Red Post Collection: Karthus Champion Spotlight, Scarizard on Ichors, IronStylus on Yordles

Posted on at 1:12 AM by Moobeat
Tonight's red post collection features an updated champion spotlight for Karthus, IronStylus chatting about yordles and Exterminator Twitch, Scarizard on Twisted Treeline's Ichors, and more!
Continue reading for more information!



Champion Spotlight :Karthus, the Deathsinger

Following his recent visual updateKarthus has received a brand new champion spotlight!

"Learn to defy death and obliterate your enemies near and far in the Karthus Champion Spotlight. 
Karthus is a powerful and persistent solo lane mage. Whittle your enemies down with repeated casts of Lay Waste, using smart positioning and timing to deal extra damage to lone targets. When your jungler comes in to gank, throw down Wall of Pain and activate Defile to deal huge area of effect damage to your slowed enemies. Even if they get away, they’re still not safe from Requiem, a colossal global ultimate that devastates every enemy champion on the map. 
Learn more about Karthus here."

Yordles

When asked how the team's plans to unify and solidify yordle appearances are coming along, IronStylus shared that Heimer was a good example of their new direction and there are a few more in concept:
"Howdy. 
So as you know, Heimer was sort of our new flagship for yordles, male yordles at least. He was built off of the framework of such characters as Ziggs and Lulu. 
Now that he's out, we're ideating on several different yordle designs, revisiting a lot of our furry/semi-furry friends which need love. What's ended up happening is not so much a grand exploration or style guide creation, though some artists have chosen to take on entire swaths of general yordle anatomy/shape/character exploration. Most of what we on ChampUp have been doing is adhering generally to what we've set forth in Heimer, what we've seen other internal collaborators make, and then let the individual concept artist working on a design execute with their own discretion with heavy feedback from the team. The results have yielded really good concepts for a number of characters. Currently we have two yordles in the concept phase which are candidate for production. These concepts still represent the very beginning of our production pipeline, and any such concepts won't be contributing to a VU or otherwise for some time. However, my hope is that by the end of the year we'll see at least one more yordle make it out. My hope is that it'll a female yordle ;) 
With that said, no promises, no certainties, but that's what preference is. 
My current priority is the building of a concept "front-log" which will supply our production pipeline with approved character concepts in the form of a bucket which characters can be easily plugged into the production pipeline without a problem. All of the above characters in the OP qualify for a VU, some higher priority than others. 
Hope that helps! Sorry for a certain amount of ambiguity."
When asked how Lulu fits into all this, IronStylus commented:
"She's in generally good shape, but she's going to start to look like she has problems the further we go with other yordle VU's. She has more anatomy than most, but right now she's pretty much all head. Though Heimer's head is gigantic, I'd attribute that to him being a brainiac. 
That said, she's not nearly anywhere near the top of the priority list."

What's up with Exterimnator Twitch?

In a thread asking about the status of the Exterimnator Twitch concept that was live art demoed earlier this year at PAX East, IronStylus commented:
"Story time. When we were doing the twitch VU, I was actually entering into 3D for the first time. So, part of what I did was to take Grumpy Monkey's sculpt of Twitch and make a costume. I decided to revisit exterminator twitch and did a high-rez sculpt of him. 
We used some of those assets to prime our demo for PAX East. So, currently he has a zbrush model hanging around. Right now I don't know plans or timelines for the skin, but we think it's a great idea. It won't end up being my call, but my hope is that the skin sees the light of day, but I doubt it'll be any time in the immediate future. 
Here's hoping!"

Scarizard on Twisted Treeline Ichors

Our friendly neighborhood Scarizard swung on to the forums to ask players what they think of the Ichors, the two Twisted Treeline exclusive items that function as even more powerful versions of the Elixirs on Summoner's Rift.
"Hey y'all - 
I'd like to make some balance changes to Ichors on TT. I have a few ideas, but before i pull any triggers i want to hear from the community what you particularly like about them. 
I know this question is kinda vague, but i'd like to understand what you guys want ichors to do, and if you find them at all interesting.

I'll hold off from posting my thoughts for a bit and give y'all some time to discuss."
He continued:
"My general thinking is that Ichors, while kind of imba atm, are important distinctions from Summoner's Rift. (opinion: i think by definition, all 'alternate maps' items should be treated as a cool lever that can be used to help identify the map they're on - feel me?) 
We could easily 'nerf' them by just removing them and replacing them with Elixirs, but it's a clear thread through my lurking that TT players like their map being 'SR Kinda' and not just SR Lite. 
I'll be pretty up-front and say i'm interested in removing the Resource Regen from Blue Ichor altogether. Structure DMG (while probably OP) is at least interesting to me in that it calls for a specific action once you take it - Resource Regen is like 'I wanna fight...maybe? Maybe i just want to stall forever.' When the map already has a global chalice aura, it gets difficult for me to justify Ziggs Potion as an item. 
tl;dr 
-gauging if TT players enjoy the secondary 'map-only' effects ichors give or if they just want reg. elixirs 
-looking to replace blue ichor's effect with something more defining/actionable, and hopefully more balanceable than stallfest ZiggsPot 
-bonus round: if players feel RagePot is too unsatisfying, Structure DMG could become something else 
that's kind of where my head's at atm - this is purely ideation phase, so don't worry - not the end of the world! would like to get Ichor changes relatively soon into an upcoming patch tho, so speak up if y'all got thoughts!"


Number of Bans

In response to a thread asking for a fourth ban for each team in ranked, Riot Moonleaf commented:
There are many different philosophies of banning 
- What has the highest win ratio ATM 
- What is perceived to be OP 
- What is the FotM 
- What is difficult to play against 
- What popular streamers ban/play well with 
- Banning out a player by removing 3 common picks for a role and firstpicking the fourth 
Some philosophies even contradict each other, eg banning Akali due to perception would make no sense for someone who looks at her 50% win ratio. 
For some of those mentalities a fourth ban could be useful, for others it would be abusable (eg the last one) while others won't benefit even though they might think they do (eg FotM). For that reason it's impossible to please everyone. 
Also, adding a 4th ban would hurt the players with smaller champion pools (eg Bronze, Silver).
In general I think that the number of bans at the moment is a good middle ground.
He continued:
"We want a healthy LCS, but we also want a healthy ranked play in all tiers. These two are not mutually exclusive.

I'm not disagreeing with the 4th ban, there might be a 4th ban for each team in the future. But I'd like that change to happen in order to promote gameplay instead of hampering it."

KR Summoner's Rift Showmatch

 Early Friday morning on the Korean Summoner's Rift livestream, members of Samsung and Najin participated in an show match to show off the new map!

Check out the VOD for the full 5v5 match:

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