Tonight's red post collection includes Xypherous with a huge list of core AP itemization changes that will be testing on the PBE soon, better changes at legendary skins through Mystery Gifting, a heads up on a Bot Ban wave that is going out soon, a fan artist feature on inkinesss and more!

Table of Contents

Tentative Core AP Item Pass

Xypherous

"Note: These changes aren't on the PBE yet! But will on the PBE once we switch over to testing the new patch stuff.

TL;DR - We're changing AP Items! NLR is cheaper! More things give 80 AP! More things build out of NLR! Most things top out at 100 AP - but you'll still probably have the same amount of AP in your full build!

Rationale

Ability Power is a relatively easy thing to optimize in the current ecosystem and the current AP builds are a little more generic than I'd like.

AP mages bring a mix of damage and utility but the AP items have accidentally converged around damaging AP builds far outpacing more utility or counter-centric ones.

Needlessly Large Rod and the '120 AP' Build

The crux of this issue is the fact that if you want a relatively high amount of AP - you were constrained to a fixed set of items that greatly synergize with each other due to the high amounts of base AP on them (Zhonya's, Ludens, Deathcap). These items also tend to be more gold efficient because they're behind the huge barrier of Needlessly Large Rod, in order to reward players for taking a power dip.

As time has passed - this NLR has created some odd side effects - the strongest AP items also have terrific utility or potential, which places every other AP item in a semi-awkward spot. It's hard to justify a utility item over a build full of NLR items - especially since an NLR item gave something on the order of +52 / 78 more AP innately per slot after Deathcap or other potential multipliers.

What we've seen is that because this particular combination is so favored - it heavily narrows the types of mage patterns to those that can best use this particular offensive combination, effectively pushing out more control oriented mage playstyles or sustained mage playstyles in favor of whatever kits work well with a large amount of raw AP and care about burst damage.

This means that mages who have a core item or side item that don't contain the default 4 items are heavily unfavored relative to their counterparts. While a certain degree of optimization around the items will exist - the power gap between different AP styles really doesn't have to be on the order of 50-75 AP per slot in order to be meaningful.

What we're doing

Tactically, we're hitting the high end items in terms of AP while retouching and doing an update on the AP of most of the other items such that they compare more favorably to each other. Some items have been raised or lowered to 100 AP - while others have been lifted up to 80 Ability Power. We want to keep the overall amount of AP you get about the same at the end - but we want there to be more variations on the type items there - in case you need to deviate from a standard core.

Here goes - It's a pretty big changelist but it's mostly a cleanup and tier adjustment pass.

Changelist

Blasting Wand

Cost: 860 G --> 850 G

Needlessly Large Rod

Cost: 1600 G --> 1250 G

Ability Power: 80 AP --> 60 AP

NLR being at such a high price / AP point means that almost any item that builds from NLR would have to have greater than 100 Ability Power on it when combined with any other Ability Power component. This proved to be a pretty huge constraint in using NLR as a stepping stone for certain items - going to retarget NLR as a smaller item. While this does have some implications on lane timing (You no longer need a double kill to get NLR first back, for example) - It was either this or inflate AP as a whole across the board.

This has some... interesting ramifications in terms of the stability of mid lane purchases.

Rabadon's Deathcap

Recipe Change: NLR + Blasting Wand + Amplifying Tome

Total Cost: 3300 G --> 3500 G

UNIQUE Passive: 30% Ability Power Amp --> 35% Ability Power Amp

Deathcap's change mostly revolves around keeping total final AP of the damage build the same - while being able to nerf the individual AP items to have more comparable numbers to each other. As Deathcap is the keystone I want a lot of AP item - we pushed the power here.

Zhonya's Hourglass

Total Cost: 3300 G --> 3000 G

Ability Power: 120 Ability Power --> 100 Ability Power

Luden's Echo (Summoner's Rift)

Total Cost: 3100 G --> 3000 G

Ability Power: 120 Ablity Power --> 100 Ability Power

Movement Speed: 7% Movement Speed --> 10% Movement Speed

Luden's is a terrifying item in terms of the general poke power it adds - Luden's probably needs a more solid identity that 'raw power' - so we've been pushing the item to be more and more about being mobility focused rather than spam spell focused.

