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Changes to Quinn, Nasus, and the introduction of Freljord in this episode of the Patch Preview.
Pwyff: Hey summoners, and welcome to the Freljord Patch Preview.
I’m your host, Pwyff, here with a couple of our designers, Morello and Brackhar. How you guys doing?
Morello: Doing pretty good.
Brackhar: Yeah, doing fine!
Pwyff: Before I get to our balance talk, we have a lot of new content coming with Freljord,
so I’m going to kick this off to Morello to find out what’s going on in the north.
Morello: Yeah, so as you’ve probably noticed, we’ve put out a lot of ice themed content for this Freljord event.
Ya know, it’s this big conflict up in the north between Ashe, Sejuani, and Lissandra duking out for control of the entire region.
We do have the Trundle and Sejuani relaunches coming out for this event as well
and there’s going to be some champion spotlights you can check out to get the full nitty gritty on those.
We also have an in-client “choose your allegiance” event where you can align yourself with one of the three tribes of Freljord.
This let’s you participate and kind of get involved with the event even if you don’t play one of the Freljord champions.
Lastly, and I know that Brackhar’s been dying to talk about this; we have the Howling Abyss map for ARAM.
This map is set in the Freljord and kind of takes you in there to experience it for yourself.
Brackhar: Yeah man, I’m super excited to finally be able to show this off.
With Howling Abyss, we wanted to give our single-lane map, the Proving Grounds, a sense of place and story.
So now we’ve rebooted the whole thing using all of the techniques and technology that we developed with Twisted Treeline
and we’ve set it deep inside of Freljord, where an ancient battle took place far in the past.
There are a lot of cool lore hooks and ties within Howling Abyss,
and you’ll be able to find out more by playing the map and by interacting with our two unique shopkeepers.
Both shopkeepers also have VO lines that respond to what you’re doing and who you’re playing.
Additionally, we knew that players really wanted matchmaking support for our All Random All Mid mode
– which was the main way they engaged with Proving Grounds - so we decided to also bundle that into this map relaunch.
Pwyff: Another thing players have been asking for are tools to deal with dodgers in ARAM.
I’m sure we’ve all been in games where someone’s randomed a bad matchup and decided to jump ship.
What are we doing there?
Brackhar: Since we’ve added matchmaking, this means you’ll automatically get the Leaverbuster support that League of Legends has,
so players that dodge won’t be able to hop right back into the queue, which should help.
But we also get that sometimes you run into a game of ARAM and you don’t want to play the particular champion that you get.
For those situations, we created re-rolls. As you play games of ARAM,
you gain re-roll points that you can spend to re-roll your pick in champion select.
Players who have more Champions will get these points faster, and free to play Champions will be included in these re-rolls as well.
Pwyff: So there’s still a lot of chance involved,
but at least I’ll be able to random again when I have an all melee team against an opposing Lux and Nidalee.
Brackhar: Definitely. But on that note, we also made a few gameplay changes we could make to the map itself.
We’ve actually added two new items to the game.
One of those is called the Guardian’s Horn,
which is specifically designed to help melee Champions engage when the enemy team is just sitting back
and throwing spears or firing lasers all day.
Pwyff: I am definitely looking forward to the new Howling Abyss. Thanks for coming out, Brackhar.
Brackhar: Yeah! Thanks dude. I appreciate being here.
Pwyff: Alright, I’m going to turn things over to our live design discussion with Morello.
We’re making some pretty big balance changes in this patch, so let’s start with Quinn, because I’m a fan of AD carries.
Currently, Quinn is a little unconventional in how she’s meant to be played.
Her ultimate forces her into melee form, and even her vault can put her in some bad situations.
Players have been asking for range buffs to let Quinn play safer, but we’ve instead given her a lot more mobility. Why did we do that?
Morello: Quinn kind of occupies her own space in the team and especially her own space in the AD carry role.
What we didn’t want to do is flatten her out
and take away the unique quirks that Quinn has and allows her to occupy that unique space on a team.
Still though, at the end of the day, as a non-traditional AD carry,
it requires a little bit more nuance and insight to use Quinn’s abilities appropriately.
