Red Post Collection: Lee Sin Retune, Team Builder Live-Beta Resuming Early Next Week, Summoner icons on forums, and more!

Posted on at 6:31 PM by Moobeat
Tonight's red post collection features Riot Chun with context and a tentative change list for the Lee Sin retune that's headed to the PBE, Lyte commenting the next leg ( NA and BR ) of the Team Builder two day live-beta will likely start up early next week, Riot Scruffy with an update on the WIP Rengar rework, and Krylhos with the announcement that summoner icons now show up on the League of Legends forums!
Continue reading for more information!

Let's Talk About Lee Sin Retune

Riot Chun has posted up a thread featuring context and a tentative change lists on the Lee Sin changes, that will soon be hitting the PBE for testing:
"Hey all, 
As some of you may have heard, there is a Lee Sin retune going on and I’m currently working on it. I just wanted to tell you about some of our planned changes before they hit the PBE (so we can talk about why we’re making the changes). 
Our specific goal with Lee Sin is to solve the following problems as we see them:
  1. The ranged melee tanky-DPS assassin mage tank-support jungler Lee Sin has the full kit to single-handedly dominate early to mid game. We like that he’s strong here, but he’s so overwhelming at times that it makes him go from someone who needs to be consistently skilled to make big plays to someone who wins certain phases of the game with the safety of his high base stats.
  2. Lee Sin falls off really hard late game, so this puts even more pressure on him to win (or snowball his entire team) before that happens. There are some champions who follow this power curve, but none as extreme as Lee Sin (maybe pre-rework Garen). Letting Lee only ‘play’ half the game (in an unbalanced way) so he doesn’t become useless in the other half is really unhealthy (for both Lee and his opponents).
Now let me walk you through all the changes (note: THESE ARE NOT FINALIZED. We’re still working on them!): 
Flurry 
This is the core change for Lee Sin’s late game power level. The huge attack speed buff at later levels means Lee Sin can deal a lot of sustained damage in team fights without relying so completely on his ability damage. 
• Attack Speed bonus increased to 40/60/80/100% (at levels 1/6/11/16) from 40% at all levels 
Sonic Wave 
This is actually a small early game power shift (we focused more on Tempest, so see that below). Something important to note – it seems like a huge nerf to Lee Sin’s damage, but it’s really only a 10 damage nerf at level 1 (with the right runes / masteries) because it scales with total AD and not bonus AD. Changing the ratio to total AD means Lee Sin will snowball less when he’s far ahead while also being able to still deal some damage when he’s really behind. At mid game this is actually a damage buff if he’s ranking up Sonic Wave. 
• Damage changed to 15/35/55/75/95 (+0.5/0.6/0.7/0.8/0.9 Total AD) from 50/80/110/140/170 (+0.9 Bonus AD) 
Resonating Strike 
The 8% missing health change doesn’t really work on tanks (which is originally what we designed it for), even if it seems to be built as an HP shredding ability. This change just makes it clear that you should use Sonic Wave / Resonating Strike when you want more damage and makes its use less confusing. 
• Damage changed to 15/35/55/75/95 (+0.5/0.6/0.7/0.8/0.9 Total AD) from 50/80/110/140/170 (+0.9 Bonus AD)
• Now deals up to 50% bonus damage (150% total damage) based on the target’s missing Health instead of 8% of the target’s missing Health 
Safeguard 
We had a big discussion on this topic! I’ll go deeper on this later on but, for now, I’ll just throw out some high level thoughts: ward hopping isn’t something we saw coming in League, but when we did we thought it was really cool and had fun gameplay attached to it. Still, it gives Lee Sin a lot of free mobility (which can be really frustrating, especially because wards are invisible and he can basically set up a “safety net” of wards in the jungle to hop around), and we wanted to reduce a little of that frustration. There’s also the problem with Lee using his defensive movement ability just to get in position for his offensive movement ability (Sonic Wave), and he wasn’t really paying a cost for doing it (unlike Katarina or Jax who have to give up a damaging ability and can only move once). Anyway, we wanted to increase the cost of using Safeguard offensively for more tradeoffs in when Lee can use it. 
• Cost increased to 100 from 50
• Cost is now reduced by 50% if cast on an allied champion (including self) 
Tempest 
With the late game power buff on Flurry, we needed to reduce some damage somewhere, and Tempest’s high utility was where we looked. These numbers might still be too high, but the general idea is that if you level up Tempest while building tanky on Lee Sin, the damage difference won’t be really big. If you build lots of AD on Lee Sin, you’ll definitely see less damage on Tempest (which we made up for in Flurry). 
• Damage changed to 25/50/75/10/125 (+0.6 total AD) from 60/95/130/165/200 (+1.0 Bonus AD)
• Now deals physical damage instead of magic 
Cripple 
This debuff used to update only once every 1 second, so it was a long and very powerful slow. We made it a little more gradual and fixed a bug where it used to not work well with Tenacity (as in it was affecting them a little too much). 
Dragon’s Rage 
While this is a significant damage nerf on the first part of Dragon’s Rage, we really wanted to separate its use in utility versus damage. If you’re using Dragon’s Rage to kick a high-value target to your team, you should be giving something up like the AoE-damage and crowd control utility. If you decide to kick someone into the enemy team, you’ll get more rewards through the knockup and high damage (it doesn’t have diminishing returns per target hit).In regards of the damage nerf, Dragon Rage’s old high values combined with the Flurry buffs would make him insane in duels, so we had to reduce that power. I can’t stress how much the new Flurry helps Lee Sin’s damage at late game! 
• Damage changed to 50/150/250 (+0.75/0.875/1.0 Total AD) from 200/400/600 (+2.0 Bonus AD)
• For each enemies target collide with would make target take 25/75/125 (+0.375/0.4375/0.5 Total AD) extra damage"

