Shia

Patch 26.20 Full Preview! Rocketbelt - We're adjusting rocketbelt to be much more about the go in aspect of it and less power budget in the haste - The haste is adding a lot to the repeatability for mages in particular, but also as a burst oriented item, it means that the item broadly isn't creating the right tradeoffs with other items like Cosmic Drive, etc. that should be purchased for the higher haste values Lillia - Lillia's changes last patch were a good start, but we feel we can go a bit further on the Sleep changes - Overall, we want to do a better job of balancing Lillia between skill levels and Lillia typically struggles at the higher skill brackets, especially after we made her early clears a lot weaker - Average play Lillias often don't get the most out of her Sleep duration, whereas higher skill players are much better at coordinating around it Diana JG - Diana mid is in a mostly fine spot, but Diana Jungle, which plays more like a bruiser and builds a lot more health needs a little more help - Overall, we're not looking to add a ton of power to Diana as she does get a bit statchecky when strong Neeko - Neeko support (and Mid) have been a bit worse for wear - Neeko support has become a lot weaker, especially at the higher levels of play after we made adjustments to her Clone and its interaction with vision - We think Neeko could use a little more power as a result Smolder - Smolder has also been on the weaker side after we made a bunch of adjustments to Black Cleaver and Deathfire Touch several months ago - We're continuing to add more power to him, but into his Crit builds as his Bruiser builds have worse counterplay given his scaling profile Vayne - With the nerfs to experimental Hexplate this patch (for her Top lane), we feel like we can give Vayne a little power in bot lane - She still has builds in Top that don't build Hexplate, but we're more OK with those as she isn't as durable while dishing out a lot of damage Yunara Ashe - We've added an Ashe nerf into the patch as she is one of the dominant pairings on the patch, even with the Hurricane nerf (as a lot of her builds don't build it) - We're also adding a moderate nerf in for Yunara as her level 1 laning is a bit too strong given how well she scales - We expect after this and the Lucian buffs for the bot meta to be in a much better spot Pulled Changes (Varus, Sylas) - We pulled Varus and Sylas from the patch - Varus because we feel like we need larger work on him to make his builds more satisfying and make sense - Sylas, because we don't feel comfortable changing him overall without messing up his role balance, especially given the Protobelt changes in the patch

Next Thursday on Dokovan NEO: From DZ-BT17 - Parallactic Fate: - Introducing Great Magick Caster of the Crimson Moon, Zerith "Mirazh" and support cards, for a total of 5 cards

Happy to have a good faith discussion about it. I don't think I'm going to be able to change your mind on your perspective, but I'll just lay out some of where we're coming from (I considered your points as well but disagree with some): 1. Champ Matchups should make the game play differently: It isn't desirable for champs to play the same way every game, that might mean sometimes you need to make a tradeoff between being able to survive/win lane vs hit breakpoints vs scaling. In the Viktor example, I think it's pretty reasonable that Viktor has strong laning as a tradeoff for lack of on-demand hard CC and difficulty in moving around the map compared to other similar mages If Akshan just "had everything" (waveclear, roaming, gap closes/escapes, gank survival+followup, good sidelaning, etc.) then he just has no weaknesses. I don't think that's a reasonable set of strengths and weaknesses (at least for soloq); in organized play, there's a lot of differences 2. Just because a champion is difficult doesn't mean if you master them you should always be able to go even against other champs: I get that the mages are easy compared to say Yasuo or Akshan, but that is also by Design. They test different skills and not every champ is meant to be equally difficult in order to serve the millions of people who play League in addition to having as best a balance as we can for high MMR as y'all are much more sensitive to that I do still think at the top levels that the high agency champions still on average perform better. Top 10 or even top 50 in regions has relatively low representation of vegan mages players (eg. Viktor/Ori) for example Champs need to have good and bad matchups for the game to be fun and strategically interesting in the long term. Some games you're more reliant on your team to play the game and we think that's a good thing, not a bad thing; you can't be the main character every game, even though we understand that's really fun 3. Champions should be holistically balanced: Champs don't need to have equal quantities of everything; some champs should have more waveclear, some should have better roaming, some have hard cc, etc. For champs that are giving up certain things that turn into core weaknesses, they're allowed to have other things that can make them powerful to the point of frustrating in those other aspects (eg. Viktor for laning, because no dashes or demand hard CC, Ekko waveclear because non-damaging Ult, etc.) For Qiyana, it's probably more likely that we tap her down in the future however; she's certainly strong and falls more into the "non-clear weaknesses" camp

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