Upcoming AP Item Changes | League of Legends

Summary

Highlights

• Phreak is leading a project on AP item changes for League of Legends. 🏆
• AP items are being evaluated for health vs. excitement, prioritizing functional gameplay. 📊
• Shrinking texts and focusing items aims to reduce complexity in League, making it more accessible. 📚
• Item changes will be reflected in patch 25.10, impacting gameplay strategies. 🔄
• Balancing includes player feedback and comprehensive data to tune item efficiency. 📈

Key Takeaways

• Phreak emphasizes the importance of game health over item excitement when designing AP items. 🎮
• AP items are being adjusted to better serve champion needs and maintain balance. ⚖️
• Changes aim to reduce complexity and excitement in favor of more functional and healthy gameplay.🛠️
• Upcoming changes will focus on making AP items efficient and meaningful in terms of gameplay impact. 🧙‍♂️
• The patch will introduce buffs and nerfs to ensure a balanced and engaging player experience. 🤖

Overview

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:00: Introduction and Context The chapter 'Introduction and Context' is led by Freak, who is the design lead of the Summoners Rift Team's Live Pod. In this chapter, Freak introduces himself and mentions the upcoming changes to AP items on the PBE, which are likely to be included in patch 25.10, expected to go live in about two weeks. Freak clarifies his role in the implementation of these changes and emphasizes that it is a team effort, highlighting the collaborative nature of the work.
• 01:00 - 06:00: AP Item Change Overview This chapter discusses the process and planning involved in updating an item system, specifically in the context of upcoming changes not yet seen on the Public Beta Environment (PBE). The focus is on how to analyze and compare items to ensure they land in a beneficial state. The speaker outlines their thought process and the discussions that have occurred, giving insight into potential future directions for the item system.
• 06:00 - 16:00: Detailed Discussion on Item Philosophy The chapter discusses the philosophy behind item localization and tool tip changes. Emphasis is placed on the importance of deciding whether to proceed with these changes by Friday evening. The discussion involves a willingness to scrap changes if progress isn't satisfactory, which is an acceptable outcome in such projects. There is a preference for releasing changes to Player vs Environment (PvE) for unfiltered feedback from players.
• 16:00 - 30:00: Class Definitions and Champion Affinities The chapter titled 'Class Definitions and Champion Affinities' covers the speaker's perspective on iterating through ideas and making progressive improvements, which they see as very beneficial. The main discussion centers on AP item changes. The speaker emphasizes the importance of balancing game health with item excitement, even though it's a point of contention among many. This balance is considered a primary constraint when discussing items.
• 30:00 - 45:00: Item Purpose and Specificity The chapter discusses the role and importance of items in the game's health, emphasizing that items should primarily serve their purpose for champions over being exciting on their own. It suggests that developers should first ensure that items meet game health needs and then maximize excitement as a secondary goal. The primary focus is on making the right choices that benefit the game overall.
• 45:00 - 60:00: Item Comparisons and Target Selection The chapter discusses the balance between excitement and practicality in game design, specifically focusing on item complexity in League of Legends. It highlights the importance of reducing unnecessary text and complexity to enhance game accessibility without compromising game health goals. The emphasis is not just on having exciting abilities but on making the game more approachable by simplifying tooltips and focusing the gameplay experience.
• 60:00 - 75:00: AP Class Overview The chapter discusses the balance between creating exciting gameplay items for champions and maintaining the overall health of the game. The emphasis is on prioritizing game health over excitement to ensure a sustainable and enjoyable gaming experience. The speaker expresses their viewpoint that while excitement in game items is beneficial, it should not compromise the stability and health of the game. Therefore, champions are prioritized significantly over merely having thrilling game features.
• 75:00 - 90:00: Specific Item Changes The chapter titled 'Specific Item Changes,' discusses a project driven by numerical balance through an overarching framework. A spreadsheet contains every item in the game. Key data variables are defined such as the worth of attack damage, ability power, mana, mana regen, heal, shield power, and individual proc damage, including triggers like energizes.
• 90:00 - 93:00: Conclusion The conclusion chapter discusses the concept of 'Ludens proc' and 'burn' with an emphasis on differences in upfront value, considerations, and cooling periods. It introduces the concept of evaluating the worth of a stat and filtering this into item building processes, specifically looking at gold efficiency of items. The speaker mentions having a personal framework for evaluating items, particularly those with diverse stats that do not synergize functionally, such as attack damage, ability power, and health. These items command higher efficiency.

Upcoming AP Item Changes | League of Legends Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 What's up, fellow gamers? Freak here. I am the design lead of Summoners Rift Team's Live Pod, and I'm here to talk to you about a set of AP item changes that are currently on the PBE that is likely, though not guaranteed, to go live with patch 25.10 in about two weeks time. Uh, I am the one who is doing the implementation work here. I am essentially leading this project. Uh, but as always, the things we do are a team effort. I'm not on an island and ignoring feedback, whatever. And of course, you will see over the course of
• 00:30 - 01:00 the days, and in fact, if you watch this video before the next PBE update, um, these will be changes that aren't even on the PBE yet. I want to talk about the process of diving into an item system and making plans and comparing across items and trying to ensure that things land in a good state. And so, I want to talk you through sort of how I think about this and some of the back and forths that have been had and uh, where we're headed likely and what, you know, some version of what's likely to happen here. So, uh, again, want to reiterate that right now as of recording, this is
• 01:00 - 01:30 Wednesday evening. Localization lock is going to be on Friday evening. Um, basically that's going to be the go no-go because some of these changes will require localization changes. We require uh meaningful tool tip changes. Um, we might rip it all out by the end of Friday. If we are not happy with the progret uh the the project or progress at that point in time, that's fine. That's always kind of baked into things like this. Uh, I personally don't mind working out of release and seeing stuff go to PvE, getting unfiltered player feedback, things like that, and then
• 01:30 - 02:00 like iterating and going from there. Like I think it's generally a pretty big positive, and so I like to work that way. Um, let's talk about talking about AP item changes. So, first off, a couple topics to bring up here. Um, all right. So, the first one is something that I don't think everyone's going to agree with, although I believe this very very strongly. Uh, which is when you're talking about items specifically, uh, game health versus item excitement. Um, your first order constraint, sorry, your first order,
• 02:00 - 02:30 um, need with items or systems in general really is the health of the game. It is more important that items do what you want and serve their champions well than be by themselves exciting. Now, the reason the word and is here is because you would like to maximize item excitement, assuming you're already hitting the game health needs. Um, right? You want to maximize that, but your primary goal is make the right things for the game, make the right choices, and then do what you can to hit
• 02:30 - 03:00 a local maximum on excitement, assuming you're still hitting your game health goals. Okay, so some items are going to become less exciting. There's going to be less text on them. I love deleting text off of items and abilities when I can. Um, because it allows them to be more focused. It gets us to lower complexity in League, which is a good thing overall. The game is exceedingly complex and hard to get into. And chipping away at that is helpful when you can. Uh, but the most important thing is not a sick tool tip where you're like fantasizing about what you could do. It's like, no, let's make a
• 03:00 - 03:30 good item that champions want to use and that we are okay with and happy with. the outputs of that item on those champions. Um, and it is okay to sacrifice excitement for game health. I think that is the worst the opposite is much worse, right? You don't want an unhealthy game, but there's exciting items like the the champions come first by a lot. Uh, and so I want to be very clear about that that like seeing the tools being like this exciting is not a huge problem to me. That is how I feel. Um, and it is sort of what is, you know,
• 03:30 - 04:00 a part of what is driving this project. Um, the next thing is a a look at numerical balance and an overall framework for this. So, um, I've got a spreadsheet with every item in the game. And I've basically got a bunch of named um, uh, data variables that are like, here is what attack damage is worth, here's what ability power is worth, here's what mana and mana regen are worth, and heal and shield power and, uh, individual proc damage, like if you're going to trigger an energize or a
• 04:00 - 04:30 Ludens proc or whatever, or a burn. Those are different of course because they're not all upfront and you know they all have different considerations and cool downs and whatnot. And so there's a big list of like here's what this stat is worth. And then that gets to filter into every item we build. And um so we're like okay what's the gold efficiency of this item? Um I have a personal framework for items with diverse stats that don't hard um synergize functionally like attack damage or AP and health. Uh commands a higher like efficiency on the item. um
• 04:30 - 05:00 giving percent penetration. I guess you could think of it as we'll just, you know, in your mind make percent pen a less valuable stat. I think of it more as the item items that do things that we want that are like meant to be pretty good in some situations are just allowed to be more efficient overall and some framework around that. Um, additionally, every item spits out um it's uh through this frameworking of like how much values in each of these buttons uh in each of these stats and uniques and whatever, you know, versus price and etc. uh how much of the item is in
• 05:00 - 05:30 offense, defense, or utility? And understanding that when I'm looking at an item and I'm like, "Here's Leandre's or here's Bloom or here's whatever." Okay, is this item mostly offense, largely offense? Is it half and half? Is it very durable? Is it tanky? Like what's going on here? Um, and at the end of the day, as we continue to iterate through items and get information and get feedback from players, uh, we get to further, uh, fine-tune and hone this framework to be more and more and more accurate and say, okay, we look back at this and, you know, after the AP item nerfs and every other classes item nerfs back in 1419,
• 05:30 - 06:00 okay, well, here's what we thought we were hitting. Okay, how close were we to that? Okay, cool. We're actually pretty close. All right, this thing was off. That thing was off. Okay, here's the adjustments we can make. Okay, cool. we should um make sure we you know try a little bit harder in thinking about you know how often we're doing single target burst and you know access and things like that and you know we hone and hone and hone and get better and better and better. Um so as it is right now um most AP items are actually pretty close to balanced again. Yes, Leandre is actually one of the best AP items in the game. Yes, last patch Rod of Ages is one of
• 06:00 - 06:30 the best AP items in the game. Yes. Um uh uh uh Ludens and Malignants and Merlamicon are not very good. Um yes, um Blood Letters Curse is not very good. Those things are true. And the nice thing, you know, the the better the framework gets tuned, it's like, yep, um, not only is this true from like champion usage and win rate data, not only is this true from player surveys, which uh we have pretty recently, uh, stood up a decent player survey where, uh, we just ask, hey, uh, what balance
• 06:30 - 07:00 scene do you think should have been in the previous patch? What should we have buff? What should we have nerfed? And so, it's not going to like drive a lot of our decision-making because there's more to it than just a, you know, player survey. Um, but it's good to know like actually uh I mean it's funny because for example um for the last couple of months players were like rod of ages is a kind of weak item. Like first of all not a lot of people talked about rod of ages in the survey but those who did it's like multiple choice like pick an item and then you know save out for basically right. Um, it's like, okay, people didn't tend to bring up Rod of
• 07:00 - 07:30 Ages much, but those who did tended to say this item is underpowered and we added a Ruby crystal to the build path and it went from no one really talks about ROA, but they kind of think it's underpowered to ROA is the most talked about AP item and everything is overpowered. I don't think a Ruby crystal in the build path is going to change that, but going from like February of this year to April of this year was an obvious massive change on like a 4x order of magnitude like sorry on a magnitude about four times, right? Um, again, Ruby Crystal does not go from an item no one talks about to the best end of the game. Survey is very much how
• 07:30 - 08:00 people think, not reality, but it's like good to see things like that. Of note also is things like, oh, actually people on average, by the way, in the AP item system, people roughly say buff as often as they say nerf. Like if you take that as like a c like if you take that as a blank how strong people think the system is, which is not actually accurate to be clear. um it's not how it uses at all, but as an example, people tend to say buff as much as they say nerf in the AP item space.
