Table of Contents

4/4 Mid-Patch Updates

" Irelia 4/4 Balance Update

Q damage ratio decreased. Base attack damage decreased. Base armor decreased.

"There's honestly not much to say here. We always expect there to be a learning curve on new or reworked champions, and we try to make sure they release at a playable state of balance. In this case, we overshot pretty hard, and Irelia's just far too strong.



You know what they say, better nerf Irelia"

Base Stats

BASE ATTACK DAMAGE 66 ⇒ 63

⇒ 63 BASE ARMOR 34 ⇒ 31

⇒ 31 BASE HEALTH 580 ⇒ 550 Q - Bladesurge

RATIO 0.8 attack damage ⇒ 0.7 attack damage E - Flawless Duet

STUN DURATION 0.8-1.2 seconds ⇒ 0.75 seconds R - Vanguard's Edge

WALL CROWD CONTROL DURATION 2 seconds ⇒ 1.5 seconds 4/4 Mid-Patch Bugfixes

BUGFIX Fixed a bug where Kai'Sa could partially resist displacement by spamming her joke

Fixed a bug where Kai'Sa could partially resist displacement by spamming her joke BUGFIX Fixed a bug where Rengar would cancel move orders if he was in the middle of his Q attack

Fixed a bug where Rengar would cancel move orders if he was in the middle of his Q attack BUGFIX Fixed a bug where Zombie States could interrupt and prevent the stacking of Manaflow Band

Fixed a bug where Zombie States could interrupt and prevent the stacking of Manaflow Band BUGFIX Fixed a bug where Cloud Drake took bonus damage from behind periodically, as though it had Rift Herald's Eye mechanic"

Midseason Essence Emporium opening soon

Bilby

"Welcome (back) to the Essence Emporium! We’re kicking things off at 11:00 AM PT on April 19 and will be open for business until April 30, 2018, at 11:59 PM PT. During that time, you can snag chromas, gemstones, icons, wards, emotes, and other exclusives for Blue Essence.

Here’s what’s new:

2,000 BE – Midseason chromas (Includes any non-limited, non-legacy chromas released between July and December of any year. See the full list of available chromas at our FAQ here. Listed chromas released in 2017 will also be on sale for 195 RP.)

2,500 BE – Mystery Mini icons, series 2 (with 8 new icons available)

In case you missed the last Essence Emporium, here’s what’s coming back:

1,500 BE – Mystery icons (Does not include esports icons, may contain Mystery Mini Icons)

2,500 BE – Mystery Mini icons, series 1

4,900 BE – Mystery wards

6,000 BE – Essence Collector Ward

50,000 BE – Make It Rain Emote

50,000 BE – Gemstone + Gemstone Knight Icon

75,000 BE – Moneybags Emote

75,000 BE – Gemstone + Gemstone Prince Icon

100,000 BE – Gemstone + Gemstone King Icon

150,000 BE – URFWick skin

Blue Essence gifting for wards and icons (both Mystery Mini and regular mystery icons) will also be available for the duration of the Essence Emporium.

As a midseason bonus, the following will also be on sale for 50% off RP:

Summoner Name Change (650 RP)

Rune Pages (295 RP each)

XP boosts (all 50% RP off)

For more information, check out our Player Support FAQ. We’ll see you in the Essence Emporium starting on April 19!"

Ask Riot: Kai'Sa's V-Neck Suit

"Let’s talk about shorter ADC attack ranges, assassins with AoE abilities, and Kai’Sa’s Void-suit.

The newest ADCs are short ranged (Kai’Sa and Xayah) and you recently nerfed Kalista’s and Tristana’s attack ranges too. Why are you making marksmen have shorter ranges?



Attack Range is perhaps the most powerful stat in League of Legends. For some champions, simply citing their range can be the easiest way to convey to another player why they are powerful (“Caitlyn is 650 range, she’ll always be relevant”). The corollary of that, given that every champion needs to be balanced around comparable power budgets, is that the more attack range a champion has, the less power we can give them in the rest of their kits.

The set of marksman champions contains some of the most similar properties to each other, and we’ve been striving to differentiate the experience of playing one from another. For Kai’Sa and Xayah, both champions had class-stretching strengths we never thought we could put on an ADC (assassination, untargetability), so it was important that we didn’t genericize them by giving the exact same range as their counterparts. Our champions need to be interactive and possess meaningful weaknesses, so being outranged by most other marksmen felt like a reasonable approach.

On the other hand, Kalista and Tristana are two champions that have frequently lacked meaningful weaknesses. Our approach in the past has been to tweak values like base damages or attack speed scaling, which has appeared to work in the short term, but often just deferred the problem to reappear in a few months. Instead of watering down the strengths of these champions, we opted to preserve what is unique about them and instead create new weaknesses with Attack Range reductions. This isn’t a change we do lightly, but we do feel the benefits of the work we’ve done here outweigh the costs.

We will create new long-range marksmen in the future as we find compelling kits or fantasies that would be good fits for the artillery-style gunslingers, and we’re unlikely to reduce the attack range of any other marksmen any time soon.

RIOT JAG Technical Game Designer, Champions Team

Why do so many assassins have aoe abilities? Aren’t they supposed to assassinate a single target?



For any class of character, we have defined goals for what they should be capable of. In this case, you’re right on: We intend for assassins to do “bursty single target damage.” But this doesn’t mean we have to constrain every action or spell to that box, as long as we don’t break our original goal (single target burst).

