Matt Leung-Harrison@RiotPhroxzon
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