Quinn’s Tag Team already has a lot inherent trade-offs.
You do more damage, you’re faster, but you have to get into melee range which makes you more vulnerable.
On the other hand, we’ve seen a lot of competitive players use this in really clever and really smart ways,
such as hunting down high value targets, or ganking, or getting away from a bad situation.
This really highlights the strengths Tag Team brings to Quinn’s kit.
We’ve lowered the cooldown on Tag Team because you already have a lot of trade-offs and decisions to make
– waiting for your cooldown to come back up isn’t the decision you should be focused on.
Another change we’ve made is that Heightened Sense’s passive now also provides movement speed whenever you proc Harrier.
This allows her to remain more mobile while either trying to get a better position or going after those high value Harrier targets.
Pwyff: The other champion change I wanted to discuss was a smaller nerf we’re making to Nasus,
with the attack speed reduction on Wither being cut in half.
Nasus has traditionally been seen as a weak pick,
and he’s only recently gained some popularity with buffs in a previous patch, so why the nerf?
Morello: This is one I definitely wanted to talk about
because I think it can be a little confusing to see a character who’s been so historically weak
finally become viable and then see us nerf it.
The key to this is: yeah we did buff him, and that’s great,
but the problem was he had previously overpowered things before that were never dealt with because he was so weak overall.
Wither is a fantastic example of this. The movement speed slow is 95% and the auto-attack speed slow is also 95%.
That’s basically a stun for an auto-attack character.
What this creates is when Nasus Withers you, you have two options: run or fight.
In its current state, neither of those options are realistic.
Nasus kills you and there’s no counterplay in that.
We decided to nerf this overpowered skill so that we could leave the other things that Nasus players are appreciating intact,
like his damage potential and his tankiness.
Pwyff: I’m going to shift our focus to our two big starting item changes.
Our first is we’ve raised the cost on Elixir of Fortitude.
This will have a big impact on early game starts,
as we saw even AP mids taking Elixir of Fortitude even though they didn’t really need that AD boost.
Was this change made specifically to counter that?
Morello: Elixir of Fortitude is meant to be kind of a high-risk high-reward gambit starting item.
A good example of this working properly is back when Shaco used to use it in Season 2.
This would let Shaco go all-in on an early gank and hopefully propel him into mid and late game.
Right now it’s so powerful in such a large number of situations that it really removes the item’s identity.
There’s no risk and there’s no gamble.
This price increase is going to change what other items you can start with when buying an Elixir of Fortitude,
and also what situations it makes sense to buy an Elixir of Fortitude in.
Pwyff: The Elixir change is also related to our other item change, where we’re limiting the number of HP Potions you can buy to 5.
This is a big hit to ultra-high sustain builds,
and some players feel this was a viable start to get some weak laning Champions through early game and into mid-game.
What were we going for with these changes?
Morello: The mega-health potion start right now is causing the same problems that infinite sustain caused in lanes.
Namely it lowers interaction, it lowers engagement, and it lowers combat.
When somebody has that much extra health that they can sustain back,
there’s no incentivization for you to go attack, harass, or try to push that person out of lane.
They’re just going to drink it back up. Therefore, your best option is to just farm.
That creates really boring, really stale lanes.
We think 5 health pots is really reasonable because it lets you stay in lane for a little bit,
but the enemy can run you out with good harass or some ganks.
Pwyff: And do you think this exposes a larger problem with the lack of strong starting items?
Morello: We actually do,
and the problem was we had to fix this first though before looking at that because this is just such a dominant strategy.
Nerfing this allows us to also look at other champions who have relied on this to be viable – say, Mordekaiser or Kassadin.
If this is what it takes for these champions to be viable, there’s some bigger underlying problem.
We don’t want them to be have to be viable by removing interaction and removing gameplay in order for them to be good.
Instead, these characters should have other reason to be good instead of just infinite sustain.
Pwyff: Well that wraps up our discussions for this week, thanks for coming Morello.
Morello: Thanks for having me.
Pwyff: And thanks everyone else for tuning in. We’ll see you next time.