Tag: patch notes (Page 3 of 3)

      Patch Day 08/10 – We can stop banning Soraka now

      August 10, 2010 /

      Enchanted Galio.

      Today’s patch brings a new champion in the form of Galio, the great blue gargoyle. Aside from the new champion, the game hasn’t changed a ton. A few characters received some significant attention, but things remained largely the same.

      The most notable change in my mind is Soraka, who received a string of small nerfs that should amount to a significant difference in her staying power. Her mana heal now has a longer cooldown and heals slightly less mana, and her global heal got a 20 second cooldown increase at all levels. That could be enough to bring her off some ban lists in favor of other champions (please start banning Amumu, people).

      Heimer’s turrets caught a little nerf – they no longer increase damage based on number of hits and the AP coefficient was reduced. They do have slightly higher base damage, but definitely nothing on the order of the old hit method.

      Malzahar got some nice tweaks, bumping his movement speed, increasing the range of his ult and Malefic Visions, and reducing the cooldown on Malefic Visions (which already felt very short to me).

      Ryze got a little bit of a rework as well, adding a passive cooldown reduction to his Overload skill. To compensate, Desperate Power now has a longer CD. Rune Prison now lasts longer at early ranks and deals damage in DoT form. It’s basically Morgana’s old Dark Binding, which is odd.

      Vladimir’s Sanguine Pool got a small CD nerf but his Tides of Blood now costs less HP, Blitzcrank got some CD reductions, Nunu got a Consume buff, and Garen got his attack timer reset on Decisive Strike back. Other than those small changes, there’s not a whole lot to report in the way of champions.

      For items, the newer items all got buffs. Wriggle’s Lantern now costs less, which is just what it needed. The Gunblade and Cutlass got damage buffs without a cost increase.

      Lots of little paragraphs in here, which should give you an idea of how many small changes came in this patch. I’ll have a Galio impression list up later today. Spoiler Alert: he’s underwhelming.

      Reviews

      Patch Day: Season One patch note roundup

      July 14, 2010 /

      Xin Zhao commando.

      It’s that time again, and though I have a load of thoughts about the Season One features I still want to cover the changes to the actual game. The Season One patch actually brought a lot of champion and game changes with it.

      The most notable change, in my mind, is the Cleanse change. Prior to the nerf, Cleanse was the skill I saw most often at the loading screen. Now, though, it feels almost useless. As of the current patch, Cleanse only removes CC effects, silences, and blinds. That’s right, ignite cannot be cleansed. Neither can Morgana ult, Kaiser ult, Malzahar ult, or any of the DoTs in the game. This is a huge buff to the characters that rely on ignite for their killing power (Kat, Ezreal, Shaco) and a big fat nerf for most carries. I should also note that Cleanse does not work on Exhaust, even though it’s a slow/blind.

      Among other general game changes, Revive now grants 225 percent run speed as a diminishing buff on use. Ignite also got a small damage nerf. The jungle has been normalized a bit so that one side can’t get an advantage over the other simply by lucky dual-golem camp spawns. Twisted Treeline experience is a bit different now that Grez no longer grants global XP/gold for the killing team. It will still be important, but won’t snowball nearly as badly. Turret damage is also up a bit, and there’s been a change to the way inhibitors respawn. Inhibitors always stay down for five minutes now, and if all inhibitors respawn, the nexus and nexus turrets become invulnerable. Just bring down one inhib to win the game.

      There’s a new item in game that should make junglers happy:

      New Item: Wriggle’s Lantern
      +35 Damage, +30 Armor, +14% Lifesteal
      UNIQUE Passive: 20% chance on attack to deal 500 damage to a minion.
      UNIQUE Active: Places an invisible ward with 1100 range sight and lasts for 3 minutes. 3 minute cooldown.

      It’s a cool item, especially because of the ward. It is a little on the expensive side when compared with the marginally greater cost of Madred’s and the much more valuable attributes on Madred’s. Still, the free ward is really nice.

      On to the champion changes – I’ll be writing a separate post regarding Xin Zhao so check back for more info.

      Heimer got nerfed versus turrets again – concussion grenade deals 50 percent less damage to turrets and has a slightly longer cooldown. It won’t fix all of the problems around Heimer but it will probably make people cry a little bit less.

      Kassadin has received a bit of a rework. His W skill no longer drains mana and instead restores it on every hit (good for non-mana targets). It also now has an active that increases armor penetration by quite a lot. I don’t think it fixes his problems – he has to blink in to serious trouble to deal damage and then can’t really escape – but it should help if you want to try hybrid/AD builds. He also gains more attack speed from his passive than before.

      Kayle caught another nerf – no splash damage on turrets and a Divine Blessing move speed nerf. I think this pretty much cements her as a useless bag of crap unless you can get a legendary farm over your opponents. With a shorter ult duration and less tower pushing, she’s pretty much back to her pre-buff level in my opinion.