Team Builder Two Day Live-Beta Update

Lyte dropped off a few comments on how the Team Builder's two day live-beta is going, mentioning it the next two regions will likely start up next week:
"EUW and TR betas are finishing up, but we're going to take a mini-break and assess all the data we have so far (from EUW, EUNE, TR, RU). We'll most likely start-up the Live Beta again early next week, and next up are NA and BR."
He continued, briefly touching on how Team Builder interacts with matchmaking:
"Players don't have a new MMR in Team Builder--it in fact does seed from your Normal MMR.

In Team Builder, there's a lot of additional smarter matchmaking features that we're testing, so there will be some number of unbalanced matches in Live Beta as we test these features. This won't be an issue when we launch the feature permanently, but we had to collect the data during the Live Beta."

[ Continued ] Rengar Rework Strikes Back

Riot Scruffy has again returned to the forums to offer up an update on the Rengar rework that is currently in development internally.
"A few more interesting updates, we're really starting to narrow down the changes to the last few things we are focusing on. 
-The movement speed coming out of ult now starts higher and decays over the buff duration, this really gives the impactful burst of speed that his ult needed.

-E now gives Rengar a movement speed boost towards the target hit by bola - this gives him a bit more stickiness because he needs more time on target, and it also creates a decision point when using E. "Should I E when I am on top of the target or wait until they are farther away to get the slow?" 
-The unique trinket active was just not proving very useful and was also creating some confusion because of the amount of mechanics added. People generally just wanted a ward or sweeper. We changed bonetooth back to yellow, red, and blue versions. (you keep stacks if you swap types mid game) 
-Other than this, Riot Jag and I have been hammering away at damage, cooldown, defenses and lots of number tuning.

-Scruffy"
He continued:
"Quote:

Excuse me, sir, but is this in ADDITION to the slow OR replacing it? A bola that doesn't slow strikes me as very, very odd.
It's in addition, though we lowered the slow values by 10% to compensate for the added power."

Riot Jag also chimed in, explaining the roles he's being tuned for:
"Slow down! (I'll stop doing that now)

We're still testing him in both jungle and top lane. He's probably more optimized for top lane in his current form, but he still has very potent post-6 ganks from the jungle. I think he needs to set up a little better with the teammates he is ganking for compared to live Rengar, but he's probably better when he has more space to work with since can get multiple Bolas off (including two empowered casts)."

If you'd like to learn more about these WIP Rengar changes, check out Riot Scruffy's original change list or catch up on the rest of the discussion in these red post collections: check: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 .

Summoner Icons Now Available on Forums

Here's Krylhos with an announcement that your summoner icons are now visible on the official League forums!
"Greetings summoners, 
As you've likely noticed, Summoner icons have arrived on the forums! Begone question marks!
As you may know, at Riot we participate in a periodic hackathon known as Thunderdome. During the latest Thunderdome, a couple of us did some tinkering to make your in-client summoner icon accessible on the web. This service opened up the possibility of displaying your summoner icons within the vBulletin forums. 
But wait, there's more! This service also provides you with a url you can use to load your summoner icon on external avatar services. 
Here's how it works: use your region and summoner name as a part of the following link.http://avatar.leagueoflegends.com/{region}/{summoner name}.png 
Here's an example: http://avatar.leagueoflegends.com/na/Krylhos.png 
Alternatively, simply right click your summoner icon on one of your posts and select "Copy image url."
A couple notes:
  • This service will automatically update as you change your icon in-client
  • Allow up to an hour for changes to show up on the web
  • This service will not affect any pre-existing avatars (i.e. Rioters / Wrenchmen)
Why didn't something like this come out sooner? We didn't want to sacrifice the already-shaky stability of vBulletin. As our tech continued to evolve though, new services became available that allowed this specific feature to be developed without putting the forums at risk. 
Let us know if you have any issues or questions. Thanks!"

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