@wealary_V2 Cause the game is dog piss now duh. gotta throw shit till something sticks
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Kaenic
376 posts
@xFSN_Saber They don’t want to get rid of them, they just want to give the illusion of choice so people come back to the game.
Ps it’s still a good idea fairy 🧚 of trying to fix proplay bot meta staleness w/o buffing n nerfing the same 6 adcs instead of just making more of them viable.
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@RiotPhroxzon @Spideraxe30 The fleet buffs need to be focused bot or top lane ranged issues will get worse like the last time it was buffed
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Mages Bot and Approach for 26.16
26.15 Rundown releasing later tonight; got a bit delayed this week
Mages Bot in Pro Play
- While Mages Bot at MSI only represented ~20% of picks (and often felt like much more), we have been seeing a significant uptick in their presence and priority at EWC and Kespa Cup and it seems only likely to continue increasing
- This presence has also started to trickle its way into Ranked play in a major way
- Only a few months ago in March, we were seeing a significantly Enchanter and range dominated support meta, which also resulted in ADC and hyper carries in bot lane being very powerful
- These champions benefitted a lot from the Season Start 2026 changes; from things like the ADC quest hyperscaling with Enchanters + changes to nerf roaming in the support role generally
- So in Patch 26.11, we made some adjustments to buff melee supports, nerf ranged supports, especially Enchanters
- But at the same time, some certain chefs were also cooking some clever ways to bypass some of the anti-roaming and lane swap controls that we added into the Support quests at the start of the year
- What resulted was 2 major swings towards roaming supports and away from ADC bot (it’s an interesting thought experiment for what would have happened if we had changed nothing about the First Stand Enchanter meta and had the roaming developments play out)
- While we overall like Mages bot being viable in some capacity, what we’re observing now is arguably too far of a swing in the other direction, players are familiar with and we still want to support ADC as being a primary supported class there
- All of the previously listed dissatisfactions with gameplay that led us to nerf support roaming in Season Start 2026 still stand and in that set of changes, we intentionally went a bit lighter on some of the anti-lane swap, anti-support roaming controls to avoid overly punishing either accidental roaming or unique playstyles
- We’ve also heard a lot of the Pro Player complaints about the meta and are taking that into consideration
- We don’t want to force them to suddenly completely swap subclasses by suddenly making ADC and that learnt skill expression unviable, so it’s a fine balance
- That said, for those who want to learn it, we want to encourage and allow for skill expression of Pros to play a variety of things resulting in more flexible comps, dynamic lanes, etc. and greater champ variety long term
Mages Bot in Regular Play
- A lot of this “excitement” has also made its way to regular play
- Players have been excited to try out Mages bot. That said, not everyone is excited about that; Mages represent a natural counter to ADC for a decent chunk of the game duration and people trying to replicate the Pro Play Support roaming style often causes more grief to their lane partners than benefit
- Overall, we like that Mages are playable bot as it adds to a lot of variety in the lane and the games that players play
- However, too many mages bot with them being too powerful in certain cases results in undermining a lot of the mastery and expectations of what can be played in the lanes
- We’re not looking to adjust this power dynamic significantly as a result (eg. Mages have earlier spiking, smoother scaling curves. ADC have later & stronger scaling, but sharper successes and failures), but we are looking to address some of the magnitude of differences to make some of them less extreme
- eg. Flattening the differences between Mages and ADC bot so they have the same smooth builds, the same amount of mana, similar levels of spikes, etc. is a quick way to make it so there’s no class differentiation, even if it would “solve the problem”
- The profile of Mages in bot lane is also quite dissimilar to how they manifest in Pro Play
- For several years now, Mages bot like Brand, Swain, Ziggs, Veigar, Seraphine, Xerath etc. often don’t win by allowing a support to roam (especially historically), they often win by either poking you out with the support or 2v2 killing especially in average play
- They also have higher winrates on account of having higher starting winrates for first time plays compared to ADC, shallow mastery curves and favorable matchups in some (but not all) cases against ADC
- Their winrates as a result, I think are misleading for their true power level, in the same way that one shouldn’t be alarmed by Malphite having a 52-53% winrate (high winrate as a novice, low skill growth)
What are we doing?