• 08:00 - 08:30 Um and uh so with that in mind, it's like yeah, it's roughly neutral. And then as of you know, two weeks ago, four weeks ago, Rod of Ages is like 5 to1 nerf this item and it's the most responded to item in in the list. Um by comparison, uh Sarap's Embrace has like consistently been like 2 to one nerf this item with like a moderate like response size every time. Um, and uh, Blackfire Torch, like 2:1 moderate response volume every single patch, like Blackfire torch kind of an OP item. And then what's interesting is even items
• 08:30 - 09:00 that are actually underpowered, Storm Surge, um, Ludens, Malignance, um, those come in with pretty consistent and fairly high volume. This item is overpowered feedback, which is interesting that like people who are saying like, "Hey, I want to talk about AP items." um a large a decent portion of players come in and say, "Hey, I think Lud is OP. I think Migus is OP. Um these AP burst items are kind of OP." Uh they don't say it for death cap. They don't say for void staff, but I think it's kind of interesting. Um so it's it's interesting gut check of like sure
• 09:00 - 09:30 it's biased towards people who are willing to respond to a survey. Yes. Right. That's that's not, you know, the exact representative average League of Legends player, but it's way more representative than say like a Twitter thread or like whoever's posting, you know, their most recent, you know, Twitch video or something, right? um or Twitch clip on YouTube, whatever. Um anyway, all this to say that we have a whole bunch of things that point into, you know, what are people actually building? Uh what is their actual like win rate data? Um and it's not just like literally win rate of slot. There's more
• 09:30 - 10:00 to it than that, but again, the actual like statistically measured item power data. There's uh frameworking of actual item balance and like how strong things actually are and aren't. So, for example, one thing with Leandre's is I knew I wasn't nerfing Leandre's enough relative to everything else. Like, it was still one of the biggest nerfs of the patch in 1419, but I knew Leandre was still OP from the framework I had. And and also Rod of Ages, by the way. Actually, both those were like these items are ridiculously silly. These are clearly OP, but like there's no way I
• 10:00 - 10:30 can nerf this by like 15%. No one's going to get it cuz Rada had like Roa hadn't caught on, right? And then like we fast forward six months and it's like oh yeah everyone thinks row is the best item and they think the result is the best item like yeah I knew that. Um so in some cases frameworking works but in some cases I have to wait for players to understand as well. Um so again a a mix of data sources that kind of creates a a whole picture. Um there are some that I think uh have very large um misalignments. So I think crypt bloom is much stronger than players think it is. Um just like pretty much full stop.
• 10:30 - 11:00 Cryum is actually a pretty good item. I agree it doesn't look good. It doesn't look like it is a strong item. I'm quite confident this item is actually good. Um obviously the user base is quite small because no one thinks it is and that's that's tough. That's like hey there is a problem here where this item is probably actually good. Doesn't look that way. Let's go solve that as well. Let's move on to the next topic here. Okay. So class definitions and champion affinities. So um I have been a fan for a while and from what I have seen in my two years and change so far doing design and league um that this model mental
• 11:00 - 11:30 model for me uh is actually pretty good and bears fruit and that uh I get the results I think I'm going to get and the game goes in the right direction. So uh what I mean by this is so champions generally belong to a class. Now every champion is actually unique. Um, we should not pretend that champions are actually in a box and that all AP fighters are the same or all AP assassins are the same or all control are the same. They all have their own unique needs and wants and that is totally fine. But the general idea is that hey, we can probably paint you with
• 11:30 - 12:00 a fairly broad brush in a a subclass of champions and say you're probably going to want these things. You're probably going to not want these other things. You're probably going to really need these couple of things. And that's tend to be true. and it's allowed us to design items toward a broad swath of champions using class definitions and then gut checking across the actual individual champions themselves and making sure that they have builds that work. Um the correlary to this is um champion affinities and this is saying that well you are let's say an AD fighter and as an AD fighter assuming
• 12:00 - 12:30 you're not like full-on Master Yi or Yasuo or Yona or something you're maybe you're scent maybe you're Darius maybe you are Vi maybe you're Fiora the same thing for AP of course right maybe you're Gwen maybe you're Morichiser they're they're quite far apart here but hey you're an AP or AD fighter you're going to want sources of damage um you're not an assassin you're going to some kind of repeatability. This could be ability haste. It could be attack speed. It could be auto attack damage incentives like Hullbreaker. Um even Trinity Force with a short cooldown is a
• 12:30 - 13:00 very repeated thing that asks you, "Hey, you might want to get haste with this to make sure you've got a two second cool down on your last on your your next hit button, right? Like it's worth getting more haste on Jax so that you can your Jack's W is close to Triforce's cadence, right?" Um that's actually valuable. It's useful. Um and like he likes Shojan a decent amount for that reason, right? It's part of the reason anyway. Um, and so saying that, yeah, you know, uh, that's where your offense comes from. It, you know, we're not going to give you lethality because that's a burst stat, right? That is a multiplier on damage per cast. What we want is you to cast more often. We want this type of
• 13:00 - 13:30 champion who wants to be repeatable, right? So, they want to be repeatable. So, they need the durability and the tools to stay in the fight in order to repeat. Uh, and that means that champs that want to burst don't need to be repeatable. It means we can cut haste from those items. It means we can give high amounts of attack, damage ability, power, it means we can give lethality or flat pen. means we can give large amounts of AD or um AP or whatever and as long as we say okay well yes is this champion kit we have is this actually going to have an affinity for high amounts of burst or high amounts of repeatability or whatever else or
• 13:30 - 14:00 whatever else and and kind of build those out and then right that allows you to come back and say well okay let me look at what Fior is building or what Ziggs is building or what um Saraphene is building or what um uh Tia is building and say hey does it match your expectations right how does this champion can actually function in the game. What do their team fight patterns actually look like? What are the items that they are building in order to enable that gameplay pattern? Is this match? Does this align with what we want to do? Does it not align with what we want to do? Is this okay? Um and sort of figuring all those things out, right? And and making sure that like actually
• 14:00 - 14:30 yes. Um this is useful. And the reason why before we go down the bottom half of this about items themselves is um I think it is important that when you see a champion, it behaves the way you expect. Like Mundo should be very big, very tanky. The regen should be noticeable. He can clearly withstand several hits. And actually, yeah, a guy with big cleaver attacks you and deals really good damage. Um, and so he's threatening. He is a juggernaut. He is a, you know, regenheavy champion, but when you look at Mundo, you know what's going on. And by making sure that his
• 14:30 - 15:00 kit has the right incentives on it, the making sure that the there are items that feed into those incentives and that feel good. And so that when you look at Mundo, you know what Mundo does? When you look at Mundo's items, it reinforces that's what Mundo does. Um and so that at kind of all levels of skill, the whole like point of a champion and their um expression of the champion fantasy and all that all kind of works out, right? And it all kind of aligns, right? That that's all sort of all wrapped in. Uh champions and items again, champions are more important, but champions and items are pretty much um they're locked
• 15:00 - 15:30 together. They are basically uh how am I trying to say this? Um they're intertwined. So you still have to care about both. Even though there is a clear like champions are more important than items, items should serve champions. Let's make sure the these these items serve champions appropriately. Um I think it's enough for that. I can go on this for longer, but this is good enough for now. So let's now talk about item purpose, right? Through the lens of we have individual champions, we have champion classes, we have champion affinities, we have stat affinities, things like that. Um an item needs to serve a purpose. Now an item's purpose
• 15:30 - 16:00 is not has equal pick rate with all other items. Um, if we have an expectation that an item is meant to be niche and it's not niche, there's probably a problem there. For example, several years ago, it was correct on every AD fighter to rush Kemp Punk Chainsword. It was just a better black cleaver. You should always buy it. And at a certain point, Riot had nerfed it. It was no longer better than Cleaver. People were really slow to switch off, but eventually switched off. They did the right thing. But, um, when you're like, "Hey, Kemp Chainsword is there to be a good Grievous wounds items. We
• 16:00 - 16:30 should not expect you to buy Kemp Chainsword every game." and then viruses kempunk chains sword for a slot with no healers and it's like we failed somewhere. Something is wrong. The item is not serving its purpose correctly. Um, crypt bloom being a uh percent magic pen item for champs who would rather have haste than a stack of AP is the purpose of crypt bloom. But if no one's buying it, there's a problem because someone should want haste more than AP. Okay, well something's wrong that no one thinks this item is approachable or
• 16:30 - 17:00 reasonable or whatever. Uh, mirror scimitar is very rare. Good. We don't want you to default to QSS all the time. It's not meant to be the default grab that makes you beat ash. It's going to occasionally be the thing you go and buy when you're facing a malahar or something, but it's fine that it's rare. It's not meant to be common. That's fine. Um, right. It's not your generic I get MR stat stick for an AD carry. Um, to talk about AD carries some more, um, I I don't slash we don't want AD carries to buy defensive item every single game. Uh, shield bow and blood thirstster and sometimes there's binding, right? Blood
• 17:00 - 17:30 Thirst is a pretty big deal for um especially Draven, but it's pretty common on someone like Samira as well. Um and you know, shield bow we do expect on Yasuo and Yona. It's like very reasonable that this melee fighter who wants crit chance and wants to deal a lot of damage but isn't an assassin needs durability somewhere and it's not offered much in the crit system. Shield though is meant to be very very good on Yasuoni. That's its purpose and indeed it is and that's great and we're happy about that. Um, and yet it's not that great on Trindir because he has his R and he doesn't really care that much.