For example, Ekko and Talon have AoE abilities on their kits. We think this is okay because compared to other champions like Twitch, Cassiopeia, and Karthus, they don’t do sustained AoE damage in the same way. More specifically, we expect that the assassins would do 50% less total AoE damage in a ten second teamfight.

As a general note, we have trended towards more AoE abilities in the recent years of champion design because they allow for much more exciting options in spell shape, timing, decisions, and context. Ekko’s Q, for example, results in many different and interesting outcomes in number of hits, using dashes to dramatically change the return missile, and playing off of the minion wave to trigger the second stage early.

It’s worth calling out that in a few cases, such as with Katarina, we actually break our own rule. This is intentionally done, and it’s a unique strength that the champ should have to give up other things to have. In this case, Katarina sacrifices single target assassination potential and on-demand aggressive mobility compared to Zed, who has much less AoE output.

RIOTSCRUFFY Lead Champion Designer

A few months ago, you said you’d no longer add unnecessarily hyper-sexualized champions, only if it made sense for the character like Ahri or Evelynn, and therefore someone like Miss fortune or Caitlyn could use a redesign. What happened to this thinking when they designed to Kai’Sa and her unnecessarily deep neckline?



We’ll be the first to admit that Kai’Sa’s neckline didn’t land well with players and that it made her look unnecessarily sexualized, even if it that wasn’t the intention.

From the beginning of her development, we wanted Kai’Sa to be a regular human who survived the Void by coexisting with a Void creature—not someone who escaped but was corrupted by the experience. We felt that this was what made her unique in the Void champion line-up, and plus, we’d recently made a corruption-themed champion with Kayn. For these reasons, it was really important for us to make sure Kai’Sa looked like a human wearing a Void-suit, rather than a monstrosity created by the Void.

Early on, Kai’Sa didn’t have a deep neckline. When we got her in game, we realized her dark hair combined with the suit made her look more “Void creature or corrupted human” than “normal person wearing a Void-suit,” particularly because the human skin showing on her face was small onscreen and difficult to read from the in-game camera. Our artists tried a few things to try and address this, and the one that worked well was redesigning her neckline so you could see her human skin more clearly when her mask was off. With this change, more playtesters interpreted Kai’Sa as being a human wearing a suit rather than a human who was corrupted.

In retrospect, we recognize we should’ve prioritized searching for other ways to solve this problem, especially because the end result didn’t land well for many players. Even though we had good intentions, we could’ve done better, and in the future, we will be even more conscious of these decisions.

REAV3 Lead Producer of Champions

Thanks for reading this week’s Ask Riot. Have a question?

Head over to Ask Riot and sign into your League account. Check out the Pro Tips, then ask away.

We promise to read every question, but we can’t guarantee they’ll all get answers. Some questions may already be answered elsewhere, and some won’t be right for Ask Riot. This isn’t the best place to announce new features, for example, and we might skip conversations on issues we’ve talked about in depth before (though we can clarify individual points).

We are listening, though, so keep asking. We’ll make sure your questions are heard by the Rioters working on the stuff you’re curious about."

Quick Hits

Riot_Riscx provided an update on the Challenger reward recall:

"Soon™

Challenger reward update is on its way as well as concepts of the new recall (had to make it better and add features, playtest team said it wasnt cool enough) - thanks for your patience :)"

Talumar noted the colors on Conqueror Varus would be the colors used for the Conqueror skin in the future:

"hey friend, I'm glad you really like it!

When we set off in creating the Conqueror skin line, we hit a lot of the MSI thematic pillars with Karma but missed a bit with her color scheme. With Varus, we think his color scheme is closer to MSI with the deeper reds and golds! For Conqueror and Championship, the colors, shapes, elements, etc evolve as we get closer to the heart of the esports event thematics and I think we're pretty much there, for MSI, with Conqueror Varus :)"

Reav3 commented on splash art updates:

"Currently none. We want to get back to these but we have ramped up on VGUs this year, and we are now gettign to the point where the Champions we are doing VGUs on have a lot more skins. As such the splash team has been pretty busy just updating the splashes for the Champions we VGU. We definitely want to get back to some of these in the future though."

Maple Nectar commented on the Cannon Minions changes that came out with 8.7:

"We talked about this when we were making the change, and while we weren't deadset against it, we felt that I patch in the midst of a season was probably the wrong spot to do it. It may be something we revisit and add in midseason or preseason, but for now we didn't want to mess with things like "what does good cs at 10 minutes look like", pro cs records and all that kind of stuff. I think that the clarity is good, but it's also not such a slam dunk that I felt compelled we needed to do it now."

Riot Eno noted ping sound changes went to live too early, and they were looking into the issue:

"Hey gang - due to some miscommunications internally, this went Live when it shouldn't have.

The functionality, along with the assets themselves are WIP, and not the intended final version, which sucks. =/

One positive is that all of you are using the feature Live now and we're getting a lot of relevant feedback that either supports some of our assumptions about the Live version, or is bringing up other considerations.

Hang tight - we'll keep you posted on what to expect in this space."





Reminders

To round out this red post collection, here are a few reminders on current promotions or limited time events!

The final round of select emotes on sale for 50% off ends April 8th! Check out the article for the full details!

Today's red post collection includes mid patch updates pushed out on 4/4, the return of the Essence Emporium, a new Ask Riot, and more!Continue reading for more information!A set of mid-patch updates went out on 4/4, here are the details:Here's with details on the Essence Emporium's return this midseason:Here's this week's new Ask Riot , coveringV-neck suit, ADC attack ranges, and more: