Riot Quick Hits for 1-20

Here is some news from Friday the 20th! I hope you are all enjoying streams coming out of the the IntelEM event taking place this weekend in Kiev, Ukraine. Be sure to check out the website for links to streams, brackets, and full event coverage!


1) Status of Shen


While we it was mentioned a few days ago as well, the Shen changes that were missing from last patch are leading lots of ninja players to forums. Guinsoo responded to them by giving lots of juice tidbits about the changes and the philosophy behind them.

[ regarding Feint and over all kit energy issues ]

A good question to answer I think.

The unfortunate answer is that we're not doing much with Feint. While it's a weakness in the set of changes we have, most of the approaches we tried didn't solve the issues anyway (it's hard to make a non-utility spell worth using on an energy character, as opposed to a mana character, because of the distributed cooldown system). It also is a lot more useful on AP Shen than tank Shen because of the high AP ratio and moderate base shield to energy cost ratio. So we are decreasing the energy cost and increasing the raw shield value a little bit at upper ranks. I don't really think this is going to make his Feint a great skill, but it's clearly skill #4 in his kit. So while we have a few small buffs coming to it, I still doubt it will be the focus point for many Shen players.

To solve his energy issues we are flattening and generally reducing his costs, and allowing Shadow Dash to restore more energy for taunting multiple champions.

- Guinsoo, Game Designer, via the official forums.






2) Kayle Getting ANOTHER Remake?


It appears that Riot is a bit unhappy with the last iteration of Kayle's kit and may be moving to totally redo it at some point. You can read a bit more of the discussion ( nothing juicy unfortunately ) by checking out all of Morello's posts.

"The QQer's" is a like when you call someone with a differing political views hyperbolic things like terrorist or commy - demonizing people who think Kayle's kit isn't a a great design undermines your own arguments, not theirs. 

Right now, I'd like to overhaul the entire kit.

- Morello, Lead Champion Designer, via the official forums.






 3) Nashor Tooth is still :(


I think it was worth mentioning that despite the recent Nashor's Tooth  buffs, Morello still believes its a bit underpar. While it isn't anything concrete, might we see more buffs or even a remake in the near future?

 ...I think it's really weak still.

- Morello, Lead Champion Designer, via the official forums.