• 17:30 - 18:00 Great. Working as intended. Meanwhile, it is situationally playable on a bunch of AD carries. Cool. They shouldn't be defaulting to getting 500 bonus health every game. Um, now we can overall tune the game to make sure the amount of damage and durability overall is appropriate. Yes. But that is not meant to be cribbing on shield to get us there. It's let's tune the game correctly such that combat is going the way we want it to. And then, hey, you can moderately increase your durability by getting a blood thirstster or a shield bow. And that's an occasionally
• 18:00 - 18:30 acceptable purchase. That's its purpose. That's why it's there. Um, and so you can kind of go down on that some more and be like, "Hey, uh, Rocket Belt. Who is Rocket Belt meant to serve?" Well, uh, right now it serves what I call circle ultimate champions. It's for Fiddlesticks and Kenan and Nico champions who want to make sure they can insert themselves into any team, make sure their ult does a lot of damage and hits as many targets as possible. And it's very kitbound. Um, and one thing we think we can do is be like, well, it should also be in the cards for a lot of kind of generic melee AP fighters from
• 18:30 - 19:00 Ekko to um, Silus to, you know, fringe Evelyn to be honest, but like assassin-ish fighters. Um, you know, Morcai be quite fringe here. That wouldn't really be uh, the expectation here. Uh, well, you know what? Maybe we are willing to woo occasionally those assassiny champions. Like Akali is actually a bit fiery and a colleague would be a reasonable champion here. Evelyn would be kind of a stretch, but like sure, Evelyn might buy this once in a while to make sure she has target access to land the charm. Okay, fine.
• 19:00 - 19:30 Um, but like we don't expect um Evelyn to buy rocket belt every game. We don't expect to buy rocket belt every game, but like it's in the pool. That would be reasonable. That's that's you know the shot call on class definitions and champion affinities are like yeah actually if you're playing a more fightery style build I could totally see rocket belt being reasonable on the suite of champions. So it serves a purpose here. Um and so that leads to the next thing which is item specificity and broadness talking about uniques and then uh we'll talk about line a little bit later. So um item specificity and
• 19:30 - 20:00 broadness is basically um talking about the kind of stat profile and or unique effects an item has that tells you who should and shouldn't buy it. So for example, death cap in its extreme simplicity does a really good job of telling you who it's for. It is extremely expensive. It is a multiplier on the amount of AP you have um and it has no durability whatsoever. So immediately you're looking at Morichiser or Singed or any other like
• 20:00 - 20:30 actual fighter Diana probably she can almost get away with this. It's like oh this is not for me. This is high burst for champ with high AP such that they got 100 AP on their other slots and they want to do another big chunk of damage, another 30% or so more damage. That's who death cap's for and with literally two lines of text. Death cap is really obvious. Void staff also two lines of text also really obvious. big stack of AP, bunch of percent magic pen to say, oh, they started building MR, time to buy a void staff, and it serves its
• 20:30 - 21:00 purpose really well. Now, the nice thing is by death cap and void staff having the text on them, there was nothing there to further sharpen them to be like, hey, but also did you know um it does double ability power on Tuesday or it's melee range modded and that can be useful if you need to target your user base better or you can be like this item does what it's supposed to do. It's, you know, fairly capstone in its design and it's for high AP users who don't need more durability or don't want more durability and so some assassins can buy it and plenty of mages can buy it when
• 21:00 - 21:30 they're trying to go for a burstier build, but it's not so strongly tuned that you literally always buy it, right? It's like, yeah, this is good when you can get it and it it's obviously on purpose, right? Um, and so talking about uniques for example, right? This is why, for example, you can have things like um and it's why uh spoiler for later in this video, um I deleted one of the passes off of Horizon Focus. Horizon Focus is a large amount of damage and a large amount of ability haste with no durability onto it. You can think of a
• 21:30 - 22:00 lot of champions who want those three lines of text, a lot of AP, a lot of haste, and I don't want to be more durable. And there's some champions who want the first two and they can build a cosmic drive and they're like, "That's not exactly what I Not. And in fact, people are generally not going to be happy that Cinder's running around with extra 300 health because that's not that's not what she's not meant to be that durable, right? Synra is not generally like she's meant to use her mobility to stay out of range and stay out of reach. And when you catch her, she's meant to kind of die. She has really really good pick tools with QE. She has really really good peel tools
• 22:00 - 22:30 with QE. She has really really high mobility with Q and W not requiring you to stop to cast. This champion is meant to be squishy. And if her bestin-class ability haste access is 300 health on it with cosmic drive, well, there are problems with the game when but but at the same time we want cosmic drive to be good for the Lilas and Morichisers and echoes and whatnot of the world where they actually want to stay and they want to deal damage rumble and so on where it's like no this is very legitimate on them and they would actually use the health and this would be appropriate for them. Uh, and yes, you could melee range
• 22:30 - 23:00 mod. I understand, but like, well, we have champions like Cassiopia or Rise or Swain where no, they also deserve durability and they also are playing at a range where they're going to take hits and they're going to give some back and like that is an entire class of champions that also deserves health items. And a melee range mod would alienate those champions. Instead, how about we just make a correlary to cosmic drive that is for Syndra and for Oriana and for Victor. Victor, you could argue a little bit. He's a little bit of battle mage. Um, and it's like actually
• 23:00 - 23:30 what this means to me is that Horizon Focus is hypershot unique is serving to um, erroneously shrink the user base when there's a whole bunch of control mages and artillery mages alike, not all of which hit at 700 range or 600 range. Um, but would like a stack of ability power with a lot of ability haste and no health on it, right? And by having these good items without health on them that you're willing to buy that you feel good about, well, this allows burst builds to be good because your opponent didn't get
• 23:30 - 24:00 400 health on two of their slots. This allows assassins overall, whether they AD or AP, to be good because that mid laner didn't get 400 health in two of those slots. Um, that's useful. Uh, that is a good thing for the game because it allows champions to have the weakness they're meant to have. Again, shield build being in every AD carry build is not a good result. A cosmic drive being in a bunch of squishy AP builds is not a good result. let them go build a horizon focus and feel better about that item. Right? That's the intent and that's um talking basically. I hope that example made sense of using uniques and using
• 24:00 - 24:30 stat profiles to specify who an item is for and getting the appropriate broadness to them. Another example here would be Leandre's Torment having the madness passive where um ha you know having a slowly ramping more damage over time allows his item to push itself toward well you know still having a line of attack says your kit deals more damage. um allows it to move toward champs who might have low AP ratios, which generally would not be a burst champion. Would allow it to move toward um uh longer combat patterns, right?
• 24:30 - 25:00 This is Zach and Amumu, but also um uh Lilia or Rumble or Morichiser or Singed where like, yeah, most of the time you're fighting, we're clearly going to be at the full 3 second duration and six% damage amp here on Madness. Um if you're doing a one-shot come with Oriana, you're probably not. And so that is a line of text that says, "Hey, this item is slightly better for long duration fighters." Now, you might be able to get that anyway with, you know, stat specificity, sure, but it is what a unique like that does is help to
• 25:00 - 25:30 broadcast who it's for if ability power, haste, um, health, move speed, things like that aren't enough to do what you want. Now, sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't, but that is sometimes what uniques are for. Um, sometimes to give a unique effect that is like this item has a purpose, and that purpose is the unique effect, such as a max health burn. Um, and sometimes it's to say, hey, this is for champions who ramp in damage. Um, or a way to lock omnivamp behind being in combat for a long time and not just always standing off waves, which is what Riftmaker is doing, right? This conditional omnivamp. Uh and so a
• 25:30 - 26:00 somewhat correlary point here is why I mentioned unending despair is uh the fairly recent update to ending despair which was giving it double resists and a heal that scaled purely off bonus health was to say hey look unending despair is for health stacking champions to have a good item in slot two. Um, now the concern I had had, and I think this actually is founded, uh, and and is is reinforced by what we see in player behavior, is that like a durability item
• 26:00 - 26:30 with dual resist is an item that everyone's going to buy slot two, even if it's not actually that good. And so, for example, an despair is not actually that strong of an item for most users. Most people buying unpair are actually kind of making a bad choice here. Um but the reason it has dual resist is actually kind of up here um serving heart steel champions, wararmmogs champions, big you know high health, Mundo, Cho'Gath, Scion, etc. to be like you have a very good feeling slot two item. In slot one you got no target
• 26:30 - 27:00 resists. In slot two your build might be done because the game might be over before slot three is done. And in high is actually true. And so we're just going to give you an item that just feels good in slot two. it covers everything you need and just like congratulations you can just go heart steal an ending you have a build that is for you that you can just go feel good about um and that is true right that actually was achieved that it totally feels good on these champions go heart steal an ending and you're like I did it I got the build and I have exciting items that feel good for me and that is good like that is useful um the downside of that is unpair is like you're looking
• 27:00 - 27:30 at the tank items you're like what do I want to buy e it despair like doesn't matter what I am doesn't matter if I'm sunfire cape first doesn't matter if I'm leandry first doesn't matter what my first item is you just buy this because like well I look at the numbers I'm like I'm not going to do the math just buy it. And there are better items out there, but it's it's so sort of complete even though it's actually not because people don't do the math. Um, it feels like this item is like, well, of course I just buy it. It's just perfect. Um, even though it's not actually always true. Um, random point there, but this is you can like this can this can cause you problems if you you know you're not always careful, right? Um, next thing is
• 27:30 - 28:00 talking about item comparisons. Uh, so the point here is there's there's two ways for you basically. So, one is um items that are very clearly distinct are, you know, function like they're very distinct. Hey, um Storm Surge and Horizon Focus don't have a lot of overlap. Uh yes, they are squishy ability power items with a good amount of AP on them. Yes, I deal damage, but like you know, I buy Horizon Focus because it's got a lot of
• 28:00 - 28:30 haste and on live right now it's because it's is um explicitly locked to being an artillery champion. and Storm Surge says, "I'm very bursty and I want even more burst to make sure I can go kill the targets." Uh, the flat magic then helps sell that as well. Um, and that kind of stuff there. Uh, but sometimes you have much more direct comparables. So, for example, all of the lost chapter upgrades where you're looking at archangels or malignance or Ludens or um, Blackfire torch. They are relatively similar in price point. They give a similar amount of mana. They give um, varying amounts of haste. They give very
• 28:30 - 29:00 amounts of ability power. They have varying unique passives. Um, and so basically you're saying, well, I need to look at the details of the text here to see which item is better for me. Um, and I think that is functional, right? It is not just, oh, I'm trading 10 AP or 15 AP for 10 haste. Um, I'm also trading out a burn for this proc here and I'm, you know, trading out this other thing or, you know, I went for serifs and I got the shield because I want the more durable item and it also got this like this nice binding to Rod of Ages because the mana from Rowa is going to feed into seraps and that probably means I'm, you know, I want to be durable and, you know, this all kind of feeds into itself and over and over again.
• 29:00 - 29:30 Um, the tough thing and I don't I'm not I don't have a great like pathy answer for you here, but the the point of this uh line being here essentially is um I sorry I'm just like trying to think how to phrase this properly. Um item selection should be obvious when you can do that. Um and it's also okay for like there not to be real choices. So, what I mean is like, hey, if you're
• 29:30 - 30:00 trying to play a melee assassin, you're probably just getting Lichbane every game on slot one, and then you're probably going Storm Sword slot two, and you're probably going shadow flame slot three, and that's fine. Um, again, the earlier point about going heart steel and despair. I think that is also totally fine. I think it is more important to have items that feel very, very good, even if they are kind of rote, than to have a set of choices that all feel kind of bad. Um, six perfect items uh is a way better state than 12
• 30:00 - 30:30 mediocre items, none of which feel good. Yes, in the latter case, you have a lot more choice here, but you'd rather feel good about all your items, even if the build is kind of on rails, that's tended to be true for players. Um, and I know this is true for the majority of players because even when there is a substantial amount of build variety actually there and the data bears out there's a lot of options out there, people still just believe there's only one build. Like by and large the culture of zeitgeist is oh you've got to go you know um divine sunder is the only item you can go for actually right now you have to go rod of
• 30:30 - 31:00 agents like well no it's good of course especially situationally when you're against burst but like no actually it's you know it's there's other good items that are totally fine here as well. Um so you know sucks to suck but that's kind of where it is. Uh, I know this has not been a very this point in I've not been very good like direct I haven't been very like directed on and apologies for that one. That's been kind of hazy moving around. Um, end of the day it's like hey people are kind of imperfect at making item comparisons and so to me um
• 31:00 - 31:30 making the comparisons stand out as strongly as you can which often means stripping pieces out of the item to make the differences stronger um is helpful. Um, also I guess one of one other thing I'll say is that um, anytime someone sees text that doesn't serve their champion, they are immediately turned off. Um, so if you have, for example, an overly complex unique passive where they going to they don't think they can meet the conditions every single time, they're just going to turn their their brains off and be like, it's not for me. Um, for the longest time, anytime Sheen
• 31:30 - 32:00 or Trinity Force had mana on it, Shen players were like, absolutely never. I would never waste money on mana. And it's like, dude, if this item didn't have mana and we just like deleted the line from the item, we literally nerfed the item for everyone else and it would like it'd still be good. By the way, Shen players would be like, "Oh, I should buy this. This is a pretty good item. Look at this. It gives attack speed and attack damage and health and ability haste and the sheen proc off of my queue." Like both old and new Shen both had pretty short Q cooldowns. Um it's like you just change the the perception of the item by like a massive
• 32:00 - 32:30 degree. Um, and here's one thing I've also come to notice with item changes is that um, opening an item to new users doesn't tend to immediately infatuate them in the way that current users who use who perfectly use the current version of a specific item are like item is perfect for me and exactly me. This is the best item. You're nerfing it for me. And then for the other, you know, 20 champions who can use this item, well, they haven't thought of it yet. Um, and so that's one of the interesting happens as well with um, like when people are thinking about shopping is uh, that has a problem as well. The last point here is selecting targets. I talked about
• 32:30 - 33:00 that already. Uh which is a combination of like we have a lot of data around actual item power um and framework driven item power and uh survey data and actual player usage rates. And so end of the day what it came down to is uh combined with the last patches of rod of ages. Uh we have nerfed four items that uh checked all the boxes of usage rate um and survey data and model driven win rate and um like model driven or framework driven um um like item power
• 33:00 - 33:30 actually. Um doing a couple of adjustments that are going to be relatively power neutral. Uh, and we're doing a bunch of buffs to items that um largely irrelevant of survey and usage data. Um, satisfy our like quantitative power metrics of like Ludens is like the second or I think it's the third most built AP item in the game. Uh, and survey data is roughly neutral. Um, but through on our any of our statistical frameworks is like no, this item is actually pretty bad, so it's getting buffed. Um, and and things like that.
• 33:30 - 34:00 Uh, Bloom is one where I'm actually really reticent to buff it. We're going to buff it anyway. Um, I think Cryploom is not a actually weak item, but it has completely no users. Uh, it it pulls horribly in survey data. Um, and yeah, uh, so we'll see. But I I do think that it is actually pretty good. Uh, regardless, let's talk about finally the next point in the slide, which is not the items themselves. So, let's talk about the AP class overview. And this is like the broad framework through which again champions are all unique
• 34:00 - 34:30 snowflakes. Just because this is their class does not mean this what the champion is uh truly doing individually and uh the most important test is that does a champion have a complete build. So to me there are vaguely five classes of champion in the AP in the AP space there's assassins/ burst mages. So assassins are pretty much by definition melee um and burst mages are by definition range but otherwise have very very very similar needs. Uh it is high odds of ability power. It is low appetite for haste. It is high appetite for magic penetration. Um the core
• 34:30 - 35:00 difference is that assassins um are given very very strong tools. Burst mes to some degree as well but not always the same. Um assassins are given strong tools to reach the target they want to kill. Um whereas burst mages depending on who they are don't always. So for example, I would argue both Leblanc and Annie are burst mages, but Leblanc has the tools to reach Jyn. Annie does not. And so in a world where Annie has like percent pen
• 35:00 - 35:30 as a passive on her R, I think it's a defensible mechanic because Annie can't really choose to go reach Jyn and a world where burst mage Annie is a balanced champion requires that she overkills Jyn by so much that there's never ever room for interaction that she astro overkills him and then has like pedalling okayish damage I guess against like your typical frontliner. Um whereas Leblanc doesn't need to have a bunch of target agnosticism in the way that we just gave it to Annie a month ago. Um Leblanc's like, "Yeah, your skill test
