Category: Development (Page 18 of 51)

Irelia is on release notice

November 11, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

Right on schedule, Riot has released the official pre-patch skill list for the newest champion, Irelia. Her skill list looks interesting, and has the potential to be viable in the jungler, which would be a nice addition to the league.

Here’s what we’re looking at:
Bladesurge: Irelia dashes forward to strike her target. If it kills the target, Bladesurge’s cooldown refreshes and half the mana cost is refunded.

Hiten Style: Irelia is skilled in the art of Hiten, passively giving her physical attacks health restoration. Activating Hiten Style adds true damage to her physical attacks for a short duration.

Equilibrium Strike: Irelia’s attack balances the scales, dealing damage and slowing the target. However, if the target has a higher Health % than Irelia, then the blow stuns the target instead.

Transcendent Blades (Ultimate): Irelia summons four spirit blades which she can fling at her enemies. These blades deal magic damage to enemies that they pass through, siphoning life from them and healing Irelia.

Ionian Fervor (Passive): Each nearby enemy champion (to a maximum of three) reduces the effectiveness of Crowd Control on Irelia.

Definitely an interesting passive, though I wonder how useful it will be. In a teamfight situation, it’s rare for CC to be the thing that actually kills a melee DPS. The problem is usually being in the middle of the AOE-fest and taking more damage than you can handle. Building her as a tank could make the passive really interesting because she’d be think enough to withstand some burst and then able to make use of Equilibrium for some stuns.

Personally, I’ll be looking into her jungling capabilities first. Inherent lifesteal is always good, and the active on that skill could make it very easy to bring down the buff camps.

I’m also curious to see how that ult will work. From the wording, it sounds like you cast to summon the blades and then perhaps cast again to throw one at an enemy? Or do they all throw at once? Is it targeted or a skillshot?

My biggest concern for Irelia is that she’ll make Katarina obsolete. Kat already has a tough time in most games due to the prevalence of silences and stuns. Giving what sounds like a similar character a slow/stun, true damage, lifesteal, and Kat’s dash ability could take Kat off the radar for most players.

Champions, Development, league of legends, News

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Magma Chamber is confirmed 5v5

November 8, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

This is old news, and it’s been sitting in my Instapaper just waiting to be posted. Early last weekend, Morelio confirmed on the official forums that Magma Chamber would be a 5v5 map and no larger, as some have speculated.

Here’s the quote:

5v5, with a goal being to allow more splitting up and skirmishing than SR.

At the outset, I think it sounds great, though one sentence can hardly get at the way a metagame will develop around that sort of map. I would love to see smaller skirmishes instead of the big teamfights we have today. It makes some of the marginal characters, like Nidalee and Swain, much more effective. Who knows if that will actually work.

As for release, I’d bet we’re looking at 2011. I don’t see Riot releasing the map, even for testing, in the midst of the holiday content. Release for testing in January, launch in March, Season Two in June?

Development, league of legends, News

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LeBlanc nerf is live

November 4, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

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The LeBlanc nerf has officially gone live. Here’s the official post:

The LeBlanc hotfix should be our very shortly. There might be some tooltip discrepancies until you relog. Like I mentioned in the previous thread, we wanted to solve two primary issues: the strength of Q-R, especially at level 6, and her mana efficiency.
For Q-R the following changes:
Reduced the initial damage on Sigil of Silence to 70/110/150/190/230 from 80/125/170/215/260.
Reduced the cast range on Sigil of Silence to 700 from 750.
Increased the cooldown of Mimic to 40 seconds from 30 seconds at all ranks.
Reduced the damage amplification on Mimic to 10/25/40% from 20/30/40%. (The tooltip was incorrectly stating 20/35/50%).
To address her mana efficiency we made the following changes:
Increased the mana cost on Sigil of Silence to 70/75/80/85/90 from 60/65/70/75/80.
Increased the mana cost on Distortion to 80/90/100/110/120 from 60/70/80/90/100.
Increased the mana cost on Ethereal Chains to 80 from 70 at all ranks.
Reduced her mana per level to 50 from 56.
We made two minor changes in addition to the ones noted above. We reduced her armor per level by 0.5 since melee need to feel she’s appropriately squishy, and we reduced the damage of Distortion and Ethereal Chains by 5 at all ranks to preserve Q’s position as the highest damage output ability and not adjust skill choices.
We will be carefully monitoring the impact of these changes.

On the whole I think these are good changes, though I can’t understand why she went live in her current form. To me it seems Riot really needs to get a serious test realm up and running, and quickly. A hotfix two days after release means just one thing – they didn’t test enough. More thoughts on this in another post.

Champions, Development, league of legends, News

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LeBlanc sneak peek

October 26, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

Today, Riot gave us the first look at another new champion. Right on schedule, LeBlanc shows up as some sort of sorceress, looking both very reminiscent of Swain and an awful lot like the Sorceress class from Warhammer (seriously, google “warhammer sorceress” – you will be shocked by the lack of creativity).

Here’s the official text:

If you’ve been looking to add a little bit of high society to your League of Legends lineup, this next patch is the one you’ve been waiting for. Allow me to introduce the talented and graceful Emilia LeBlanc, a stately sorceress ready to round out your champion selection. In addition to being extremely attractive, the Deceiver comes primed to fuel your most megalomaniacal of desires. If you’ve got a bit of mischievous thread to your personality, you’re definitely going to want to make sure to pick up LeBlanc in the upcoming patch. Would I lie?

I haven’t been able to find anything significant with regard to skillset. It seems Riot has put forth some serious effort to button down the early champion leaks, which is probably for the best.

I know this isn’t a blog about game art, but really Riot? This is about as uninspired as design gets. A tall, slender chick in a bondage suit with phallic headgear. Color me unimpressed.

Champions, Development, league of legends

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Zileas gives us a little insight into Riot design

October 18, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

Over the weekend Zileas gave us a rare gift – a list of development patterns that guide the design process for League of Legends. I can’t tell you how much this kind of thing interests me, though I’m sure you can guess from my own detailed critiques of several champions. This also gives us a chance to consider some of the recent champion releases against this list to help understand just how complicated the design process can be, especially when the company has committed to a bi-weekly deadline for champion development.

Consider Swain: a big part of his problem was that he was originally designed under a burden of knowledge, that is, the player had to be aware of a complex mechanic in order to understand its use against opponents and against himself. It was undesirable enough that Riot decided to make it more understandable, but there wasn’t enough time to rebalance the character before release. Even the champion spotlight was released with the original skill in place.

Personally, I don’t think burden of knowledge is a good enough reason to change a hero like this. After a point, there will be too many heroes with too many different mechanics in play for new players to truly understand the game. In that case, the game has to adapt, to be better suited for a player to pick up. Make the knowledge more available, don’t dumb down the game. I still see people who don’t know the basic mechanics of some heroes. It’s not that they are incapable of understanding, just that they haven’t yet discovered the mechanic. Make the discovery process easier and burden of knowledge only becomes an issue in extreme cases.

As Zileas notes, we could find examples of each design pattern he mentions within League of Legends. I’ll be referring back to it often to help me better understand what’s behind a champion. We’re getting Lux tomorrow, so you can bet she’ll have my full attention during the week ahead.

Development, league of legends

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