Matt Leung-Harrison@RiotPhroxzon
Patch 26.3 Preview!
This is a huge patch after we've had a bit of time to assess how things have landed and things have taken some time to settle. Will go more in depth about champion changes tomorrow, especially the jungle changes.
Ranked
- We're triaging a few things related to Apex negative LP gains that we're seeing in a few regions (+17/-23 kind of things)
- We're also looking at some duo queue adjustments for literally top 20 challenger levels of duos to make those a bit more balanced
- As a reminder, these things that we've been posting about recently with the Ranked ladder don't affect 99.9% of Ranked players, but matter a lot to the Masters+ crew and we're still trying to fine tune behavior here
- I'm going to write more of a detailed Masters+ retro about some of the considerations that went into the changes this year as well as some of the follow up changes we're doing in a few days, especially after validating some of the hunches for the cause of the negative LP gains
Game Metrics
- We've seen game snowballiness continue to stabilize lower than Season 15 values
- Game times are also coming down a bit back to S15 values
- As discussed in a previous preview though, players feel like downtime is down and so feel like the game is faster. On the flip side, there are many players saying that this Season feels really fun and part of that is due to how much action is going on
- We're going to let it ride a bit though, as it seems like players are getting used to a new normal here and at least a good portion are finding it more fun
- What we are changing though is how much players are worth for repeat kills on a player who is not worth that much; we reduced this in 26.1 but are pulling it back a bit
- At the same time, we're investigating what communicating this state looks like on the scoreboard, but have a pretty strong aversion to cluttering up the scoreboard with a lot of exact numbers; nothing to share back yet on that front, but doing some investigations
Towers & Objectives
- There's been a lot of discussion about how threatening first Baron is and also a bit about how much damage junglers do to objectives
- We're not planning to change a lot here on 26.3, but may change some of these dynamics for 26.4 after observing more
Vision
- With early game faelights and slower first clears, early ganks have been a bit harder to come by
- We're pushing back early game yellow trinket cds back to S15 values (170 >>> 210s) to make warding a bit less "free" and early ganks a bit more successful on average
Items
- There will be more detail on the item changes tomorrow with full preview, but I just wanted to talk about 2 ahead of time
- Actualizer (which is currently only a Ryze item) is getting a buff to be viable on more users. At the same time though, Ryze is getting nerfed
- The entire package is intended to be a net negative to Ryze and he's getting nerfed indirectly by a lot of changes this patch
- Dusk & Dawn has been a super hot topic!
- We don't think Dusk & Dawn is overpowered overall, but there are champions that synergize very well with it that will ultimately be hard bound to it
- This is totally fine though; plenty of champions love and are hardbound to certain items and we hope that D&D is one of those that those users find very satisfying
- This is ultimately why we're choosing to nerf the champions that predominantly purchase the item, while still leaving it viable for the fringe users
- Having said that, we think the item power budget and shape is a bit off
- D&D was intended to be less damage-y and more bruisery than its other AP sheen counter part - Lich Bane
- We're adjusting its profile (+HP, -Damage) to better suit this
