Preseason 2016 Changes - Page 26

On November 08 2015 07:57 Ketara wrote:
Yes. And double edged sword is a 3% damage increase that works on jungle camps.

You can't just do it that way though. Since Rammus is an initiator a majority of his damage (although not much of a majority since Rammus sustained damage is pretty good compared to his burst) will happen before the target hits 40% HP.


One thing I'd like to see out of the defense tree in the new system is a defensive keystone that increases your damage, for champions that want to have a healthy mix of tanky and damage stats like bruisers.

If I had a pbe account I would totally make that suggestion to Rita.

On November 08 2015 13:03 Volband wrote:
Hm, Let's see Leona. First of all, you want a resolve keystone, so you are going to invest all the way there, while the ferocity tree gives you exactly nothing, so the remaining points have to be assigned to cunning.

5 points to unyielding should be a no-brainer, and not just because it has a synergy with her W (and her future build), but because the health regen is useless. You bought only wards and potions to begin with early game, when such a life regen could matter, and now you can't even buy wards and start with more money, Also, you will most likely still start with targon, so the health regen is just useless. Same goes for Thresh and Braum.

So, Explorer or Tough Skin. Against ranged opponents at bot lane, it really isn't a question, Tough skin just gets you to reach lvl2/3 (whenever you want to start going ham) all the more safely, and after that, none of these two masteries are crucial in lane, though having tough skin still sounds much better, because your opponents will have to be close to your E range, and if not, it means you are zoning them out. Explorer can be fun, if you want to gank mid early, but you'll have mobility boots most of the time and rather fast, so you give up lane strength (inb4 someone tries to argue that some +12 movement speed in brush shenanigans will win bot lane more reliably, than tough skin) just to have a narrow window of opportunity when you can roam more efficently to mid lane. Meh.
Whether explorer is better later in the game if you don't plan on buying some speedy boots... It's just too weird.

Runic armor vs Veteran scars is, once again, an easy one. Unless you are supporting an AP Janna of course, because then suddenly we are presented with some meaningful choices, but I'm going to be bold and assume that you will still see marksmen on your side at botlane, so veteran scars is just superior. Yeah, runic armor can be comboed with the whooping 2 hp/5sec of Recovery in the first tier, so if you want to waste 10 points to have an extra ~2.3 life regen instead the scaling bonus resistance and scaling hp masteries, go ahead. (Yes, the regen is scaling as well, but when mid/late game fights will occur, no one will wait for you to regen anything, you either explode or not)

Now if we add Preservance to the picture, we actually have to accept the fact that you can have some preeeetty nice life regen. Then we wake up and take the 15% reduced summoner cooldowns, because more often than not, reduced flash, ignite/exhaust cooldown will net you more kills and saves, than (gonna make up a number now) +~7 life regen/5. And again, Insight has a nice mid and late game power as well.

The 4th tier where I actually had to take on my imaginary glasses, because 15% tenacity is just good, can't argue with that. Legendary Guardian should still be the g-to choice, as you can start your cc chain a million miles away, and your basic role is to get into the fray and endure the beatings. Though even if you are having one of those games, where you have to stick to your adc/apc, because that 20/0/0 Rengar is hunting them, Swiftness still won't top it. Also, Legendary Guardian means +4/4 resistances constantly at bot lane. But this is the one tier where I could see people taking swiftness once in a blue moon, though I won't agree with them. It's still not a meaningful choice, it's just sad to leave Tenacity behind.

