Updates on Viktor / Shyvana and Akali discussion

Continue reading for an update on Solcrushed's plans for Viktor, Scarizard discussing the pulled PBE Shyvana changes, and join Statikk for some heated Akali discussion.

Update on Viktor
Solcrushed offered up a small update on the status of Viktor's long awaited changes, saying:

"Slight update: Unfortunately not much since there hasn't been too much progress. 

Prototype is finished thanks to the Pony, but we need store-related tech to be able to fully realize some of the things we want to do. Playtesting time has been crunched due to Aatrox and some other characters-that-shall-not-be-named.

We will go into small scale testing soon, hopefully there will be more info to give out in a few days."

Update on Shyvana
 Scarizard commented on the Shyvana changes that, unfortunately, were confirmed earlier to not be in the upcoming 3.8 patch, explaining why he's pumping the breaks on implementing them until he can see just how powerful some of the other upcoming changes are.

"Definitely still on my list - as i said (others have quoted my post in the 3.8 PBE Context Thread), we decided not to put it on live for 3.8, as pretty much all of the other changes buff shyvana in some way (Wits End stealing MR, Jungle respawn rates+, Wriggles buffs). 

So Shyvana won't receive changes just because other things might make her better? Not a chance. We really like the direction all of the shyvana changes have taken - the reasoning is solid and it's working well in playtests. The real issue here is numbers tuning, and how hard it's proven to find where balance lies with all of the other changes thrown in. I'm a huge shyvana fan - i really enjoy running fast, punching things, and of course being a dragon -but instead of tossing everything in the pot together and letting Shy players run wild, holding it back seems much wiser.

After all, what i'd really like to avoid is over-buffing with Shy changes + Jungle changes, then having to tone down her power right after giving her a tune-up. Logged some iteration today and i have to say it's shaping up nicely."

He continued, explaining that the previous 10 fury per hit, a change seen on the PBE, was an error.

"10 Fury per hit was definitely a value error. Shyvana gaining extra fury (based on rank of Dragon's Descent) however is one of the directions we've been testing, with pretty good results."

Akali Discussion
In response to a very well thought out criticism of Akali by our fellow player Sayath, Statikk has returned to brainstorming potential ways to fix and improve Akali on the forums.

"Hey Sayath, 

Once again I'll start with, thanks for the massively detailed and well thought-out analyses.
Unfortunately I do have to be brutally honest here though, Akali certainly isn't in an ideal spot, but to be realistic with you there are a ton of champions who are worse off. 

Champions like Rengar, Heimer, Olaf, Sion, and Alistar for example are all champions I feel are simply in a worse spot than she currently is and should be prioritized as so. This doesn't mean all these champions will receive changes before Akali does since some projects are bigger in scope than others, but it does mean that the team will at least be exploring the needs of those champions first before investing time elsewhere. 

As much as I'd love to just sit down and hack away at her design, Akali is but 1 of our 100+ current champions and it doesn't seem right to give her special focus simply because there is a strong presence on these forums. Once again, I do appreciate the thought and effort being put in here, it's actually very impressive, but all of the above still stands. 

The Shadow Dance turning into a skillshot is quite intriguing (essentially multi-target Lee Sin Q) and seems like a great direction on paper. I do have a few questions though: 

1) Do you think Akali will be able to function without a guaranteed targeted dash? Would other changes to the kit be needed to support this change? 

2) Do you think such radical changes to Shadow Dance (and whatever else we would need to tweak to make this work) is something that will ruin the current feel of Akali and possibly push away current Akali players? Changes like these typically come at a high cost especially when considering that Akali is still a fairly popular champion.

3) What do you think of this version of her R that is similar to what you suggested except when she dashes to a marked target it only removes the mark on THAT target (note: this would potentially have to be coupled with other change such as now being cooldown based instead of ammo and the cooldown resetting on kills/assists)? I think there's some interesting possibilities here."

He continued, revealing why a past PBE changes reducing the CD and energy cost of Akali's W didn't go through to live.

"Well, sure, we nerfed Akali. Once again though, we can agree to disagree on the part where she didn't need a change. The team felt pretty strongly that she was an issue.

As far as the W buff, we didn't feel like it appropriately addressed the actual issue that has been identified here (increasing her skill ceiling / counterplay depth). The cool part of that change was basically giving Akali more opportunities to use her W in interesting ways but I'm not sure it would have been used that way in practical settings. I think a more solid change would be reduce both the CD and the duration (keep similar total uptime) which would basically allow her to relocate her W more often. It might be extremely frustrating to play against though. Thoughts?"

Statikk powered on, this time discussing what it would take to put together new, test versions of Akali's abilities IF that was something that was on the table. He also addressed the previously mentioned intent to give Twilight Shroud some form of movement speed.

"It'd probably only take me about an hour or 2 to script out this version of Shadow Dance. Unfortunately, that's one of the least time consuming parts of developing these things. After initial analysis, planning, and implementation we would still need to allot times to playtests and feedback/iteration cycles until we were confident in the direction. After that comes one of the most time consuming parts which is allocating art resources. For this change alone, we would need a few VFX particles (ex: her shadow missile, a debuff marker) and sound effects to go along with that. We would then need to do feedback/iteration cycles upon that to solidify the art direction and simultaneously do balance iterations throughout. 

There's a lot of development that you guys never see that happens before release. Changing even just 1 spell has a huge time commitment involved with it across several teams. 

Master Yi, Rengar, and Shyvana are all melee champions that have core issues which we are currently in the midst of tackling. As soon as we get free time, we would like to tackle other melee champions such as Akali, Fiora, and Talon to see what we need to do there, but I think those champions will benefit a lot from the current experimentation and learning we are doing with the current set of melee champions.

I think adding Movement Speed to W is still an interesting option, but we need to weigh such a change against the vast other possibilities. If we allot more power there then it leaves us with less room to go as extreme with future changes (for example the skillshot R). Thoughts?"

Again he continued the discussion, this time addressing a summoner suggestion to move Akali to a charge based system for her Twilight Shroud.

"Yeah I was just thinking about that. The only problem is now we're giving her the possibility of having 2 Shrouds out at the same time, which changes things quite a bit (unless we're saying she has 2 ammo charges but cannot use them simultaneously). Other than that, I think that would be the best solution to the problem. Do note though that I think this would be a substantial increase to her power level. 

As far as the skillshot R goes, yes, I spoke with Xypherous and it is possible to do context sensitive targeting (essentially if I'm mousing over a target with the mark debuff dash to it, otherwise fire a shadow in that direction and consume an ammo).

The 2nd part about basically having marks associate / clear based upon their parent shadows is a bit more tricky but is something I do believe is possible (I may have to summon the dark lord Xelnath to help me here). I do wonder though if this will cause tons of confusion in terms of how to represent which shadow marks belong to which shadows. The idea of multiple shadows being able to be sent out is extremely intriguing but figuring out how it exactly should work and how it should be visually manifested seems a bit messy. An interesting problem."

He wrapped things up by reflecting on this on-going Akali balance issue by saying:

"I think it's natural to be frustrated by what we do, so I can't really blame you guys. I've learned to have a much thicker skin having worked on this team for a couple of years now. 

I honestly question whether Akali isn't "viable" right now. It really depends on your definition of the word "viable." I think there are tons of players outside of this thread that have different opinions than you guys do and believe that she really isn't even in a bad spot. 

You simply can't just use winrate to determine whether a champion is viable or not. Pre-nerf Olaf was consistently a ~45% win rate champion when he was completely dominating the competitive scene in every single region. Do you think Lee Sin is not viable? He shares a very similar win rate to Akali. Win rate alone cannot determine the viability of a champion.

I also don't agree that Eve is underpowered. She has shown to be still a powerful champion in the right hands and is not an uncommon pick in competitive play or high Elo ranked solo queue."