- In 26.16 we will be making some targeted adjustments to these dynamics; some examples
- Straight nerfs to support roaming using already established levers (starting at upping out of lane support gold/xp penalty from 25% until level 3 >>> 33% until level 5
- Buffs to some underpowered ADC tools (Berserker’s Greaves, Fleet)
- Buffs to ADC base MR, nerfs to MR growth
- Buffs to Heal
- We’re also testing a variety of speculative things; will share more later in the week once we’re more firm on tactics
Thank you to everyone for all your passion and thoughts on these topics. We want to strike the right balance between increasing and rewarding diversity of playstyles in the game; the rate of these adoptions and how much burden we’re putting on the player base and Pro Players for said diversity
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in scenarios like this one whoever last picked deserves to get shot
megan@esoupieslol
remove mages bot they always ruin team comps why do we have 4 ap -_-
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@SaskioLoL Are you crazy ? Pick a support, any support 9 times out of 10 they’re already mentally booming before the game even starts.
Oh no! the Draven said a slur? yeah, whatever the supp player in the fairy outfit just insulted everyone’s family and now nobody wants to win the game. gg.
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Draven players are the angriest people in League of Legends
a draven player has NEVER once been calm.
not in his entire life.
he loads into the game already upset about something that hasn't happened yet
he catches every axe perfectly for 8 minutes straight.
40 CS lead. looks incredible.
then he overextends trying to ego trade and DIES with all his stacks.
you can FEEL IT through the screen.
his stacks drop and so does his will to play the game.
and now it's YOUR FAULT
you are now sitting there with a cortisol spike anticipating pings or something hes about to TYPE.
every draven player believes with his entire soul that he is being personally sabotaged by the universe.
the enemy team. his own team.
the matchmaking. riot. the axe physics.
all of it conspiring against a man who just wants to POP OFF
and god forbid he actually LOSES LANE
because a losing draven doesn't play safe. he doesn't give up the wave.
he int DIVES at 20% hp SCREAMING about how the game is lost while personally losing it in real time
there is no in between with these men
they are either 8/0 and furious or 2/9 and furious
the axe stops spinning and so does his humanity
Draven players operate with EGO and nothing else.
take the ego away and there is no champion left.
there is no man left
Study the Saskio way
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The Mordekaiser buffs are WAY stronger than I thought they'd be.
Because apparently: Morde's ult cuts his target's maximum HP by 13%, and THEN drains their current HP by another 13%.
Meaning it's both a 20% -> 26% damage increase vs full HP targets, AND a 13% total stat steal.
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@REDROMINA Wdym how? how do you think music artists make money through Apple Music subs or actors in any other entertainment sub service?
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serious question for the people who are in support of this lawsuit:
How do you expect us creators to make a living and continue to make videos for you to watch?
Dexerto@Dexerto
A class-action lawsuit has been filed against YouTube over its "ad-free" subscription claims Plaintiffs argue YouTube Premium still shows ads because creators include sponsorship segments in their videos
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@Lord_Prosciutto @Ablazeolive Thanks for the advice. Out of pos 1-5 which one do you think is the least played/most filled?
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@ShwayDogs @Ablazeolive It's definitely a hard game to learn, I recommend starting with an easier character you like. I had a really hard time getting into it cause the first characters I liked were way too difficult to pickup like that.
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It just clicked why league is so much more popular
Max0r@realMax0r
my favorite example is a guy named anti-mage who is picked to counter all mages and will not stop talking about how much he hates magic
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@ShwayDogs @Ablazeolive > arbitrary ass mechanics that are out of a windows 95 catalog
Nothing more arbitrary than this statement right here. Bros just typing shit at this point
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@Lord_Prosciutto @Ablazeolive Yeah I get it, to me it’s like Pepsi or coke. I’ve been wanting to really get into Dota just to see the stuff yall bitch about vs league complaints. Like to me hands down matchmaking is better in Dota.
But it doesn’t matter anyways cause riots pissing the game away rn.
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@ShwayDogs @Ablazeolive Yeah and it makes the game interesting. League feels like I'm a preschooler being guided by a teacher to walk in the hallway correctly.
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@xFSN_Saber Damn sabers finally joined the handless side, hate to see it.
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@RiotPhroxzon @Spideraxe30 After reading this I’m convinced role ambiguity is being pushed to, again, cater to pro play viewership. If people wanted lane ambiguity they’d just play dota2 instead where it’s actually balanced around it and has been the norm since forever.
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MSI Thoughts
Congratulations to HLE for winning MSI! This is one of the first times (at least that I can remember) that the first seed from each of the major regions made it to the top 4. Perhaps signs that the regions are all a lot more competitive with each other. The gap is closing?
The major talking point of the tournament was Mages bot, allowing teams to play a weakside bot strategy and send their support to roam around the map. At the end of the tournament, there were ~20% mage bot picks, primarily Mel and Ziggs (can survive easier by themselves) while they enable a roaming support like Pyke, Rell, Camille.