I suspect we'll eventually need to do more to the item but it'd most likely be more of a slow burn.

Archangel's Staff (Summoner's Rift)

Recipe Change: NLR + Tear of the Goddess + 1030 G

Total Cost: 2700 G --> 3000 G

Ability Power: 60 Base AP --> 80 Base AP

Making more items build out of NLR in the hopes of expanding the high-tier AP space. AAA is definitely deserving of being one of the high tier AP slots, given its general growth pattern and the fact that it's attached to a quest in order to achieve maximum AP potential.

Seraph's Embrace (Summoner's Rift)

Ability Power: 60 Base AP --> 80 Base AP

...For completion's sake.

Rod of Ages (Summoner's Rift)

Total Cost: 2800 G --> 2700 G

Health: 450 Base Health --> 300 Base Health

Mana: 450 Base Mana --> 400 Base Mana

Passive: 20 Mana Growth / 200 Maximum Mana --> 40 Mana Growth / 400 Maximum Mana

Passive: 2 Ability Power / 20 Maximum Ability Power --> 4 Ability Power / 40 Maximum Ability Power

Rod is currently leaning a bit too much towards favoring AP Heavies with the statline - while not really solving Mana / AP concerns for mages who want to pick it up. Going to adjust the item to more favor the Mana and Offensive statistics of this item, especially over time.

Nashor's Tooth

Total Cost: 2920 G --> 3000 G

Attack Speed: 50% Attack Speed --> 40% Attack Speed

Ability Power: 60 Ability Power --> 80 Ability Power

We're also pushing more items up to compete in the 80 Ability Power range - While Nashor's is a fine purchase for people who already have strong on-hit procs - the ratio of Attack Speed to Spells favored these characters probably a bit too hard.

Nashor's should be acceptable as a niche for certain mages that can use their autoattacks well - but also have decent ratios.

(I'm not being biased here at all. I don't know who you're talking about.)

Rylai's Crystal Scepter

Recipe Change: NLR + Amplifying Tome + Giant's Belt

Total Cost: 2900 G --> 3000 G

Passive Single Target: 35% Slow for 1.5 seconds --> 40% Single Target Slow for 1.5 seconds

Passive AoE: 15% Slow for 1.5 seconds --> 40% Slow for 1 second

Passive DoT: 15% slow for 1.5 seconds --> 20% Slow for 1 second

Note: If a spell is both an AoE and a DoT - they use the DoT value.

Rylai's is currently good in a few scenarios, namely - do you have a spammable single target spell and a train pattern - a large part of this is the fact that the AoE / DoT portions of the slow are so weak in comparison to the single target slow. Changing the tactic here to make those slows have less overall duration rather than penalizing the direct effect.

This is a very powerful push in terms of Rylai's overall power - but we'll be looking at modifying and cleaning up of the slow rules as well either now or in the near future.

(Also added a self-only freeze particle effect so you can watch everyone become ice cubes when you're slowing them. FOR CLARITY.)

Haunting Guise

Total Cost: 1480G --> 1500 G

Wait for it...

Liandry's Torment

Recipe Change: Haunting Guise + Blasting Wand

Total Cost: 2900 G --> 3000 G

Ability Power: 50 Base AP --> 80 Base AP

Liandry's Torment is designed to be able to fit as a High Health / Low Resistance shredder (hence the combination of health damage + flat penetration). However, the lower AP on the item frequently meant your kit didn't actually work. Aggressively pushing the power of this build to be able to compete with the more immediate damage type builds - like proc builds.

Will of the Ancients

Spell Vamp 20% Spell Vamp --> 0% Spell Vamp

New Passive: Your spells and abilities heal you for 15% of the damage dealt, calculated BEFORE your opponent's resistances. 33% effect for AoE Spells.

You need so many things to get a Spell Vamp build to work. You have to be resistant enough to not get bursted. You have to deal a sufficient amount of raw damage in order to heal. You probably need to be ahead to outscale the opponent's resistances. You need a ton of base damage. Therefore - this change is trying to reduce the number of dependencies needed in order to 'turn on.' You won't need Pen to heal from this item on champions. Spell Vamp builds are fairly problematic to control once they get rolling - so they tend to be pretty binary.