And the playstyle defining keystones, all right, that's what we've been waiting for. Forget basic masteries, they are just to fill the void. Here we come, 3 different Leonas at least just from the resolve tree!!
Grasp of Undying: This looks charming, I know you are already counting that 3% of ~3500 as damage sounds cool. It does, actually. Sadly, we don't start with ~3500hp, and while it hurts a bit during the laning phase too, Leona a.) never had problems with lacking early damage b.) landing your skills and cc is how you win the lane, an extra ~50 on hit damage is just luxury. Take ignite if you want a higher kill potential. Sadly, as fun as it could become later in the game, your job will still be to cc the living crap out of everyone and to start (or occasionally disengage) fights. The enemy carries won't die because you hit them in the face for ~200 dmg (after resistances), but because you put them on a plate for your assassins, or your tanky top laner, who actually benefits from this mastery, because unlike you, he has no other obligations other than "be an annoying asshole". Also, it would be hardly playstyle defining for you, because you auto-attack during the off-time anyway, and your build has been HP heavy too, so nothing would really change.
Strength of the ages: No. I mean, it's good, but how on Earth could you pick this over
Bond of Stone: Easiest keystone choice in my entire life. Percent based damage reduction which doesn't suffer from max/current hp damage and works vs. everything (ie. minions, dragon)?! This bonus is doubled when I'm near an ally and I happen to be on a lane with an ally 99% of the tme (damn you afkers!!)??! They also happen to be squishy, and this kestone mastery lets me take away from the damage he would receive, while I'm tanky as fuck since the very beginning??! .... Naaah, which one was the hp based bonus damage keystone mastery again? Totally want that instead.

I guess a good point could be raised, that while BoS just makes everything else a laughing matter, the liferegen masteries are actually a good combination with this one. Which is true. If I could pick all the masteries in one tree, I would definitely invest everything in this tree, because as I just said, BoS+liferegen sounds so damn neat during the early game! But I can't do that, and I'm still forced to choose. The only difference after knowing I'll pick BoS in the end is that I'm not choosing between useless and very good, but good and very good. A prime example why the new way of picking masteries, or rather, the options presented are pitiful. If you pick health regen nstead of a 15% reduction of one of the ost powerful skills (flash+ignite/exhaust) in the game which are accessible since lvl1, than you are probably the person who is happy, that now you won't look at your silver border at the loading screen, but your silver division 3 border instead.

Anyway, we have 12 useless points to spend, so let's get over with it:

Wanderer (5) - (won't change my opinion on Explorer, especially because BoS will probably make you hurt more during the laning phase, so you'll need Toughness even more so)
Secret Stash - was it a hard choice? honestly?
Tier 3 - The one example where Riot hit the nail in the head. Both of these are so damn useless, that it's not really obvious what you should take. I guess if you are one of those people who can even run out of mana with Leona, than pick Meditation, otherwise Merciless sounds like the way to go. Which is terrible to type out, because it's still a ridiculously ineffective mastery for you.
Tier 4 - All right, on a serious note, this is the one and only tier where you can really choose between somewhat meaningful options. As much as I like Bandit, Dangerous Game have its' uses on an all-in support like Leona. Credits where it's due, I guess?

I really don't see how is this an interactive or gamestyle defining mastery system.

Don't want to make another WoT, so a quick rundown on Janna's no-brainer choices:
Wanderer
Secret Stash
Meditation
Bandit
Intelligence
Windspeaker's Blessing (once again, hardest choice in my life)

Recovery
Toughness (I can already see people picking Explorer for that Janna brush-control)
Runic Armor
Insight

Damn. We can even switch Janna out with Nami and we get the same results.You'll need some math for Soraka to know whether you Preservance on her instead of Insight, I guess. Imo it's an easy Preservance, as flash is rather meh on Raka, and her second summoner spell is only secondary to the power of her constant heals.

On November 08 2015 14:06 Ketara wrote:



So, there are a number of things that I think are unfair about your comparisons here, but the main point is that you're not comparing the season 6 tree with the season 5 tree, so it's not really a fair comparison.

In season 5, Leona, like most champions, has little to no variation in masteries. Everybody on probuilds takes 0/9/21, and while I do see some very minor variations in the 21 utility points, most of the variation I think comes down to people not caring enough to do the math to optimize their mastery page for an extremely minor improvement. I think there is a page that is unarguably "correct".


For season 6 though I think you're painting in broad strokes and not really seeing where the possible variation lies. For starters, I don't think you need to go 0/12/18 at all. I think 6/6/18 or 0/18/12 are arguably viable.

The problem here for me is that most of the middle tier of Utility is useless. Bandit is good, but for Leona who doesn't have real mana issues and is a low damage initiator, both Merciless and Meditation are useless.

However, Sorcery and Double-Edged Sword (Feast is useless you're not killing things) are strong. They won't be as strong late game as Bandit. However, Leona's damage early game is threatening and respectable, and Bandit won't do anything early in the game.