• 35:30 - 36:00 is figuring out how to reach the Jin or the Jinx or the Aelius or whatever, you got to go figure that out. That is part of the skill of you playing your champion. Go deal with it." Um because in a world where LeBlanc is good at killing Maokai, the game breaks down because who's good into Leblanc now? Hope you have Ma's ult. That's not enough. Um, and so having a set of targets and um, target access in mind is important and then using that to through to through then the lens of are you repeatable, are you not? And look, if Leblanc wants to like pivot her build
• 36:00 - 36:30 because like actually this entire team is tanky and I can't burst anyone and so I'm going to have a worse time and I'm going to play a haste build and I'm going to like try to burn this tank down with Leandre and it's going to be a worse use of Leblanc. It's going to be a, you know, weaker than if it was an ideal comp for her. But like it is good that champion classes and champions individually have generic strengths and weaknesses where it's like yeah it kind of sucks to be a burst champion if you're against four bruisers and tanks um or an assassin at least like the assassin skewed types of these and it would be a reason on a colleague to say I'm going to play for the conqueror
• 36:30 - 37:00 riftmaker version and not the electrocute um you know high AP lichbane stuff. Um and like you make that pivot you move towards fighter when you're allowed to as a colleague or echo or whatever and like that's fine. you become a fighter because the game dictates it. Not because as an assassin you can just also assassinate front line. Um the next class down um which is similarly squishy is artillery mages. There aren't a whole lot of them. U in fact you would um the case I would make here is that Zoe is a burst mage not artillery mage. Um but again it's it's not a you know hard you know rigid box
• 37:00 - 37:30 here. It's just I think she's more of a burst champion than artillery. But obviously she has some poke aspects right in the way that Akali is an assassin but also clearly has some fighter aspects. Ekko is a fighter with some assassin aspects. Um, Diana is a fighter with some assassin aspects. But the point is for artiller mages, um, artiller mages have actually a lot of space here. Uh, they should be by default squishy. Um, they are the default squishiest AP class in the game. Uh, they don't have high base stats. Uh, they are meant to be safe by playing
• 37:30 - 38:00 from long range. They should have high access to ability power. High high amounts of ability power. just have high access to amounts of uh ability haste so that they can choose to play high uptime artillery. They're also situationally totally fine to play high burst um ability power, sorry, high burst or high uptime ability power. Either one is is fine more or less, but we want to make sure uh both avenues are good. And so that allows us to do things like, hey, let's make sure that the mana costs are reasonable such that you can move on and play Horizon Focus. Um one thing that I
• 38:00 - 38:30 identified here as part of this is like, oh, I don't really like that Zig is to go two lost chapter items. Um, I don't know if we'll do it this patch, but um, the fact that Ziggs kind of has to go serif because of the mana pool uh, means that Ziggs doesn't get to be highly lethal, highly damaging and appropriately squishy because he has a 500 point shield in all of his builds because his actual build is like blackfire torch or ludens and a sarap embrace. And then he finally gets to build a cool item on slot three. It's like that's too late. Um, and so like we'll probably at some point go and um change his ex mana cost/ mana pool to
• 38:30 - 39:00 make sure he's happy on like just a blackfire torch and functional. Um, and if he wants to really greet much mana, he can, but I don't know why he probably would. Uh, but if he wants to pick Sarah over horizon because he really wants the shield because there's a talon and a VI on the enemy team. Okay, right. That's totally fine. That's totally reasonable. Um, it is fine to situationally go into durability when there's assassins, that's fine. But if the default look for Ziggs is, oh, I always get a 500 point serif shield because it needs the mana. Oh, oops. Um, things are slightly off, right? And having this like framework
• 39:00 - 39:30 driven like let's go top down, like let's make sure we're doing all the right things. Like, oh yeah, that's an identified uh problem that like we should probably fix, right? But again, artillery mages, um, you know, default to squishy, high AP, high haste can choose to build burst if they want to. Uh, next one down the line, control me mages. Um, this is, you know, your pretty much your standard Oriana. This is where Syndra kind of is. Yes, she looks a little bit like a burst champion, but um you know, this is this is like when you think of a default mage in League of Legends, probably what you're thinking of. Um this now says, "Hey, sometimes I'm going to be looking a little bit more towards durability because I am I'm not playing at maximum
• 39:30 - 40:00 range, but like across all the other AP champs in the game, I'm probably still the second squishiest class." Um serifs is a little bit more reasonable. Run of Ages kind of weird. Um you know, should be very able to and willing to build full squishy, high AP every slot. Uh realistically, control mage builds and trolling mage builds are going to be almost identical is the idea here. And it's why again uh one of the passes getting deleted off Horizon Focus because Oriana and Victor and uh Hay should all feel good about buying Horizon Focus. They should have a a
• 40:00 - 40:30 clear path to high ability haste in every slot. If your build is blackfire torch into horizon focus and cooldown boots and crypt bloom and um now you want to round out with a death cap, that should be a viable build path where you're like, "No, I'm going haste every slot." And if I really really really really want haste, fine. Cosmic Drive is is another 25 haste item for me. Um if you really really care that much. But for the most part, like let's let's give them the full AP build with Storm Surge
• 40:30 - 41:00 and and Shadow Flame in there. Let's give them the full haste builds with with and void staff. Um let's give them the full haste builds with horizon focus and cooldown boots and and uh crypt bloom and like make sure that both of those paths are there because you're like I'm playing control mage and you know what no one on that team is burstable. Okay. Well, we make sure that your base damages and ability power ratios are such that it is reasonable to trade off void staff versus um uh blanking sorry void staff versus cryloom. it is reasonable to trade off Shadow Flame versus Horizon Focus or
• 41:00 - 41:30 Storm Surge versus Horizon Focus. Let's make sure the numbers make sense that the, you know, the 25 AP I'm trading for 20 haste is acceptable and that is fine. It's like, well, let's make sure your AP ratios are appropriate then because I know gold-wise what that costs. Um, but if your kit says actually I have astral astronomically high AP ratios, um, and my mana pool is so constrained that if I build haste, I run out of mana, we should fix that, right? Um, and so again, I truly believe there there's going to be some champion kit follow-up work, just moving numbers around to make
• 41:30 - 42:00 sure that they have the appropriate affinity for these items. But, um, this work is to make sure those items are in the spot that we think is reasonable. Uh, next step down is battle mages. This is uh, Swain, Cassopia, uh, Rise. I would argue Brand are all in the space as well where, um, they and Brand you could argue is again jumping back towards burst mage sometimes because he kind of offloads and leaves. Uh, but there's totally like viable battle mage builds out there for Brand. Uh, the point is, um, you are now doing AD carry things. You are constantly in range all the time. Um, your stuff often only has
• 42:00 - 42:30 like 700 range or so. And we're expecting you to literally just stay in combat. Again, Rise and Cassipia being a really, really obvious examples of this. Swain being a really obvious example of this where it's like, no, you are staying in range. It's not like a cannon thing where you're like, I dive in once, hope they all die, and then I can do whatever. It's like, no, you are staying in range to do your job. You don't really go in and out. Okay, well guess what? These champs need to live long enough when Vaggar and Syndra are in the game such that they can get through. Um, like the idea that like yes, Swain might get outranged by Syndra, but he's not
• 42:30 - 43:00 getting one-shot by Synindra. He's actually allowed to do his job in a team fight if Synra exists. Uh, in the way that any champion is to play at that kind of range is allowed to exist and play the game out when Synra exists. She can zone, she can CC, she can peel, she can help get a kill if it's a 2v1 instead of a gank or whatever. And I'm not saying like Swain should actually counter Synra XD, but it's like no, your champion should function. So, let's give you the kit that makes sure that you function. Let's make sure the overall damage tuning in League of Legends like across the game overall is such that you
• 43:00 - 43:30 don't tend to get bursted out when you're playing a battle mage and you're exposing yourself to the entire enemy team being in range of you. Um, and let's make sure that the items that serve you such that if we're going to have, you know, gold snowballing modulate how well the game goes. Okay. Well, Cinder's really hard far ahead of Swain. Swain someone gets one shot or like gets comboed out and can't actually team fight. Swain is really ahead. He gets a shrug off Synindra. Yeah, that dance is appropriate for League of Legend to have texture based on what you're doing. That is that is appropriate. So, battle mages have a meaningful appetite for durability such that they are not burstable. They could be brought down, not burstable. And then
• 43:30 - 44:00 the final one is um just truly the actual fighters and occasionally greedy tanks. Um, Amumu and Zach will go for a uh, Leandre's Torment sometimes and they are allowed to build greedier. They are allowed to go for these kinds of builds. They want to go into Riftmaker. They want to go into um, Bloodletters's Curse because they're doing well and they want to carry. I am fine with tanks having viable AP alt builds for when they are snowballing. I think we should make sure that these champions are good as tank
• 44:00 - 44:30 builds from the beginning. Some of the really hard affinities like I mean Wu with Landre is really hard to break out and so he's kind of going to be on the item for a long time but um when is reasonable have it be an alt build not the default. Um I do want to do a project at some point of bringing down some tank burst damage to make sure that they're not too threatening overall because I think in a lot of cases they can be. Um, but this is, you know, the kind of situation where, okay, they really are, they are melee, they are running in, and they don't have a Collie
• 44:30 - 45:00 Shroud. They don't have Echo R. They don't have Evelyn R. They can't just get out. They're in, and they're staying in. Morichiser is staying in. Singed like has to literally touch people with his body basically to deal damage and then he's going to fling and run away. Sure. Yeah. But like he needs to like have the ability to like actually play his champion out because he can't blink. They don't get in very quickly. Um, and of course there is a wide variety of fighters here, right? From true juggernauts like Morichiser to very, you know, live and deaf ones such as Ekko who can literally just blink black out. And like, yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if Ekko does some assassin builds
• 45:00 - 45:30 because of course he can. He has R. That's an assassin spell basically. But he also has his W and his passive and his W passive that says, actually, I've got some fighter patterns here where I'm going to stick it sticking with it. I might go rocket belt. I might go cosmic drive. I might get some durability on these slots and and stick around a bit longer. All right, so finally I know we're 45 minutes in. We're not even on the items yet, but I wanted to kind of here's the the groundwork that we're kind of working off of to look at these items and make changes. So, here we go. Um, we are nerfing the three of the best