The hope here is that there's a lower spell vamp value and less healing generally in exchange for not needing so much to get started.

OmNomNomicon

Recipe Change: Codex + Idol + Amplifying Tome

Total Cost Unchanged

Wanted to increase the number of potential purchase options at the ~1200 G level.

I'm attempting to make Codex + Book or Wisp + Book potentially attractive choices compared to NLR, especially on your first back. You'll get more interim power than the NLR - at the slight cost of strongly telegrahing what you're going to build and locking yourself into a build. It's mostly an experiment to see if players like having this kind of choice between 800 + 400 component vs. ~1200 mid-tier.

It makes the recipe a bit bloated but... yeah.

Athene's Unholy Grail

Recipe Change: Codex + Chalice + Amplifying Tome

Total Cost Unchanged

See Omnomnomicon Above.

Void Staff

Total Cost: 2295 G --> 2500 G

Ability Power: 70 Ability Power --> 80 Ability Power

Void Staff's raw efficiency is pretty high compared to some of the other items on the list.

While % Penetration will always be a great multiplier for damage for any damage oriented mage - you don't really need it to also be such a great source of Ability Power. This pushes Void Staff's efficiency more in line with some of the other items with comparable multipliers. Also adding a bit of AP to ensure that players end up at roughly the same amount of AP they did pre-patch."

Xypherous

Team Up Week: A legendary Mystery Gift upgrade

"Stack points for Team Up Week and enjoy double chances of unlocking Legendary skins with all Mystery Gifts and Chests. The legendary upgrade is live now and lasts all the way through June 21 at 11:59 PM PDT."

June 16th Patch Update

"6/16/2015

Sound effects in Fog of War

Important note: Not every ability plays SFX if it hits something in Fog of War and this update won't change that. We're just restoring a couple of abilities that stopped working this patch.

BLIND NOT DEAF - Fixed a few cases introduced this patch where landing an ability on a target in Fog of War wasn't playing the appropriate sound effect."

Bot Bans Incoming

The Wolff

"Hey everyone,

Last week, we banned accounts found to be cheating. This week, we're banning botted accounts. We want each and every game to feel competitive, and having bots on your team cripples your ability to work together as a team toward victory. As a result of these bans, we expect players will encounter fewer bots in their games, but there's still more we can do in our efforts against bots.\

We wish we could provide more context, but we won't be answering questions about how we detect bots to avoid being reverse engineered. Just know that we're committed to keeping these bots down. We'll continue to improve detection as bots try to get around it, and we're working toward other solutions that will decrease motivations for botting."

The Wollf

"There will be regular ban waves for bots going forward :)"

The Wolff

"Getting community support to identify bots can be helpful for investigations, and I'm excited to hear you want to help. We've thought about this feature, but aren't sure if we want to add it yet. One reason is that we can't simply ban bots off of reports alone...we need to be able to identify and ignore false reports.

For now, I'd suggest using an existing category that most closely matches the bot's activity (usually players use 'Intentional Feeding' or "Refused to Communicate with Team'). In the report comments, tell us that you're reporting a suspected bot and describe the activity that tipped you off."

"We're focused on detecting and banning botted accounts before they can be sold. This doesn't mean that buying a botted account makes you innocent (our Terms of Use prohibit the buying and selling of accounts). That being said, let me answer your question directly: yes, accounts that were botted and sold are in-scope for these ban waves."

The Wolff

"The best answer I can give you right now is "It's complicated."

We hear that players want secondary accounts. As for the reasons why, we're sympathetic to some (e.g. "I want to play with my friends who just signed up"), but not others (e.g. "I want to stomp noobs"). We're not sure that selling level 30 accounts is the best solution. There may be other ways we can support the 'good' use cases for smurfing in a way that doesn't require creating a secondary account."

HUD Update disabled on PBE for now

vLemon

"Hey guys,

in preperation for the 5.12 patch we disabled the new HUD as we're not going to be releasing it with this patch. The reason for this is that the closer we get to the patch date we want to get confidence on the builds that we plan on shipping to all regions.

We will be re-enabling the new HUD on PBE once with 5.13!"

Xypherous on System Refinement

Xypherous

"Quote

There's so much stuff getting added to the game in preseasons, does anyone else feel concerned that riot are going to completely overload the game with crazy new objectives on the map, stupid reworks to roles (16 jungle items+ 4 camp passives) and bloated unlikeable champions?

