lane role - It really did seem like every lane could carry and balance of objectives vs splitting felt pretty appropriate Shyvana - Shyvana definitely initially landed a bit strong and her hotfix put her in a decent spot after that - Shyvana has a bit of an unintended interaction with Sylas that we will be micropatching out tomorrow; essentially he benefits double from her auto attacks passive (with Sylas's passive) that makes his attacks do pretty eye popping values - We're still taking our time to evaluate role viability for Top Shyvana and whether it's reasonably supportable without destroying Jungle role satisfaction - We've also been working on some changes to increase satisfaction of Passive, reduce MMR skew, increase counterplay and satisfaction of E Support Quest - A few patches ago, we talked about reducing the negative impact of the support quest to reduce complexity - We're going to pull this all the way this patch. This may result in some farming support shenanigans, but then you're also denying your bot carry their quest progression; we're giving it a go to see if anything breaks More on champions tomorrow

@LeagueOfLegends Terrible ability VFX.... Almost a recolour of other skins' VFX

Powerful and silly in equal measure. Bubble Bash Blitzcrank, Pug Trainer Sejuani, Surprise Party Vex, Choncc Kench, and Fried Chicken King Swain are heading to the PBE.

@RiotPhroxzon Swain either needs his effective range (and thus itemisation) lowered/changed or bring his strong R back. It's the best TL;DR of how I see Swain's deep design flaws fixed.

Patch Preview 26.6! Overall - Overall, the game is looking pretty healthy in terms of balance and broad satisfaction - Over the coming patches, we're going to be looking at some of the champs that have felt a bit unloved/worse for wear and would love to hear your suggestions (both champions and systems) Systems - Chempunk Chainsword has been one of the weaker Grievous items for a while. While we don't want Grievous items to become too commonplace, as it subtly degrades champion kits when too common, it is still just a bit weak for even that purpose - The support item minion penalty has been a pain point for support users and with role quests, the risk of funneling (why it was there in the first place) has been reduced pretty significantly, so we're removing that drawback Shen - Shen Jungle has really started to take off recently, which is really awesome to see! (thanks xPetu!) - That said, he is a tad strong, especially in lower levels of play Zaahen - We're really happy to see Zaahen picking up a sizeable audience in both Top and Jungle, but now that regular players, in addition to experienced players are starting to demonstrate that top end mastery performance, he's looking too strong across the board - Currently, we think his Jungle is a bit stronger than Top, so the nerfs are mostly focused there Skarner Top focus - Skarner has been out of the spotlight for a while and since we've tapped down a few of the things that were causing him to be overbearing in Top (especially W max and the E point blank kidnaps), we think he can get a bit more power there Olaf - Jungle Olaf has fallen a little behind the pack so we're adding some power back

@swainssue Swain will rise once more, soon.

my life is like this

@RiotPhroxzon These are the 2 core issues of Swain: -His kit feels awkward for kiting -His R feels cosmetic despite its long cooldown, often gets reduced to a timing mini-game. R feels cosmetic partially because he's forced so hard to kite and play around E max range. FIX SWAIN

Full Patch Preview 26.4! Ryze - Ryze's resurgance in the last few months has increased visibility on R's prediction behavior. This behavior is frequently difficult to predict and often doesn't teleport champions when it feels like it should - We're removing this functionality as it leads to overall less predicatability around Ryze R behavior Dusk and Dawn, Gwen & Kayle - While we nerfed several other Dusk and Dawn users, Gwen has floated to be one of the better ones; we're tapping her done a bit as a result - Kayle also falls into a similar boat - We're overall pretty happy with the state of Dusk & Dawn; it's a popular item with a strong fantasy and after this patch, we hope it's a balanced item with an appropriately sized user base Manamune Kassadin - We're thrilled to see Kassadin finding a new fun build to play; unfortunately he's a bit too strong both with and without it, so we're tapping him down - The early game changes to let him get back to lane a bit faster has made punishing him a bit more difficult and so he'll have to work a bit harder to access those 2 and 3 item spikes he used to Rengar - Rengar's had a good number of bugs fixed on 26.2 that added quite a bit of power and consistency to him; we're pulling a bunch of that back as he's a bit too powerful for Elite players in particular ADC's & Senna - We're trying a niche for Hexoptics where it is positioned as a greedy 3rd full damage item for Crit users when they don't need LDR (or post LDR) - Jinx and Twitch are receiving durability nerfs in the mid-game to keep some of their damage fantasies intact, but create sharper tradeoffs if they misposition - Aphelios is still one of the stronger ADC's, even after a hotfix nerf in 16.1; just a generic nerf here to bring power level down - Samira's BT build is significantly worse for wear, especially after the changes to Crit; so this adjustment is intended to bring some of that build variety back - Xayah has been out of the meta for quite a while; we're trying to ease her reliance on Essence Reaver procs in order to open up a bit more build variety for her. Additionally, her damage output is just superseded by several of her contemporaries, so increasing her W uptime will help her be competitive relative to the pack - For Senna, in Support, her Enchanter builds have been on average a bit too strong relative to her AD builds and so we're trying to make that balance a little more AD skewed - We like the Enchanter build being viable, but AD should be the stronger one for her fantasy

@RiotPhroxzon Swain's R2 is a dead spell. Next rework should look into removing it. Pull the plug, it feels 10% of its original power. It makes R feel more clunky if anything

@RiotPhroxzon Swain needs big overhauls, Phroxzon, I know you like to ignore him there at Riot. You created a mess at 2018 you deny to fix. Burn items will be even more prevalent with a nerf. Swain's kit is not well designed for kiting. His R will be even more cosmetic

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

@RiotPabro It's the same question I've been asking for 8 years: Will you ever allocate the proper resources for a PROPER Swain rework? Or are you satisfied with bribing the playerbase with 56% Winrate? You know it, we all know it. With all due respect. I want to believe you can do this.