• 45:30 - 46:00 AP items. Um, Rod of Ages was nerfed by five ability power, 80 health last patch. Again, it was pretty clearly an overpowered item. Uh, Sarap losing 20% of its shield. Uh essentially we think that with the changes coming in this patch that there will be plenty of fruitful and useful battle mage and fighter durable enough items such that Sarah can uh lose some of its shield and not give quite as much durability to a whole squad of uh control mages who are really mana hungry and whatnot and we can just ensure like down the line that Cassadin or Rise or whoever else cast
• 46:00 - 46:30 etc have enough durability that they're going to be okay with the shield being weaker. Landry's Torment. What it comes down to is this should not be a default item. This should be an item that is situationally good that is worth worth trading off meaningful AP and meaningful ability haste in order to gain this percent max health burn damage. Um I've certainly seen the comments of like but Riot were buying this because champions are too tanky. Uh so my view right now
• 46:30 - 47:00 is that overall in League of Legends champions are not too tanky. Now certainly the current invasion of a bunch of rowa ri like rowa um rift maker rowa leandre's midlaners is making a lot of squishy mages too tanky and now there's an arm race of like well I can't burst you so why would I go for a burst build you're just going to build that item well of course if landers is OP and row is OP why would you not build the best items which also happens to counter the burst mage that you're up against in lane right of course why would they ever do anything else because not only get
• 47:00 - 47:30 they get to counter you it's also they're just the strongest item in the game if they're not the strongest item in the game. Well, guess what? You as the burst mage could go burst the other champion, all the other AP users who are doing this already. Um, and the AP bot laners and AP, you know, supports occasionally who are doing this as well. Um, even some of the the AP junglers, right? It's like, well, yeah, if everyone's already building health, yeah, you're you can't do your job anymore. So, part of the reason, part of the reason, um, AP burst builds kind of suck is one, the relative power of AP burst items to AP health items is off. Uh, and then two, the meta game that
• 47:30 - 48:00 you're in is a bunch of AP health items, aka you can't burst them. Now, in general though, the fact that fighters aren't good at, you know, aren't getting bursted very easily, tanks are getting bursted very easily, that is working as intended. Um, again, broadly speaking, the overall combat pacing of League, I think, is fine right now. Um, we have robust player surveys around how people feel about combat pacing. Um, it varies by server and it will, you know, vary over time to a certain degree, of course. Um but uh the like global aggregate
• 48:00 - 48:30 answer here is um that the people who think combat is too fast and those who think combat is too slow are in equivalence. Uh now we might decide down the line that the best version of League is one where um the majority of players think combat's too fast by a small degree. Uh but for now I'm inclined to think that the overall pace of combat in League of Legends is appropriate. that on average champions are appropriately tanky and that when you face tankier
• 48:30 - 49:00 champions such as juggernauts and tanks they in fact feel very tanky and that you're like wow I'm against a Darius I can't burst him um good is kind of what I can say here like that is intended is intended that when you're playing Syndra um interact with Darius is meaningfully different from interacting with Ari is meaningfully different from interacting with Jyn and of course Ari's currently going Riftmaker Leandre so she looks like Darius that is a problem that we are fixing by nerfing those items because that's not the experience you signed up for when you played Cinder
• 49:00 - 49:30 into Ari. Um, so like we got to fix that. Again, the item tuning is not appropriate. Um, but when you're saying, "Hey, should I build the Anderson's game?" It's like, "Well, we're in a game where everyone's a tank and I do not have burst targets." Okay, I'm going to go for a drainier build. I'm going to go for a slower build. I'm going to go for a burn-based build because this game does not behoove a burstier build. Cool. we make the trade-off high enough that Leander isn't generically the best in the game, which it has been for months. Um, which has metagame effects of when
• 49:30 - 50:00 everyone finally realizes that now the matchups are also not burstable. But again, we get to the point where Leandre should be an actual trade-off and that as a burst mage, if you have a hard time with Darius, good. Uh, that's intended. Um, final change here is Blackfire torch. It's a pretty small nerf, but it is one that, you know, adds in the list as well. It's, you know, not a big deal, but it's a, you know, 4% or so cost increase. So item is overall nerfed here. And so yeah, we are nerfing the basically long duration fight items a
• 50:00 - 50:30 small amount as they are all overperforming. They are a bit overpowered. Uh the blackfire torch change is likely to be different. Um it'll be something else tomorrow. You'll see it on the Friday PBE. Um but it'll be probably a a shift around to make uh the combat power of the item feel better without actually making the item any stronger. The goal is still to nerf Blackfire torch a small amount. Uh we then go to roughly power neutral adjustments. Um Lichbane is losing 15 ability power but is getting 300 gold cheaper and the build path is getting to
• 50:30 - 51:00 be fair buffed uh from an NLR to a blasting one. This makes the item 2900 gold. And actually one thing I didn't talk about when I talked about um class reviews is not only am I talking about stat affinity and sort of how the champions are going to function, I want to talk about actual um game time pacing here. So, the thing I want to bring up is um and this is to be clear as much or more about actual kit tuning uh than it is about item tuning itself, although we can ladder into it pretty easily with
• 51:00 - 51:30 items. So, um, the goal with assassins and burst champions overall is to generally on average, but not always, every champ is a unicorn, every champ is unique, but generally on average, these champs should be more early game skewed and snowbally against the average class of champions in their role. Um, that as an assassin, you are good at killing an individual champion, which means when you're in a 1v one lane, that is a clear and obvious point of strength. um and that when the game gets grouped up and
• 51:30 - 52:00 you start going towards 30-minute baron team fights and whatever um it is naturally going to be harder to be an assassin. And so um you can of course in some cases give assassins really really good lateg game tools to allow them to still team fight well when doing so. Oftentimes that can make them look a bit like fighters. Akali is an example here of an assassin who actually has a pretty real late game because she has the tools to team fight effectively. But on average, you look at what Leblanc does, it's like, yeah, Leblanc runs the game for a while and then is pressured to close the game. It is good that champions have different
• 52:00 - 52:30 power curves and that some champions are pressured to close the game out in time and some opponents on the back foot and have to lick the wounds and wait and hope that they can recover from a mistake or um group up in time or, you know, make the right plays to catch somebody out or whatever and and um get back out from under an assassin. And so on average, burstier items are meant to be cheaper. Um, champions who buy Mercy items are meant to spike a little bit sooner. And on average, though not in all cases, these type of champions are meant to uh be a bit early game skewed from kit function. This could be through
• 52:30 - 53:00 kit tuning. This could be through the types of tools that they have. Again, a collie W is a way to team fight later on. It's a cute way to gain some energy in lane. It's a team fight godsend late game, right? Um, that's like the big one to bring up. Otherwise, the general one is going to be, hey, um, team fight focused mages kind of around here are going to look towards more two to three items, right? The average game of League of Legends ends around the time your third item is done, which means the game is often decided before the third item is done. Um, and so the general like rough space
• 53:00 - 53:30 here is for a lot of these sort of middle ground mages. They're going to be roughly two items spike champion. And a lot of that's going to be your second max is also really good. And so you really want to have level 13. Your ultimate has meaningful rankups. That rank two ult is good. And so you're really happy there. Um, and then understanding that like when you get towards three to four items, well, the multiplicative nature of critical strike chance takes the, you know, conventional crit auto attack AD carries and puts them over the top later on. And there's the tension around can you catch them out, can you burst them, can they dodge in these houses, whatever. And you've got, you know, some interesting class dynamics going back and forth. It's
• 53:30 - 54:00 like, well, it doesn't matter how fed Jyn is, fed Leblanc will always kill him in one combo. Even if Jyn is theoretically better late game than Leblanc, if Leblances one-shots him, her team wins the team fight. Um, and so you have, you know, fun interactions there. And again, I think it is good that all champs can't do everything um to try to carve out more like strong niches per champion and say you have an express purpose. You've got to do your job well here. You're going to be good at this thing. And so um I think overall League has moved slightly toward homogenizing. I know I have individually contributed
• 54:00 - 54:30 to that and I regret some of what I've done there. Um but I would like to slightly uh resharpen champions over time. One way to do that is again to be fairly particular around item spike timing and things like that. Um, broadly but like not, you know, super harsh by every single slot. Uh, okay. So, um, those are the nerfed items. Let's talk about power neutral adjustments. Well, with the line being, hey, assassin should tend to spike pretty early and feel really good early on. Lichbane is getting um, gold efficiency wise, this
• 54:30 - 55:00 is pretty neutral. Um, it's losing, you know, 300 something gold with ability power. It's going to be 300 gold cheaper. It's going to tend to be power neutral overall. Obviously, spiking sooner is something that feels good for champions like this. Um, it's interesting. There's some chance, you know, and we should like serve the audience correctly and and fit, you know, player needs. Um, the champs who want to buy a lichbane typically want to spike early. Here's a better early spike. Uh, the champs who want, you know, big large spells tend to want bigger items with more ability power and stats on them. And that's kind of happening a little bit here as well. Um, there are a lot of build pass updates
• 55:00 - 55:30 here. Uh it's in a lot of cases pushing um uh uh fish codeex in instead of uh Kindle gem in a lot of these spots. Basically, if you're getting ability haste on a mage item, you should almost always be able to find it from a codeex. Some of them don't have it and you've got to build it from last chapter. But for the most part, it's going to put Codex on all these so that you can um there's like a little bit of easier window shopping. And I think it also better in that uh Kindle gem is already serving a different audience in the first place. And so, um, it helps kind of alleviate some of the load around
• 55:30 - 56:00 epic items here. Uh, strict buffs. These are things that, uh, you really can't consider in any other way than it's strictly stronger. Uh, blood curse does in fact kind of suck. Five ability power, 50 health, and the shred is going to be 7.5% per stack. Four stacks for 30% in shred. Um, so it's still on four hits, but it's saying, hey, you know, when we look at something like Black Cleaver, where champions have physical damage spells and every auto attack always applies it. Um, those crit champions are not always going to be applying it nearly as quickly. And so, hey, if we assume you're kind of locked behind using spells and whatnot, let's move this down and say it's going to