I sympathize with your concern - we did add a whole ton of stuff in the previous two seasons - designed to solve specific problems - but each of these can be refined to a certain extent.

While I can't speak to a lot of the other work going on - I will say that a lot of my work will revolve mostly in refining the systems that I've created to something more streamlined and multi-functional.

For example, there are roughly ~8 trinkets doing the work that 4 trinkets could do - one of them being completely unbalanceable for early game - and they're all super narrow in terms of purpose.

For example, one of the ideas that I'm testing is that you can merge your Tier 2 Gold item with your Sightstone if you don't really want the added burden of managing the Tier 3 support actives and then feeling sad over that wasted 'slot.'

If there's anything in particular bugging you though (you seem upset at Jungle, for example) - let me know."

Fan Artist Feature - Inkinesss

Jynx

"Hey Summoners! For this Fan Artist Feature we’re speaking with Inkinesss, a longtime community artist and Thresh fan with a fun and adorable style. Follow her on Tumblr and Facebook to see even more of her art!



If you know someone that you'd like to recommend for a future Fan Artist Feature, please let us know here.

How did you get started creating League of Legends fan art?

My first fan art was made after the champion reveal of Lulu, I was like “Hnnnng how can she so cute I need to draw her <3” At that time I had a huge room for improvement on drawing, so combining “practice drawing” and “share things I love” sounds like a great idea, and the support and response from everyone keeps me drawing, too :D

What's been your favorite piece to create, and why?



Aaagh this is hard to answer, I like most of them! If I have to choose then Corgi Nasus it is. I enjoy drawing him as a tiny fluffy puppy with short legs so much! His dramatic ult and the relationship with Renekton also gave me lots of ideas (´・ω・`)

Have to mention another piece of Thresh shaking his butt, I tried to make the animation myself but it was a disaster, thanks to Racoonwolf and his awesome skills, the outcome is super cuteeee <3

Do you have a dream project you’d like to work on?



Ahahaha *hollow laugh* I keep making doodles which look like a huge series, then stop after few pieces cause I wanted to try something new like a different brush, technique, character proportion and so on. There was a series of mini champs wallpapers sorted by area or faction, but I can’t decide where Poppy should belong to, Bandle city (Yordles) or Demacia xD”... so it ends with only three pieces.

Also I wanted to make some figures (technical difficulty! ) and T-shirts (Riot already has an adorable Thresh Tee, all I can do is instant buy)

Who’s your inspiration? Do you have any favorite League fan artists?



Actually every artwork or artist can be my inspiration, there’s always something like color, technique, composition that I can learn. (´・ω・`)



Markou because of the epic Battle Bunny Talon, my favorite piece! Riot please!

Artsed has a great style and fascinating skin ideas!

Kaisinel too beautiful (*´∀`*)

Is there anything else you’d like to share with the community?



Thanks everyone for your support <3!"

Inkinesss art, check out these links:

Tumblr

Twitter

Deviantart

Facebook If you'd like to see more ofart, check out these links:

Continue reading for more information!While they aren't on the PBE yet,has dropped off a massive list of AP itemization changes that will be on the PBE testing for(not 5.12, which is the next live patch). These changes include droppingAP and price down as well as oodles of other changes.is currently still on the PBE boards discussing these changes.]Withunderway, players will now have double the normal chance of unlocking legendary (1820 RP) tier skins in Mystery Gifts & Chests throughThe official 5.11 patch notes have been updated to reflect a hotfix for a bug with sound effects not properly playing in the fog of warFollowing the anti-cheater ban wave announced last week,has jumped on the boards to announce there will also be a bot ban wave going out soon:As for the future,When asked about the possibility of adding a report option for suspected bots,As for if this ban wave will include players purchased accounts leveled by bots, he clarified When asked if there will ever be an option for "secondary accounts" and removing the temptation for players to buy bot leveled accounts,The work in progress HUD Update has been disabled on the PBE and is not being released to live in 5.12.Here'swith more information: In a reddit thread voicing concern over the growing complexity of systems such as wards, jungle items and enchantments, and various other things typically added during preseason,Next up iswith a fan artist feature for