[Patch 4.11] Maokai Rework General Discussion

Kill dudes, buy boots. Turrets hit harder and ramp up faster. Lane minion experience range has been increased.

When we talk about 'snowballing' in League of Legends, we're mainly talking about teams rolling into victories through a single skirmish or unlucky fight without having to earn their win through multiple displays of skill. Like we've mentioned in our design values dev blog about mastery, we want to ensure there are systems in place that reward the consistently skilled team who can continually make intelligent choices - even when they're behind - to win the game.

Along that line of thought, back at the start of the 2014 season we made some 'anti-snowball' changes to First Blood mechanics so that it would still give rewards but not so much as to derail a game through one unsuccessful jungle invade. We still want to make sure League has exciting potential - even after first blood - but we felt we could spice up the incentives for successful early aggression.

As for the Turret and experience range changes, we wanted to make sure that Turrets remain a safe(ish) place to be in early levels and that players in 'lost' lanes (like 2v1 lanes or completely blown out matchups), can still function later in the game. While these upgrades are aimed specifically at competitive, they also affect other levels of play as players who fall behind in lane have virtually no safe place to hide. Finally, if the enemy team has a dive-heavy jungler (ie: Pantheon, Elise, Lee Sin, etc), weak turrets can skew champion diversity such that players can only choose champions who don't rely on turrets for protection (this is particularly true for solo lanes like top and mid).

Bounty Rewards

Turrets

Experience

Embiggened Champions

This might be a nerf (or buff if you enjoy eating skill shots) to the following champions, but we want to ensure for the sake of clarity that their hitboxes always match their visual representation.

Shyvana

Thresh

Vi

Updated Splashes

Given their high visibility, we're taking a broad look at base champion splashes throughout our roster and showing some love to older ones that are showing their age. Caitlyn and Urgot are first out of the gate; keep an eye out for more over the next few patches!

Caitlyn

Urgot

Sustain-focused tanky junglers now have an item build path that supports their playstyle from Hunter's Machete to Quill Coat to Spirit of the Ancient Golem. These new (and newly changed) items give high regeneration stats while ensuring jungle monsters can be taken down in a decent timeframe from the mid to late game.

The problem with the old Hunter's Machete and Spirit Stone items (at least for tanky sustained junglers) was that they were too damage-focused to really help the slow and steady Maokaii and Nautilii (Maokais? Nautiluses?) of the world. As a result, these tanky dudes fell out of favor against damage-heavy junglers like Kha'Zix and Pantheon or early pressure/utility junglers like Lee Sin and Elise. While these changes may not directly shift the landscape back to equal footing, we want to at least offer a meaningful choice for those who want to play the utility tank jungler.

To focus on the changes themselves, our goal here is to 'normalize' jungle clear speeds so that even a utility jungler can clear reasonably well throughout the game - even without buying a damage item. The solution to add Sapping Barbs (and make it based off a percent of maximum health) means that once a jungler gets a Quill Coat / Spirit of the Ancient Golem, they'll be guaranteed to clear a jungle camp within a set period of time. Adding a ward to Quill Coat and Ancient Golem also gives tanky junglers a way to fight back against high-pressure junglers through superior vision control, rather than giving more stats to out-duel the duelists. Final point: Spirit of the Ancient Golem scales with bonus health, so you'll need to be building health to see bigger gains.

Jungle Items

Hunter's Machete

new Quill Coat

Spirit of the Ancient Golem

Spirit Stone

Madred's Razors

Wriggle's Lantern

Attack Damage Items

While we realize that Essence Reaver probably needs more tweaks before it'll be in an optimal state, we want to keep it in the spotlight to show that we're committed to supporting this build path for marksman (ie: Ezreal, Corki and Sivir) that should like it.

Essence Reaver

We're introducing a new restriction for ranked duo queues so players can only duo queue with teammates ranked within one full tier above or below them. We found that the vast majority of duos are already between players within these thresholds and this change will allow us to curb some of the potential abuse cases we see under the current matchmaking system.

In the case of unseeded players, the new system allows for duo queuing with Gold, Silver and Bronze players while their skill level is still being assessed. After they've been placed, the usual restrictions will apply.

• Players may only queue for ranked duo games with players ranked within one full tier above or below them. For example, a Silver III player may duo with players ranked anywhere from Bronze V to Gold I.


• Unseeded players who were ranked in solo queue during the previous season will use that rank to determine duo eligibility.


• Unseeded players who have never been ranked in solo queue are able to duo queue with Gold, Silver or Bronze players.

With our bot updates in Patch 4.6, we were able to take bots off their purple leash and introduce a little variety to which side players end up on. This has been a great addition for our Co-op vs AI enthusiasts, but it's a little jarring for new players trying to get a handle on how the game is played. In order to meet each group's needs, bots in Beginner Co-op matches will go back to always being the Purple team while Intermediate matches will continue to sometimes give Blue side to the bots.

• Bots in Beginner-level Co-op vs AI matches will always play from Purple side

Public chat rooms aren't really serving their purpose at the moment as they're often filled with scams, spam and phishing attempts. This can create a pretty negative experience, especially for new players, so we're disabling them while we investigate long-term solutions.

• Public Chat Rooms have been disabled

• Muting players in-game no longer unfriends them or puts them on your Blocked list


• As a result, accidental mutes no longer reset Mystery Gifting's 2-week restriction on sending Mystery Gifts to new friends


• 'Ignore' tools have been relabeled as 'Block' to clarify their functionality

The following skins will be released at various times throughout Patch 4.11:

Hazmat Heimerdinger

Soulstealer Vladimir