Red Post Collection: Preseason Begins, Preseason Spotlight, Patch Rundown Preseason 2015, and more!

Posted on at 3:31 AM by Moobeat
Following a busy day of both live and PBE patches, we also have a gigantic red post collection! Tonight's collection features a ton of information on the 2015 Preseason changes, including a dedicated hub, a preseason spotlight, and a two part patch rundown - all of which will get you up to speed with patch 4.20's wealth of changes. You will also find Meddler discussing Taric's future updates and tentative Yasuo buffs,  Riot Reinboom commenting on the removal of Executioner's Calling in 4.20, and more!
Continue reading for more information!



Table of Contents


Preseason Is Here

With patch 4.20 heading out to live, we are officially moving into preseason 2015 and looking at some major changes for the game!

Luckily, Riot has prepared a dedicated preseason hub that is chock-full of in formation to catach you up to date on the latest preseason jungle, objective, and item changes!
"The preseason has always been our annual opportunity to push League of Legends in new and healthy directions for the coming year. So whether it's an updated map with brand new visuals, or broad changes to objectives and the jungle, you can always expect us to be refining, polishing, and evolving the League experience. 
Our big goal in 2015 is to encourage more strategic diversity. This touches a lot of different areas but it all boils down to giving you more paths to victory so your in-game decisions matter just as much as the champions you pick. Where do I go on the map? How do I respond when the enemy team takes an objective? What can I do now that we've secured dragon? All of these things currently do matter, but we feel there's always room for improvement. 
If you're looking for a full rundown of all of our changes with in-depth context from the team, check out the full 2015 preseason patch notes!"

Check out the dedicated Preseason 2015 hub for more better look at:
  • General - Overview and a look at the  stats per level and kill reward changes.
  • Jungle - Jungle items, Enchantments, Smite, and more.
  • The focus of this preseason jungle is to let players pick the champions they love while flexibly fitting them into their team's strategies. The jungle position is most rewarding and healthy when the strategic decisions of the jungler are as important as their mechanical play. In this way, we want to highlight the unique strengths of each jungler by providing different optimization paths and more unique ways to interact with the jungle.
  • Objectives - including changes to Dragon, Baron, Towers
  • By creating uniquely incomparable rewards for different objectives, we'll be able to differentiate each game based on what each team achieves in that particular game. A team who controls map objectives and wins by mounting pressure should see victory in a different way than a team who, for example, fast-pushes their way to a win."
  • Items - including changes to old items, new elixirs,  and more!
  • "When we looked at all of the high-level strategic opportunities in League, we wanted to create and retune items with a specific focus on macro-level value over micro-level contributions. If more teams can change course in a game through item purchases, rather than relying purely on champion composition, we hope to provide the right tools for strategic innovation to prosper in League of Legends."

Not the reading type?  Lucky for you we also have the Preseason spotlight, which offers a general overview of the changes headed out way in preseason!

"The preseason is our annual opportunity to push League of Legends in new and healthy directions, and we’re focused on strategic diversity this year. For an overview of how we’re shaking things up across the Rift, check out the Preseason Spotlight! 
If you’re looking for a deeper dive into the hows and whys of what is changing, check out our series of dev blogs or the new preseason hub!

For even more discussion, join Scarizard and friends in the Patch Rundown for Preseason 2015!

Part One covers the strategic diversity and objectives with Ghostcrawler and Jatt

Part Two covers the jungle changes with Scarizard, Kobe, Snoopeh, Fearless

Taric up for a Gameplay and Visual update

In a boards thread asking if Taric's eventual update will be like Karthus and be mostly cosmetic or like Sion and focus on both his gameplay and visuals, IronStylus replied:
"Sion level.

BOOM!"
Meddler elaborated on this, explaining:
"Whenever we do work on Taric we'll likely make some substantial changes to his gameplay as well as his visuals. There's a lot of cool stuff his paladin ish sort of theme could support that at present isn't being done too well (his ult for example's really powerful, but pretty flat, both in terms of ability to make skilled plays and in terms of appreciability of power)."

Tentative Yasuo buffs testing for 4.21

In a thread discussing Yasuo's dropping win rates after nerfs a few patches back, Meddler stepped in to comment they are currently testing some small and tentative buffs for Yasuo in the next patch:
"We're testing some tentative buffs at the moment for patch 4.21 on the theory that we did indeed hit him a bit too hard. What we're currently trying is +5 movement speed (reverting half of the previous nerf) and changing Q's CD to 4s flat (rather than 5s to 4s by spell rank)."

RIP Executioner's Calling

As mentioned in the 4.20 patch notes, Executioner's Calling has been removed from the game as part of the preseason changes.

In a thread discussing the removal of the item and options for limiting enemy healing vis itemization, Riot Reinboom commented:
"For the far and vast majority of games, melee users would take the same actions they had been taking before.

Executioner's Calling was not attractive as an item, and there's quite a few things that failed with it.

One of the key strengths with offensive items is in the act of constructing a build. "I can now kill you in this way". Executioner's Calling kind of fell flat here in that it pulled more in the direction of "I [i]have[/i] to do this." rather than "I [i]want[/i] to do this."
It pushed more in to the realms of what a defensive item feels like, you are answering a build. You are being directed by the choices of your opponent.

Now obviously there are items that do this as well (Last Whisper, Void Staff, defensive items et all), but all of those are competing for slots and there's limited room available to make build decisions versus reactive decisions.

Which pulls in to the second problem there was with Executioner's Calling. There wasn't a strong point where we could make it feel like it was worth it for the slot it took.

The item did serve an important function though, you're right. When we have more time to address healing and the interaction with healing, we may very well revisit the item and morph it into something new (or... potentially something new entirely to make it not needed at all). Hopefully while also solving the prior issues with it and making it actually exciting to purchase for more players."

Blood Moon Elise Colors

A new Blood Moon Elise skin was added to the PBE in the latest update, and a few summoners have popped on to the PBE boards to ask why the skin is more pink instead of red. In response, Riot KateyKhaos explained:
"Her base uses a lot of red, so if we used red particles here, it would have kind of been a repeat of her base - and of course - we didn't want to do that! As for the mask in her human form, she has one! It's similar to Blood Moon Akali, where it's flipped up, and she's wearing it on her head."

More Texture Rebalances in 4.21

Ququroon also tweeted that we'll see another set of texture rebalances on the PBE soon!
"There's a few new Texture Rebalances due for 4.21, but they won't be in until later this week or early next week. Enjoy the Skins/Preseason!"

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