• 56:00 - 56:30 shred 50% faster. It only takes four stacks, this item is going to be online for you. U obviously stretch stat upgrade here as well. This is probably the single biggest buff this patch. It's a really big deal. But yeah, blood letters fails every metric. It fails user base. It fails um uh survey. It fails um any like both versions of um item quantifying. The item is not very good. Uh Nash's Tooth very lightly fails. It's not terribly weak. Um, but we think we can push up a little bit here. Uh, it's already on the slightly
• 56:30 - 57:00 cheap side if I recall correctly. Um, I think it stat profile is already kind of fine. Just like, you know what, we have room to say that the aggressive item is cheaper because the aggressive item should be a little cheaper. Um, Merlin, I'm not sure if my notes were wrong from earlier or what, but meon is 100 gold more spent than I thought it was supposed to be. Um, so this might have been a mistake for me and I never caught it ever since um, 4.19 or 14.19. That's entirely a possibility, but like on my document Merlin that like I I tuned it for was 2850. Um, but it's 2950 and like
• 57:00 - 57:30 shows how much I build Merlin. Um, for what it's worth, there's two things I want to say here. So, one, the item is weak, right? And dropping about 100 gold I think is relatively appropriate. Um, the other though is that um, it is not intended that you finish Kemp Punk, Chainsword, or Merlin. uh you are meant to build execution is calling or oblivion orb and then sit there and buy your other items and then when you hit full build so the item is not dead in your inventory finish the upgrade. It is
• 57:30 - 58:00 why K punk chains sword has a good amount of health on it is this has to serve grievous wounds needs for assassins all the way up to like full-on heavy juggernauts and even maybe maybe maybe though kind of an argument here um AD tanks like scion if they want to proactively apply grievous wounds um and because has to serve a very wide array of champions and you you actually could argue that like screw it assassin is going to go ahead and build mortal
• 58:00 - 58:30 reminder instead, which yeah, I could see that. Uh, but because it has to serve like that big wide array of champions, it's got to be relatively beefy because it has to be not griefing for Darius to buy this and then finish the item later when he's fighting Volibar or Mundu or whatever. Um, and on the same side, Realamicon has to serve Morichiser and Zerith, and they have incredibly different needs, but it means the item does need health because Morichiser should be allowed to build Oblivion Orb and then feel okay about finishing the build with a mature build that is like not griefing and made of paper. Um, I think being able to
• 58:30 - 59:00 democratize out this stat and saying, "Yes, everyone more or less has access to this stat, um, is fine, is encouraged, but it should not be necessarily correct to say, I've got Oblivion. Oh, I must go finish Mela." It's like, no, you're allowed to take a 800 gold pit stop to buy Oblivion and then like just go build your Horizon Focus or whatever you're going to build. Um, and so like there is a cap to how efficient Morela Nomicon and um, items like this should be because it is not meant to sidetrack your build. It's
• 59:00 - 59:30 meant to be a pit stop and you finish your build. Um, but again, the item is like pretty clearly a trap and so a small buff here. Keep in mind that a cheaper item getting minus 100 gold is a bigger buff than a larger item getting minus 100 gold. Rabbit's FC cap is I would say only slightly weak. And what's funny is when I initially did the list of buffs here, Rabbit is one of the one of the only like strict buffs here to items that were like kind of borderline and it was meant to be like, hey, those high AP builds going to feel better with cheap death cheaper, easier to build death cap. Um, and over time basically
• 59:30 - 60:00 went in and like threw in a lot more buffs. Uh, the one concern I have here is that this overall set of changes is a pretty large like sweeping buff to mages, especially because some of these items are actually overbuffed here. Um, I don't think death cap gold is like a really big deal, but um, we'll talk about them later. like there are some that I think are actually kind of overbuffed and it's like kind of um it makes me a little bit uneasy because I don't want to parade the game if I can help it. The fact that there are four buffs and like or sorry four nerfs and like nine buffs is you know part of that. Um I said though again most of these buffs are like very defensible and
• 60:00 - 60:30 it's like not like blood is in the game right now and really like not really in the game right now right so like these are buffs but they're like they're currently not you know express themselves in the game anyway. Um, Luton's Companion is by data, by all the all like the the objective metrics is underpowered um through usage rate and through like player survey. Um, it's quite common. It actually gets more nerf requests than buff requests. Not again that that it's um uh uh binding by any means, but it's like worth noting that like the players we ask about items tend to think that Ludens is on the strong side um relative to other mage items in
• 60:30 - 61:00 particular. Uh regardless though, this item does look quite weak. And we're saying, hey, um again, the lens is let's give bursty champions the earlier spikes. Minus gold is like the direct way to do that, right? It is first order. This item is only a little bit weak. It's not a ton weak. Again, I really think that most of the AP system is pretty close together overall. Um I think it's pretty close to balanced overall, but hey, there's a you know, there's a move we can make here. Let's make that move. Uh malignance, uh a five ability power buff is pretty equivalent to um this here. It's again a relatively
• 61:00 - 61:30 weak item. Let's make it a little bit better. Um again, it's not absurdly off. We already know this item is relatively hard bound to certain kits there. So, it's never going to be all that popular. We should ser those champions well and make sure they feel good about it. And so, there's the buff. Um we then have adjustments that are meant to be power positive. And so, we're going to go through these are going to be, you know, a little bit more meaningful here. So, Horizon Focus, uh, the conditional 10% damage amp on hitting somebody, um, from beyond 600 units is removed and instead is 35 ability power and a 200 gold price
• 61:30 - 62:00 increase. Now, obviously, if you're already currently a very, very good Horizon focus user, this is a nerf for you in some contexts. Uh now what's interesting though and it's why I like having a fairly rigorous um uh item like mathematical tuning framework is it lets me look at this and say like well look I have a model I have a a belief on what the gold value of the damage amp is which is only against champions so it's not as good as AP per damage and two is
• 62:00 - 62:30 not always on. It is totally possible that you're playing Velcos or Zerith or something and the Yona ults you or the Talon jumps a wall and you might see the item and be like, I do 10% more damage. Like, no, you do 10% more damage 80% of the time only to champions. And that is a meaningful distinction that matters because this is one of the cases where um because the condition says you must be long ranged. There's a whole bunch of
• 62:30 - 63:00 relatively long-range mages that don't think this item can be bought. So Oriana and Victor and all these champions, even though they probably could use the item reasonably well, probably I'm not saying like super easy. um are no longer willing to look at the high haste high AP stat stick that would totally serve a reasonable high haste build, but there's a line of text that says, "Well, but I'm not always going to range away, so I will never buy this item because it might not work." And on the other side, you've got, you know, your Velcas and Zeras who are like, "This unique is literally always on and it's the best
• 63:00 - 63:30 thing ever and it's perfect." And if that were actually true, this item would already be astronomically overpowered. Like if you really considered um Hypershot's damage amp to be just 10% more damage flat, this is the single strongest AP item in the game and it is not close. And yet player usage rate data suggests that's not true. Player survey data suggests that is not true. Um win rate data suggests that is not true. And the model that I use which says this is not always on and it's only it champions says yeah of course it's
• 63:30 - 64:00 not true. And the end result is Horizon Focus is slightly underpowered. on its current users, which it is, uh, because again, this doesn't affect minions and it's not always on. And so, trading out 10% damage for 35 AP is a very, very, very large upgrade. Now, in some cases, I could totally see a Zerith or a Velcos lose some win rate because if the exact best user get good value out of this one, okay, fine, right? But even then, I'm not even convinced. Even then, I'm not convinced that it's
• 64:00 - 64:30 actually just like clearly better than storm surge or shadow flame or something and people are just believing it's just 10% unconditional damage, which is not true. So, what it comes down to is I think 35 AP is much much stronger than hypershot um such that um this item also warrants a 200 gold increase. Now, this means the item is still cheaper than cosmic drive. It gives the same amount of ability haste as cosmic drive. And it gives I want to say 40 40 or 50 more ability
• 64:30 - 65:00 power than cosmic drive. Cosmic drive gives some move speed and some health. I know a lot of champions who will trade some health and a little bit of move speed, okay, moderate amount of move speed for like 40 ability power uh and 100 gold. There's a lot of champions who are like, "Yeah, of course I want to build that way." Um, you know, all the Arya players who are pissed that they have to go rowa into Leandre and Rift Maker. Yeah, of course. This item is for you to say you want to repeat. Awesome. Have fun. You want to be more damaging as Syndra? Awesome. Here you go. You are going to frag people with 40 more
• 65:00 - 65:30 ability power and another 100 gold in your pocket. Um, and yes, this means that unique passive is reveal champs you hit at long range and like trigger scars bloom sometimes every 30 seconds. Okay, cool. There's like some cute flavor here, which is like mostly flavor that I think will not turn players off. what they're going to see is 110 ability power on an item for less than 3,000 gold with 25 haste and go, "Wow, that's a lot of stats. I want ability power and ability haste. This item is for me." Um, and I think again the item serving a
• 65:30 - 66:00 bunch of users is more important than like, "But it's called Horizon Focus. It's the artillery item." It's like, well, it's the high AP highest item because it should serve a whole bunch more champions because we can delete one line of text, buff another line of text, and triple user base. To me, that is worth it. To me, that is the right choice to do for this item. Next is Hexic Rocket Belt. I know you've seen a different iteration um on the PvE. The current version is this. Um it is plus 10 ability power which goes up to 70. It is plus five ability haste going up to 20. It is minus 50 health going down to 300 health from 350 and it's 50 gold
• 66:00 - 66:30 more expensive. Um this ends up being on net for me about a 6% buff to the item. The item is 6% more stats per gold functionally. Um and we're basically trying to it's basically a a shift here. So, um, the rocket belt that's on live and the rocket belt that was on PvE, um, ended up being like 2:1 damage to durability with like obviously some parts are here for utility of of the dash. Um, but 2 to1 damage to durability is much too heavy for the user base we're looking for. And so, by cutting down on health and bumping uh to the
• 66:30 - 67:00 damage stats here, we're going to get closer to like 3 to one damage to durability, which like that's a a framing I think is actually really valuable to think about. And it's one that um, again is like built into the model. every time I update an item, it just literally spits out like what's the ratio of of of uh stat bracketing. Um and uh Rocket belt being 3 to1 says okay, it's a little bit tanky for assassins, right? 300 health is not exactly the stat line Evelyn wants, but like she can put up with it um if she really wants to target access. And like 80 AP is or 70 AP 70 um is like not miserable, right? That's like decent. Um