It's worth noting that there is a distinct difference in the types of Mage bot play we observe in regular play and the ones that we typically observe in Pro Play. The ones we observe in Pro Play are predominantly used to unlock a roaming support, whereas the ones in regular play are much more about playing something like Brand/Swain + engage support to kill you or pairing a bot like Seraphine/Ziggs with another skillshot support to throw a lot of abilities and if one lands, following up with chain CC for a kill.
My current take is that the Pro Play portion of Mages bot are in a decent spot; they are not at the level of ubiquity that we would really take major action here. For regular play, accounting for the high skill floor, winrates, level of presence and their mastery curves, I could see an argument for a slight tap down in some situations. That said, all the Mage bots are not equally powerful, but we do want to continue supporting a wide variety of picks here. It is desirable for bot laners to have a variety of different experiences when playing bot which should include things like Mages bot, melee carries, etc. as those spikes of intensity + variety are some of the things that keep League fun and fresh for the long term.
Another major talking point was the ubiquity of roaming supports, which was quite nice to see, given the meta shift at the start of the year being dominated by ranged, laning dominant supports. While we made some changes to reduce the effectiveness of these with role quests, the impact here seems pretty limited to Pro Play and making major adjustments here may end up having a disproportionately negative impact on regular play to solve a problem that may not be that much of a problem (or can be solved in other ways).
The last notable callout is the prevalence of both Hextech Rocketbelt and Sundered Sky at high levels of play. Hextech Rocketbelt we think is a bit too ubiquotous on immobile mages in particular that removes a core weakness from them (that they can be engaged on and killed). That said, it's relatively limited to Pro Play and does not find the same level of success in soloQ outside of the very highest levels. Regardless, we're still planning on adjustments that make it less effective on those users, but retain effectiveness on the melee champs that the item was originally designed for, especially because the core fantasy of rocketbelt is not really one that is strongly resonant for this use case (primarily rocketbelting for escaping).
Sundered Sky has been a strong item for a long time; and arguably too strong for too long. The Sundered Sky spike on 1 or 2 items in particular often results in champions being too heavily statted at those item breakpoints making it hard for other champions or subclasses from interacting with them. That said, a significant number of champions in the game purchase or have been tuned around this item, so we will approach the investigation and follow up balance carefully. It's pretty notable that the MSI jungle pool was quite heavily stacked with AD junglers, many of which use Sundered Sky.
Will of course discuss these more with the team when getting back to the office though as there are a diversity of viewpoints on these topics.
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@JungleKingdomGG Oh I thought the most broken item combo was Mage+not in midlane my b.
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the most broken item combination League of Legends has seen in years
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@ChaosRain I’m not gonna lie in the old days text chatting was cool and fun cause that’s really all that you could do. But now(for the last 15years btw) where 99% of games have voice chat texting is just really inconvenient and a hindrance especially for people that can’t type fast.
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@drewlevin @Spideraxe30 So it could be like loss mitigation original loss -20 performance based loss-17 or something
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@drewlevin @Spideraxe30 I think with performance based losses knowing that you have a mitigated loss could be a “feel good” button. But lp gain/loss is already an individual thing i.e. not everyone in the lobby is getting +30-30 it’s all variable already, where 2 ppl +19-20 or +22-16 in the same game.
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Reflecting on a number of matchmaking frustrations that people have shared with me over the last few months, I’ve heard a few common frustrations. I’d appreciate it if folks who have felt the pain in this space let me know if this captures their major concerns:
1. Some people believe that offering personal performance-based loss mitigation is mostly doomed, because it creates selfish incentives that pulls a player away from exclusively focusing on helping their team maximize win expectancy.
2. Some people are frustrated with duo queue in Master not having returned. Concerns about duo queue competitive integrity largely sit in two spaces: (a) boosting people from outside/low master into GM+, and (b) the difficulty of balancing games with GM+/GM+ duos, as different duos will contribute different win expectancies in ways that feel like you’re either smashing lobbies or being forced to 2v8.
3. Master+ players feel that there is room to increase queue times if it means narrowing the within-team skill range.
4. Some players do not understand that some accounts in climbing states (e.g. high Diamond MMR, Emerald rank) are being appropriately placed in their respective lobbies on the basis of skill evaluation. This contributes to - but is not the sole or primary driver of - frustration with (3).
How does that read for y’all as “here’s what’s frustrating about matchmaking right now”?
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@LaurenWitzkeDE I get it’s a video but those are real people behind him. If someone tries to push past me on an escalator into my space I’m flipping you bro idgaf, if you’re a child I’d understand but an adult? No, don’t be a fuckin twat that doesn’t know how to conduct themselves like one.
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Oh look, an ironic metaphor portraying how they also stop societal progress.
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