It’s patch day again, boys and girls, and we can finally say it happened. That’s right, today we were given a major feature release. Well, sort of. The major feature from today’s patch, Co-op versus AI, won’t actually launch until later in the week. It is built into the client, though, so that’s a step in the right direction. And, of course, today also marks the Maokai release. He’s got some of the coolest champion art in the game and what looks to be a decent skillset. I’ll be covering him in a different post later this week. For now, let’s take a look at the rest of the champion changes.

Amumu got a buff, though it looks to be mostly to his jungling, which is odd. I’ve never had problems jungling with Amumu. I know he isn’t being played much these days, but that’s what happens when a champion is FotM for like five months straight. I’m sure people will be sick of playing Rammus soon too.

Anivia got the expected nerf. It seems pretty serious to me, but I don’t really think that’s a bad thing. I used to play Anivia quite a bit in the pre season one days. She is crazy strong, and when she’s got golem, which is virtually all the time if your teammates are smart, she’s an unstoppable force. I’m also glad they added a more discernible buff system for her ult. I’ve probably asked 10 times over the past two weeks “how do you know if her ult’s up again?”

Pantheon got another change to Heartseeker that I really like. It now takes the skill .5 seconds longer to deal full damage. That’s something I hadn’t considered in my post about Heartseeker balance. With the duration nerf to his stun and now this he might be a bit less frustrating to play against.

Rammus got a speed nerf to Powerball. As I mentioned before, I don’t think it’s enough. He’s still too good at chasing and too strong out of the jungle. I’d love to see them make Powerball more of a quick boost – make it reach full speed quickly and nerf the duration in a big way.

Ryze’s rework did make it live, but I’ll be covering that in another post.

The Vlad nerf is kind of underwhelming on paper, but I think it could play out well in game. His passive now grants 1 ability power per 40 health instead of 25. Sanguine Pool also no longer grants a speed boost and interacts properly with turrets. I still think it’s ridiculous to give a gold multiplier to a guy who farms extremely well, but we’ll see how things turn out.

That’s it for champion changes. EDIT: Just realized this didn’t post yesterday for some reason. I’ve got a slew of posts lined up for tomorrow afternoon. Check back for more on Ryze, Maokai, and the item changes for today’s patch.

Riot posted a patch preview for the upcoming Maokai patch, and though it wasn’t presented in video form this go round, we still got a lot of good information. At the top of the list, for me personally anyway, is that Vlad is getting a nerf.

You may remember Vladimir’s champion spotlight, if only because it was so funny to listen to Phreak tell us just how overpowered Vlad would be. Riot’s stance is that he’s not explicitly overpowered, which I can sort of agree with. Certain characters do very well against him, but a lot of toons don’t, and he snowballs way too fast with the bonus survivability he gets from his passive. His passive is getting a nerf, but probably more importantly so is Sanguine Pool. I’m excited, to say the least.

Anivia is catching a nerf to her annoying ult -> E combo, which is almost a guaranteed 25 percent damage done to her target with very little required effort. The change will make it cost more mana for players to ‘pulse’ her ult, quickly toggling it on and then off, hopefully reducing the number of times that simple combo can land. I don’t think this will be quite enough, but we’ll see.

Rammus is also getting nerfed, this time on his speed. Powerball bonus speed is down 15 percent. Again, I’m not entirely certain that this addresses his issues, but it should help. I can understand Riot’s resistance to nerfing tanks. There are relatively few tanks in the game – a heavy nerf to one tank makes the rest of the list look pretty sparse.

Lastly, Ryze is getting a long awaited rework. I’ve played a few Ryze games recently. He’s pretty fun if he gets farmed, but the mechanics on Spell Flux make him unreliable in lane. The change will make him a ranged caster-carry. His spells will have shorter cooldowns, longer range, lower base damage, and scale with mana as well as AP. I’m actually really excited to try him out, though I wonder how Spell Flux now works. If the bounce range wasn’t increased with the cast range he could still feel a little frustrating.

Some of the cooldown reduction items are getting a rework, but I’ll cover that in more detail once Riot releases the actual number changes.

I’m ready to call today’s patch the biggest thing that has happened to the game since the release of Season One. Today, Riot finally took some steps the reds have been talking about on the forums for months, making changes that could have a significant impact on the metagame. It won’t change things entirely, but it will almost certainly start to shift things in a new direction.

This is one of the first patches for which we’ve seen Riot give overarching design notes along with the line by line changes. Let’s start with those.

This patch is focused upon the following main issues:

Area of Effect damage and disable spells being too powerful
Area of Effect is taking a pretty large hit this patch, especially to the damage on Galio’s Idol of Durand, Morgana’s Soul Shackles and Vladimir’s Hemoplague. After seeing its effect on the game over a longer period of time, we’ve found something more akin to Annie’s Summon: Tibbers is a proper mix of area size, damage, and disable. We have several area-effect skills in the game that have snuck past this and we’re looking to bring these back to acceptable levels.

Strong supports are able to protect powerful ranged carries too well, cancelling their fragility too easily
We’re starting with a duration nerf to Morgana’s Black Shield and Janna’s Eye of the Storm to reward better timing of the spell reactively and to raise the skill ceiling a bit on these spells. If this proves too little, we’ll evaluate the need for additional changes in a future patch.

Ranged carries, holistically, are too safe considering their damage output
While we predict bigger changes will be required, our first adjustments are to lower the movement speeds of ranged carry-style champions to provide more of a tradeoff, and nerf Blessing of the Lizard Elder when used on ranged champions. We’d like to keep ranged carries “safer” than melee, while beginning to provide more tradeoffs that both give melee a place in the game and differentiate the roles of melee and ranged characters.

I was thrilled when I read these. Read the rest of this entry »