      Pantheon received even more surgery. His stun now scales in duration so you should be able to avoid a little Heartseeker damage early. His spearshot is now more expensive/less-spammable, and Aegis has had its CD normalized to 12 seconds. Overall he should be a little more fun to play in the early game (no more eternal cooldowns) and a bit easier to avoid in terms of damage output.

      The rest of the changes are pretty small – a slight damage buff for Veigar, TF PaC can’t be dodged, hit box spells like Feast, Fling, and Consume are a bit easier to cast and a load of bug fixes. For the full list, read up on the official forums.

      league of legends, News

      Painful reminders that Riot is young, still growing too fast

      June 29, 2010 /

      Evelynn is dodge-worthy.

      Today we got another patch, this one full of bug fixes and small tweaks to existing characters. It also brought some painful reminders that Riot is still a very young company and growing to fast to handle its exploding community.

      I’ve written a lot, both here and on the official forums, about the queue dodge penalty system. It sucks. It doesn’t work. People still dodge and troll and do whatever they can to avoid playing with certain players or champions or whatever. This most recent patch actually increased increased the queue dodge penalty. Instead of rewording things, I’ll copy my thoughts from a forum thread I created today.

      No one likes to get queue dodged. It sucks. Adding a penalty doesn’t encourage players not to queue dodge, though. It encourages people to attempt to force a teammate to queue dodge. Increasing the time penalty will only make this problem worse.

      The whole point of the penalty was to encourage players to make an informed decision about whether or not to drop queue. An informed decision shouldn’t force you to always make a bad decision. I don’t want to join a game with an AFK player or a player who chooses revive/smite Eve and threatens to feed if he doesn’t get mid solo. I also don’t want to wait six or a ridiculous fifteen minutes for another game while that player gets dumped right back into queue.

      And let’s say I actually start the game and our friend leaves or goes AFK or feeds or any number of things trolls do just to get to the next game – what’s the penalty for that player? He has effectively ruined the game for 9 other people and in most cases wasted at least 25 minutes of time for 9 players. Even if he leaves it doesn’t count against him in any fashion whatsoever. He gets a leaver mark that can’t be seen until he has likely already ruined a game? That’s like covering up the scarlet letter until Hester Prynne has nailed every married man in town and then telling their wives they should have seen it coming.

      Get rid of the queue dodge penalty. It didn’t fix anything when the penalty was two and ten minutes. It made the game creation process much, much worse. I realize the queue dodge system sucks but this little band-aid won’t stop the bleeding. Figure out something new (new lobby system, perhaps?) that will actually address the problem.

      In short, the dodge penalty is not doing its job – improving the game experience by reducing dodged games. It’s actually making things worse by incentivizing players to troll, which is terrible for a community.

      The reason I think this all points to Riot’s immaturity as a company is that they’ve remained quiet about it, responding to few if any of the posts regarding the dodge problem, and there are a lot of them (posts). Riot is trying to force this system, which is a crap solution, to work when it just doesn’t, instead of implementing a new lobby system or some other player management system that accounts for things like dodging and leaving.

      Granted, they might be working on something, but the dodging has been an issue for months. I wrote about my first experience with the queue dodge penalty back in February. The development cycle for these kinds of fixes is way too long, most likely because Riot is understaffed, so the company comes up with these bandages when what they really need is surgery.

      Thankfully the community has started to turn around. When the queue dodge system first came out, anyone willing to speak out against it was downvoted into oblivion. Players are starting to realize, though, that the current system sucks and it really needs to be fixed. There’s a lot of support in the forums for reverting the change. Even if the old system wasn’t any better, it certainly wasn’t this bad.

      Get on the forums and show some support.

      Development, league of legends

      LoL: Gragas buff is on the way

      February 4, 2010 /

      Gragas the Rabblerouser.If you’ve played any games as Gragas you’ve probably felt pretty underwhelmed. I know I have. Generally, I like to give a new toon a chance to shine, but Gragas really can’t, and it comes down to his lack of internal synergy.

      I realize that sounds like something from a Six Sigma retreat on 30 Rock so I’ll try to clarify. Gragas suffers because his skills are a weird mix of AP and physical damage. While some at Riot contend that he does best with a health/physica DPS build, the player community is frustrated with where that puts his AP scaling skills, most notably Barrel Roll and his ultimate.

      Luckily, Riot has seen the light. Gragas will soon be receiving a buff per red posts on the forums. I’ll be interested to see how much, though. As it stands I think he’s fine for the early game, but he really suffers mid to late. Buff him the wrong way and suddenly he’s too big early and starts to feel just right late.

      For what they got wrong with Gragas, they got completely right with Pantheon. I am completely in love with that Spartan bastard.

      league of legends, News, PC, Strategy

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