• 67:00 - 67:30 it's not again glitch bay numbers, it's not storm surge numbers, it's not shadow flame numbers, but like it's it's enough to feel okay. But it means like, yeah, if you buy this on Evelyn, you are trading off some obvious damage because you're not going to scale all your abilities to the other 30 of your ability power, the 15 magic B or whatever, but you're getting target access. If that's worth it for you, awesome. You're getting some repeatability. You're getting a little bit of durability in case you like really can't play it this way. Okay, fine. You're playing Ekko and you're like, I'm going to do less burst damage, but you know what? Instead of going lichbane and trying to get the one shot with, you know, a cheap version of 100 ability power and a really really good
• 67:30 - 68:00 active effect that's going to do, you know, hundreds of damage every time. Um, I want better target access. I want more repeatability. I want some durability. Woo me. I'm a fighter. Get me in here. I'll I'll spend 300 gold. I I'll spend 2650 on 300 health and like decent damage. Um and and still while still being a stat profile that like Kenan's fine with, Nico's fine with, Fiddlestick is fine with. And so trying to like, okay, what is what is the numbers tuning such that we can woo fighters? Um it might be a little bit too frail for juggernauts. So, you know, Morichiser
• 68:00 - 68:30 might not really be the happiest with Rocket Belt. Okay, fine. um but saying, you know what, we're gonna we're gonna move it toward this way. Uh and honestly, yeah, Rocket Belt was a little bit too um a little bit too juggernaut skewed and so moving it back toward like kind of skirmisher shaping. Uh and that same like 3 to1 2 to1 whatever sort of profiling like I use that with the fighter items as well to make sure that like skirmishers and divers and juggernauts also kind of felt like appropriately covered by the items they're using. And that's why we have these like 500 fighters because like yeah, I said if you're going to play a really heavy juggernaut build, you're
• 68:30 - 69:00 going to spend half your gold on damage and half your gold on durability or like 6040 uh damage and durability and like you're going to feel heavy as a result. You're going to be really tanky and really hard to push down. We can tack your damage as needed, but that was the goal here. Um, storm surge. This one might look scary. Um, I truly believe this is win rate positive. Um, if we get it wrong, of course, we can make changes and just like buff the item. But this is like, hey, this is my good faith effort at lightly power positive adjustments that if I'm wrong, we just buff the item, right? If I'm wrong for a patch,
• 69:00 - 69:30 we'll know from data and we just buff the item, right? So, if I'm wrong, we buff the item. I understand that shock here probably looks quite bad. Storm surge is getting 2% flat move speed at all times. So, going from 4% to 6%. It is getting 100 gold cheaper. Those are the buffs. That's obviously a pretty meaningful buff, right? That that's a much better item. Storm surge is already relatively popular. It is one of the least underpowered items from data. Um so I think storm surge doesn't really need very much. And so this is actually um the smallest buff on paper um from my analysis. Um, but we are removing some
• 69:30 - 70:00 text from the item to make it easier to understand, easier to appreciate and u able to frontload the item more and make its uh direct comparison against other assassin items and against um uh shadow flames in particular uh more direct. So this means the gold difference between storm surge and shadow flame is 400. that is meaningful enough to be really again yeah repeating it meaningful um need large rod versus etherist is a meaningful it's the same but is a meaningful difference in the build path
• 70:00 - 70:30 that you know you why you're getting this um storm by giving proactive move speed instead says right I'm going to buy this to go kill other people instead of them both having some kind of aquous in combat effect that makes you more effective and they still do right one has a damage proc one has this um this like damage you know more damage when they're low storm Storm surge has a condition around your combo being proactive and bursty in the way that like Zyra won't go storm surge but she will go for um shadow flame because it'll make her like Leandre's burn and plants better if she wants flat pen
• 70:30 - 71:00 somewhere. Um storm sword says you need to be a burst of champion. So that's one point of comparison. Second point of comparison again a 400 gold delta big enough to be meaningful. The final one being again flat proactive move speed says oh this is good enough that I can roam with this item and go elsewhere and do good things with this. I'm going to go kill bot lane. I buy storm surge because I'm gonna go down there. And in fact, I'm gonna buy storm surge over rocket belt or over lichbane because actually it's even faster than lichbane. I'm gonna I'm gonna get there even sooner and I'm gonna get, you know, maybe I don't auto attack very much in this pattern or whatever or, you know,
• 71:00 - 71:30 I'm just I can't blame for use lib for some other reason. I'm going to get storm surge and I'm going to be fast. Um, and then removing some text to be like, okay, well, part of the power budget of storm surge is this in combat short duration move speed that you might be still casting other spells during and so it often goes to waste. Um, just in a lot of cases, you often don't need storm surge. If you need the move speed, like the big move speed trigger, you already have things like phase rush. Um, and in a world where like champions kind of do move too fast, I think 2% unhalable move speed. Um, in terms of like the game
• 71:30 - 72:00 feeling too fast is like more palatable than a surge of move speed sometimes. Um, and again, what I believe to be and then this additional 30 gold is like, you know, if you overkill someone and the thing explodes, you're still exploding in an AoE. like yeah, you might have wasted the proc if everyone else is there, but like this is just text that kind of doesn't need to be there. Again, if we can remove complexity, it's helpful. Um, and just like look, this is not doing a lot of heavy lifting. It's not doing anything to tell you who it's for. It's just text. Um, I am a very big fan of trying to remove things that are truly just
• 72:00 - 72:30 text and don't do anything to really sell the item very well. I like if it was a collector and it said every takedown is 25 gold, I would feel differently. Oh, I get it. I'm buying this as a kind of a snowball item. Now, that said, mages have magis. They have a snowball item. Just buy a dark seal. So even then, like I'm not even a huge fan of like, oh, there are snowball mage items because they literally have one expressly for that purpose. And the more you make other snowball mage items, you just eat away at Maji's purpose. And that's that's not great either. Um, so a random thing there, but uh yeah, these things are going down, these things are
• 72:30 - 73:00 getting buffed. I believe this a power positive. And again, if this is incorrect and this item is bad, we buff its AP, we buff the percent move speed or something, we make the item better. We'll just do that next. The last one is Cryloom. Uh, I truly do believe Cryloom has a PR problem, not an actual power level problem. Um, but Cryloom does not look good compared to Void Staff. Uh, it is only 150 gold cheaper. That is not enough to be like, "Oh man, I really just got to finish this." Because a lot of the time it's like, "Okay, well, I've
• 73:00 - 73:30 got my um, blighting jewel and it's like, well, next recall I can buy Blasting Wand or Codex. By the way, they cost the same amount of gold, which means you're probably choosing, you know, farther down the line which one you're going to buy. U it is a little bit unlikely that you recall off of just blighting jewel and have exactly enough gold for crypt bloom and go the baron fights right now. I guess I buy crypt bloom. That's not realistic. And so the first order is like make the price the same. Yes, you're going to like still choose on the second
• 73:30 - 74:00 component which one you're going to build, but at least the direct comparison is going to be a lot closer. So plus 50 gold. Okay, fine. Um we're going to get 5% more pens. So now it's 35 to 40. it's a much more um it's a sort of much more reasonable trade-off there like okay I'm only using 5% pen I can stomach that it's okay whereas I think 30 versus 40 is like a big enough downgrade you're like but I'm buying this for the pen it's why I want this slot the thing with cryoom by the way is like cryloom has a lot of text on it um cryloom has ability haste that boy staff doesn't and it has uh this life from death heal that boy staff doesn't and
• 74:00 - 74:30 you have to pay for those right you can't just have cryoom be the best item because then boy staff has no uses right like this has to be a balanced item otherwise you just delete you delete void staff and you you're no longer allowed to play a burst build. You've got to play haste on this slot. You've got to play haste on slot three, slot four. Um and so it's like, well, how can we get as close as we can to not feeling the sticker shock? It's like, well, let's bring the AP up from 60 to 75. Okay, 75 AP versus 95 AP. It's like, well, I'm trading off 20 AP for 20 haste. I'm cool with that, right? I
• 74:30 - 75:00 actually think the balance version crippling is actually 70 AP, not 75. Um, but because no one thinks item is good, even though I think it actually is fine. Um, this is the one item that I think is actually targeted at overpowered. I think Krypum is overpowered in this patch. Um, because no one thinks it's good, even if it is, which means we have to overshoot to swing perception and then I am very willing to nerf some things down once that has been met. Um, which I think is going to be needed at some point here. I do think this system is a little bit overtuned as a result, but um, let's get the the, you know, the player base where we need to go. So 75
• 75:00 - 75:30 AP uh, right? You're losing 20 AP 20 haste. You're losing 5 pen. And as compensation about that 5 pen, like versus void staff, uh you still have life from death. And I think that is a comparison you can make and be like this feels acceptable. Uh 75 AP does not feel like a meme whereas 60 does. Um I think 35% magic pen is enough to like feel reasonable and like you're actually getting some value. Uh and so the way to make room for that because this is obviously a very very large buff. Um is again one more gold. So it's tied with void staff. I think the direct comparison is fair. Again, I think small
• 75:30 - 76:00 like fiddly numbers differences are not good enough for item comparison. You know, 400 gold on Storm Service um uh 400 gold on Storm Surge versus Shadow Flame is. I think the meaningful disparity between um you know, Lichbane and Rocket Belt or uh Luden and Blackfire torch. I think those totally are those totally meet the bar. Um one piece of gold is not the other change though is to make room nerfing the heal about 30%. So, uh, this is bringing the base heal down from 100 to 75. It's bringing the AP ratio down from, um, 25%
• 76:00 - 76:30 to 10%. Now, I basically ballparked Cryloom at three items. Um, I think a lot of times people buy pen is on slot three. Most, again, games end on slot three. Um, and so at a 300 AP build, which is, you know, a roughly three slot build, um, that is 30% less healing. Now, of course, if you go into slot four, slot five, um, that is a bigger nerf. Sure. But one thing I think is also true for people who would look at this item is look at it and go like well I don't want to buy a support item. You know you look at the stats and you're like 20 ability power that sucks. 10%
• 76:30 - 77:00 less pen that sucks. It's basically the same price point. I'm buying the thing to heal my teammates. No thanks. And so I think we should have the power of that, you know, passive be good enough to like still exist on the item. And I think like a harder something point heal to your entire team once per team fight is that I think that's actually still a pretty good item. Um it's it's a pretty good effect that like has real value. Um, but what it comes down to is let's grow the rest of the numbers up to not look terrible by comparison and then as a result uh land on um, you know, a lower healing to make room for the
• 77:00 - 77:30 actual items power budget while still like existing as text. Uh, and I believe that is everything. Uh, that is an hour and almost 20 minutes talking about AP items, why the changes we made, where we got to where we're going, and the champions we're trying to essentially seduce with those items. Hope this was enjoyable. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.