So you can easily see how 6/6/18 would be stronger early game, and 0/12/18 would be stronger late game. This means these two pages can be changed based on playstyle, preference, and team comps/strategies.


In fact, if you want a real threatening early game page, you can go 0/18/12, picking up Thunderlords Decree and Precision. These are both strong early game damage masteries. Thunderlords Decree won't scale well when you're not building damage items, but an extra 30 or so damage on both members of the enemy duo in your level 3 engage, plus a bunch of extra flat pen that's strongest early game, gives you a generous amount of additional early game threat.

What you give up is late game tankiness. Both Swiftness and Leg. Guardian are much stronger late game than early game. Bond of Stone is legitimately very good and I don't see a better defensive keystone for a support, this is a totally fair criticism, but it's also better late game than early game. Realistically Thunderlords Decree in an early game fight will do much more damage than Bond of Stone will prevent, and dealing damage is usually better than preventing it early.

So you might call 0/18/12 an early game, slightly cheesy mastery build, but it's a realistic choice and it's a choice that is not present in the season 5 system. A less cheesy early vs. late game choice is the choice between 6/6/18 and 0/12/18.

You have choices.


There's also choice within the defense tree. For Keystones no you don't have much of a choice that could be better. Again, a defensive keystone that did damage would provide a good differentiation from Bond of Stone, as would a difference between Strength of Ages and Undying that was more pronounced. I really think Strength of Ages and Undying are much too similar in comparison with the other trees (I also think Warlords Bloodlust and Ferver of Battle in offense are too similar).

But there's still choices earlier in the tree.

Swiftness vs. Legendary Guardian is not as preference based for Leona as it is for Rammus, but you still might grab Swiftness against a disengage heavy team with lots of slows and low damage output. You say it's not a "meaningful choice" but it absolutely is.

Perserverence vs. Insight is also a meaningful choice that's based on playstyle and preference for the exact reasons that you outlined. Decreased summoner spell cooldown I think is more important in bot lane than other lanes typically, but it's very arguable that it's just not actually all that helpful. People take it in season 5 because there's just no better option at that tier when you go 21 Utility, but I imagine in season 6 while there will be some resistance to not taking it, Perserverence is competitive.

For a bot lane tanky melee support that's one time where HP regen early game is actually kind of a big deal.


There's other things where I think you're right. For Leona in particular Tough Skin, Unyielding and Veterans Scars are obvious. But not every single tier has to provide a meaningful choice for every champion, as long as for every champion there are choices somewhere in the system. If every tier provided choice for every champion then the system would be too complex and it would take up too much of your time and reduce the fun factor.


So, in conclusion:

I DO think your criticism of Keystones for Leona (and tanky supports in general) is fair. There is no choice there unless you want to go cheesy and shoot for 0/18/12 instead. I do think that even if other tiers don't provide obvious choice, every champion should have a choice of keystones.

However, I think while you've made some legitimate criticisms of the new system, you've failed to compare it to the old system, and if you did so you'd find that the new system, while not perfect, is a marked improvement.

On November 08 2015 18:14 Volband wrote:
I thought tier 3 is Meditation vs Merciless. Than I was talking about tier 1.5 I guess.

I don't know why you want me to compare it to previous masteries though. Without the keystone masteries, S6 masteries look very boring and 1-dimensional, S5 beats it out, and with the keystone masteries, S6 wins, but ONLY because of them. It's not because they improved the mastery system, but because they topped it off, so I wouldn't call it a fair comparison.

I don't think (again, making up a number, I think balance comes next) a 25% slow (it can decay, last for 0.5 sec, once again, numbers can be tweaked) would be blatantly overpowered. BoS still gives you 8% damage reduction in fights, while the third one boosts your early game a lot.

I just wish Riot would be as ballsy as they are with some of the marskmen changes, or God forgive me, with dynamic queue. Yes, I love one of them and passionatly hate the other one, but at the very least I can say they dared to pump new blood into the game. The new mastery system has a good basis, but falls flat, aside from a few keystone masteries here and there.

Edit: For example, what if Recovery was 4 hp/5 and Unyielding was 7/8 %? Like actually getting there where you get the feeling of choosing between a strong early and late game mastery, instead of laughable numbers.