Matt | Moonlit

Diana changes: - Attack speed ratio increased from 0.625 to 0.694 - Attack speed growth reduced from 2.5% to 2% - P attack speed now scales at every level instead of every 3 - P empowered attack speed duration increased from 3 seconds to 5

General - Saw a bunch of interesting discussion around balance philosophy yesterday. Will try to make a post later this week around some of the thoughts there (staleness, mastery, etc.) AP Items - Lich Bane, while being pretty anemic last season and having a lot of its lunch taken up by Night Harvester is proving to be a very strong first item on a lot of champions - We're taking stock of the AP systems and are noting that 1st item choice structure for AP Assassin types is pretty good between Lich/Rocketbelt/Ludens, but some of these items are stronger and weaker than others. - This is prompting us to want to put Stormsurge into more of the 2nd item space and bring Lich down and Rocketbelt up in the 1st item space to put everything more in line Proc Damage - We've seen a lot of the discourse around proc damage on Stormsurge being unsatisfying. - One of the lessons from the previous system is that more players disliked items being a delivery system for proc damage, than those who liked it. On the design side, we also found it hard to support, especially when creating new items that had to compete with these outputs - We're making a call that we won't intentionally try to push item proc damage values over ~200 (Stormsurge for melee being 140 + 20% AP is ~the max value we want to tune around) - Over time, this means we want items to carry a bit less of the power budget compared to champions to let champions and their kits shine a bit more - Proc damage and especially proc damage scaling with ratios is one of the leading causes for indiscriminate damage creep that is hard to reign in and without having guidelines like this, it is easy for these values to creep up over time - This is an aspirational and forward facing value (things like Lich Bane, Profane Hydra, etc. currently violate this principle, but have been grandfathered in) because disentangling the power of Lich Bane procs from these champions and putting it elsewhere is quite difficult - We understand this may not be a popular decision, but one that we feel is going to set us up better for the long term Items - 1st items for farming tanks have been pretty weak (Sunfire/Heartsteel), so we're looking to make them more appropriately powerful across their intended areas of power (scaling proc for heartsteel, burn for sunfire) - In keeping with the narrative of previous patches, trying to flatten out the support quest items (dreammaker, sleigh) so they're weaker at 1 item spike, but scale to be decent in the mid-late game. - This is mainly to reduce the incidence of things like 1 item support being able to solo scrap with bot laners (and in the case of some supports, just straight up kill them) Champions - There's a lot of changes here, so I'll just talk about some of the notable ones that we didn't chat about yesterday Rek'Sai - We're still continuing to try and support bruiser Rek'Sai builds - E and R damage aren't quite hitting the mark, especially after E's change off being true damage Evelynn - Evelynn is a champion with a pretty unique play profile in League - In high ELO, she's played a lot by mains - Her mastery curve is quite steep and starts pretty low - While her new players are dragging her winrate down from this steep curve, this is offset by a lot of her players being mains and pulling her winrate up - Typically, she sits over 50% for this reason, however when she's pushing 52% she can feel low counterplay, so we're tapping her down a bit - Multiple different changes for Evelynn were considered, but slowing her clearing speed and needing to land more Q's to hit R threshold was where we landed Twisted Fate - TF has been a topic of discussion recently - We like that he's been shaking up the meta a bit - We're not going to land balance right away, especially for a multi-role, multi-build champion but when we add these things back into the game, we'll try our best to have them balanced as fast as possible - AD is clearly stronger in higher levels of play and E is a lot of the reason for that (higher uptime in high ELO, better spacing, etc.) - So we're isolating the nerf to the AD build this patch, especially when he's got a lot of uptime on his targets (typically top lane) Vayne - We like Q max on Vayne, feeling that it makes her lane a lot more interactive, especially in bot lane, which is otherwise "try to farm and get punished" simulator - We want to strike the balance between enabling her to be proactive in bottom (especially in her good matchups), while not running over top lane, so we're nerfing Passive and Q that allows her to space a bit too well, especially in early levels Seraphine - This changelist is a big one, would suggest checking out Phreak's rundown to get the details on why each change is made - The gist of it is that non-support roles are performing too well, players are clearly voting for her support to be her primary supported playstyle Smolder - Players are still trying to experiment with a lot of different builds on Smolder - We're also trying to figure out how much of the tankier style patterns are able to be healthily supported long term (typically ADC's are meant to die when jumped on), but players are having fun with them regardless - In the short term, we're making these builds pay more of a damage tradeoff compared to pure squishy builds - We're also trying to make his R mechanics actually carry weight, right now they pay the complexity cost of being there, but being mostly ignorable - Finally, we're still trying to figure out the purpose of E on his kit. Currently, it's a trap to cast in offensive cases, but we're trying to support that without making the pattern unhealthy gameplay wise. We're making that pattern a bit better

Diana buff: - E reset cooldown reduced from 0.5 seconds to 0.25