League of Legends - Late August patch preview

Changes to Evelynn, Graves, Corki, and more, covered in this episode of the Patch Preview. Thanks for joining us, summoners. I’m Phreak and this week we’re with a new face: one of your favorite Designers, FeralPony. Together we’ll be discussing some of the most important changes coming into the next update for League of Legends. While this video does not cover every single change, it will explain the thought process behind some of our decisions. In this patch, we’re going to be making a change to the Abyssal Scepter item. What’s our change and why are we doing it? We initially designed Abyssal Scepter as an item for AP tanks and really short-range casters, like Diana and Amumu. But due to the long range of the aura, it ended up being extremely effective on almost any caster, regardless of their build or their opponent. We really wanted to keep the item’s core identity intact, and keep it just as effective for those short-range casters and tanks that really needed the damage and survivability it provides. So as a result, we’ll be reducing the range of the aura to make it less effective for those longer-range champions and a little bit more of a niche pick. Diana’s been out for a few weeks, and after our players have gotten accustomed to her, it turns out she is stronger than we anticipated. We’re nerfing her next patch, but what are we hitting and why? Diana’s just a little bit too strong in general. Her burst damage, sustained damage, and survivability is just overall too high when compared to other champions. So we’re making a few changes to bring her more in line but keep her strong in competitive play. First we’re tuning down Diana’s natural health regeneration. She’s a champion who already has a shield and she should be using that to block incoming damage. She doesn’t also need really high base stats. Additionally, the damage and AP ratio of Crescent Strike is coming down a bit. It was simply dealing too much damage and lowering this should leave her in a much more balanced state. Our live designers spent some time looking at our top three attack damage carries: Graves, Corki, and Ezreal. The goal of these changes is to leave carries with obvious strengths but also obvious weaknesses. Let’s start with Graves. We’re targeting his attack speed. Why does this make sense thematically for Graves? Graves is a cowboy with a giant shotgun. He jumps in and Buckshots you in the face, and this gives him a lot of early game power. The problem is that he doesn’t have enough late game tradeoffs. So we’re reducing the attack speed on Quickdraw and a little bit off of his base attack speed. This should give him those early versus late game tradeoffs. So ultimately this should make him a really strong early game champion and give him those tradeoffs so he’s not a no-brainer. Let’s move onto Corki: Right now he’s just too damn good at everything, so this patch we’re nerfing his mobility and poke potential. What are we changing and why? One of the things that makes Corki the most fun to play is how much area of effect damage and how much burst damage he brings to a fight. He excels at this role over pretty much every other carry in our game. But overall his power level is just a bit too high, so we’re siphoning off some of the power from his mobility and his long range poke while still retaining the fun elements of Corki. So we’re increasing the cooldown on Valkyrie a little bit so that he jumps around a little bit less in team fights and relies more on proper positioning. In combination with Corki’s other strengths, his long-range harass was a little bit too strong because he had missile up all the time. He was just generating ammo too quickly. As a result we’re going to increase the time it takes for him to general a missile, but we’re keeping the number of total missiles the same. So he’ll still be able to put out tons of damage and bring a lot to the team. Ezreal is really known for long range poke, high mobility, and of course, Pulsefire energy. This patch we’re looking at nerfing Essence Flux and buffing Mystic Shot. What does this do for Ezreal? So the first thing we're doing with Essence Flux is we're reducing the width of the missile a bit. Essence Flux was kind of a no-brainer pick in lane. The actual width of the missile was bigger than the visual effect so people even when they thought they dodged it would still get hit. This in combination with really high base damage, low mana cost, and the ability to pass over minions made it really, really strong and it lacked a lot of counter-play for your opponent. A lot of players really like hybrid Ezreal or AP Ezreal, and we didn't really want to indirectly hurt those builds that aren't being a problem. So we ended up increasing the AP ratio of Essence Flux quite a bit, so those players will actually end up seeing an increase in damage late-game. Mystic Shot is Ezreal’s most fun basic ability but the mana cost was a little bit too high and it caused him to resort to other abilities. Mystic Shot allows him to have this long range poke and harass gameplay which is really, really fun in lane and we wanted to encourage that and not punish them for casting too many Mystic Shots. We recently remade Evelynn’s abilities and she got a lot better, but she’s still a little bit too weak. What are we doing this patch to bring her up to speed? We’re really happy with Evelynn’s overall design but she needs a few improvements to her mobility and late-game contributions to team fights to make her a solid pick. So to improve her mobility, we’re lowering the cooldown on Dark Frenzy and gave it the ability to pass through minions. This will allow Evelynn to get closer to her enemies faster. We’ve also made a few adjustments to her stealth, making it so that she can get closer to her enemies before getting detected. To improve her viability in team fights late game, we’ve significantly lowered the second and third rank of her ultimate’s cooldown. These changes to Evelynn should help her early ganking as well as her ability to contribute to team fights late game. That’s it for this episode of the League of Legends Patch Preview. Please subscribe to the Riot Games YouTube channel above and leave us your comments just below the video. Thanks for watching!