Hey gamers! We're going to be filming our next Dev Update in a few days and we wanted to know if you have questions for us that we can answer in that video. We can't promise that we'll get to everything, but we wanted to give you all a chance to let us know what's on your mind. Let em rip!

@RiotPhroxzon Now you're just being desperate to get people to play Swain. You rather buff a 54% wr champion than sit, investigate and work on making the kit function better. Hypocrisy, poor resource management, and bad investments on the champion's gameplay identity. 4 reworks so far.

Patch 25.24 Full Patch Preview! Zaahen: - Zaahen has been off to a powerful start, and after the micropatch nerf, he's relatively stable - For regular players, he's stabilizing out, but seems a little stronger in higher levels of play right now, especially with what we're seeing out of his early mastery growth currently - We intend to nerf him in 25.24, but haven't yet decided what nerf or by how much and want a bit more information before we act - We don't think he's so overpowered currently that he can stay in this state Bloodline: - Bloodline has fallen a little behind Alacrity especially for most champs, so evening it up a bit there Jungle Changes: - We're monitoring a lot of the feedback coming in over the last patches about the jungle changes; doing a few small tap downs to get some of the top end into a better state - Overall, some of them are still not particularly viable, but not looking to take another swing at them at this point Mel: - Mel's changes this patch are aimed a bit at reducing frustration - eg. The lingering of her E zone and the particle are slightly mismatched (this follows the behavior of several other similar types of spells), but is resulting in a little more frustration than we think is worth it - E max is also being reduced in power level and being a little more costly for her to cast

@RiotPhroxzon Yes. Swain's kit has gone awry. Ever since the VGU. And your past solutions to an amputated hand are bandaids on top of bandaids. You KNOW he needs a big scale rework. It's only a matter of time.

We think EUNE service is restored. Would recommend canceling queues, relogging, etc. Just to be safe. Please let us know if any things are still going awry. 🙏

THEY CAN'T KEEP GETTING AWAY WITH THIS

@RiotPhroxzon Yeeeeah that's not going to do anything for Swain, he does, still, need a new rework.

Patch 25.23 Full Preview! Zaahen - Chatted a bit yesterday about Zaahen starting out development as a support! - We hadn't made a support for a while and we already had a headstart on wanting Zaahen to be a Darkin with eye/all-seeing motifs - The first iconic ult Squad5 tried was swinging his Glaive to Deathmark everybody (think Deathmark meets Xin Ult) - One of the issues with this was that Zaahen had a support economy, so he'd do this and just die. It wasn't a fatal flaw, but it wasn't quite cool enough to build a kit around - Another idea tried was to embody the idea of sacrifice; Zaahen would gain stats each time he got a takedown or died (because supports die a lot) - Teammates weren't super enthusiastic about this though, even if it ended up being powerful and useful - At this point, we decided that Top lane might be a better fit, especially because some of the Xin Zhao parallels weren't quite working out from the support role Zaahen in Top Lane - We were taking a bunch of inspiration from Erlang Shen and Guan Yu throughout development - Erlang Shen has a third eye, which is often known for being all-seeing and associated with enlightment/higher levels of consciousness in Hinduism or Buddhism and some other Eastern religions - So some of the ideas were related to these motifs - Squad5 tried some ideas like Ult makes him untargetable to non-targeted abilities (think Gwen W), but this only lasted a test (was very experimental 😅) - Also tried versions where he learned about his opponents while fighting them - Another version that was interesting was dodging attacks every X seconds (but that became kinda hard to use and was already similar to old Pantheon's passive) - Kind of late in development however, we had a pretty functional kit that was working well and was satisfying, but it still felt it was missing something, and August suggested adding the revive back as max stacks on the passive - That just immediately clicked in Playtest and so we kept it - We hope you'll all enjoy Zaahen Rek'Sai - Rek'sai was erroneously listed as a buff yesterday, sorry about that - For those watching Worlds, or playing high ELO solo Q, Rek'sai has been pretty pretty powerful in Top Lane, but we're OK with her Jungle strength currently - In particular, she is sustaining too much, so we're taking those aspects down ADC Meta - ADC meta has been stale for a while, so we're looking for a bit of a shake up here - Most of the changes here are pretty self-explanatory Skarner - Skarner has been pretty heavily overnerfed, so we're restoring a bunch of power to him this patch

@RiotPhroxzon Overall a welcome surprise to see Swain on the Buffs list, but I think ultimately he once again needs something more than a number buff.

@RiotPhroxzon What are you doing with Swain?

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