Red Post Collection:"March 32nd" Party, 3/25 Patch Update, Dark Horses Jungle Gragas, Bard Buffs, Meddler on GP & Shaco, Debonair Galio in 5.7, & more

[UPDATE: Added Riot's preview post for the upcoming April Fools' skins!]

This morning's red post collection includes an invitation to Riot's party on "March 32nd" and previews of the upcoming April Fools' skins, a look the March 25th patch update to fix bugs with skins and item inventory, a Dark Horses article on Jungle Gragas, Meddler mentioning more Bard buffs are on the way and commenting on Gangplank and Shaco reworks, a look at the new Riot Support  help videos, and KateyKhaos confirming Debonair Galio will be going to live in patch 5.7.
Continue reading for more information!



Table of Contents


You’re cordially invited to a soirée!

With "March 32nd" coming up soon, Riot has posted up an invitation to a fancy party with several upcoming skins!
"For the past year, you've reminded us over and over (and over) of something we once released. You bombarded everything from Twitter to telegraphs and overwhelmed computer repair shops with shattered caps lock keys. 
The time has come. This March 32nd, we're releasing a suite of silly skins. Dress up with Nasus, Udyr, Soraka, and Nami for a party of the ages! 
Archduke Nasus 
One can survive everything nowadays, except a shoddy tailor.
Definitely Not Udyr 
Turtle, tiger, or bear… oh my! Parrot!
Order of the Banana Soraka 
The enlightened embrace banana hats. 
Urf the Nami-tee 
Even sea cows can be stylish."
Can you spy the Surprise Party Amumu in each comic?

March 25th Patch Update

The official 5.6 patch notes have been updated to reflect a hotfix that went out on March 25th!
"Skin Bugfixes
  • RE-ENABLED - A number of skins have been re-enabled following a few visual bugfixes
Item Inventory
  • COOLDOWN COUNTDOWN - Fixed a few cases where the cooldowns of various item effects weren't being displayed over their inventory slots"

Dark Horses - Jungle Gragas

Next up we have Luqi with a Dark Horses article looking at the rabble rousing Jungle Gragas!
"We're used to seeing Gragas dominate the mid lane and occasionally go top, but recently we've also seen him roaming around the jungle. Here's how to add a little more rabble-rousing to your gank routine.

Carousing from camp to camp

Jungle Gragas advantages 
Gragas's abilities are surprisingly useful in the jungle. You can use Gragas's E (Body Slam) to dash through walls and jump from camp to camp faster, and it applies area-of-effect damage and stun to help you quickly clear camps without taking tons of damage. His Barrel Roll (Q) reduces enemy movement speed and applies area-of-effect damage, giving you good camp clear rates. Also, Drunken Rage (W) was changed in Patch 5.5 to deal more damage to neutral. The icing on his cake is the Explosive Cask (R) which is great for both setting up teamfights and ganking solo lanes. 
Gank early, gank often 
Gragas is very mobile (for a guy his size, anyway), which means that when he's in the jungle, he's got plenty of opportunities to gank. Before level 6, he already has a stun and a slow. From level 6 onwards, his ult gives you the chance to break hard-to-gank positions and even open up tower dive opportunities. Plan on your top lane ganks to be more focused on pushing out the enemy laner compared to his bot lane ganks, where he can be more aggressive and engaging with Explosive Cask.
Can build to take damage - or dish it out 
Gragas will always have a big impact on teamfights due to his abilities, which means that you can build him to tank damage and still stay relevant later in the game. However, Gragas' abilities also have nice AP ratios, so you can choose to build offensive items and make him more fragile, but his cask won't be the only thing exploding here and there.

Go home, Gragas

Watch out for mana usage, aggressive enemy junglers 
Gragas needs a strong early game in order to stay relevant later on, and his impact will be most noticeable after you build Cooldown Reduction and Ability Power items. Also, you'll need to be conservative with your mana usage; Gragas spends a lot of mana to clear camps, and if you don't save some, you won't have an effective presence in lanes. This dependence also makes it hard for him to deal with aggressive junglers like Lee Sin or Rek'Sai, who can make your life miserable by contesting your camps and starting duels you'll have a hard time winning.
Needs a good initiator 
Gragas relies a lot on his teammates to make plays by tackling out-of-position enemies or forcing fights. Lissandra, Maokai, Leona and Blitzcrank are excellent teammates for our keg-draining friend. 
Powerful tools take practice 
Gragas has a lot of useful tools, but they've got pretty steep learning curves. A poorly-placed ult can help the enemy tanks dive your own backline. Hitting your own barrels can also be hard, and it takes a while to learn exactly when to use your Body Slam to get in (or out) of a fight. Always keep your mana at an average level so you can gank or move around the jungle if necessary.
You can add Gragas to your champion pool for 553 RP (30% off), and his Superfan Gragas skin for 525 RP (30% off) from March 26 until 23:59 PDT March 30."
As mentioned at the end there, Superfan Gragas and Gragas are on sale through March 30th!

More Bard Buffs on the way

Meddler chimed in on the boards to mention that Bard will tentatively be receiving more buffs in upcoming PBE patches, aimed towards base stats, mana restore on chimes, and more
"We'd like to keep Bard's ult damage free, since putting a damaging effect on it leads to some conflicting uses and muddies it's purpose (keep dudes out of a fight, whether allies safe or enemies unable to contribute).

We definitely agree Bard needs some buffs though. We held off from doing substantially changes in patch 5.6 since by the time the patch changes locked Bard had only been out for 6 days. That's not enough time to see how people adapt to and learn a new champ, and we've sometimes buffed champs unnecessarily in the past when we've reacted too quickly, so we decided to give it a bit more time. At this point we're confident he does need some more significant buffs though, and have a better idea of where to test out more power. You should see some buffs on the PBE in the next couple of days at a guess, with a focus on base stats, amount of mana restored per chime and faster Meep respawn. We're also planning to test a little tweaking to Chime spawn locations, though that's more speculative and might be more of a feel change than a power one, not sure yet."

Meddler on Gangplank & Shaco Reworks

When asked about the fate of Riot Gmang's previously discussed Gangplank ability rework, Meddler noted:
"Still planned and the gameplay changes are showing promise. Won't be for quite a while though, there'll be a number of other reworks first."
He continued:
"Quote
Just curious; what sort of pacing can we expect for these reworks? One every month? Every 3 months? 6? 
Mostly I'm wondering if it's worth getting my hopes up for a rework yet. As I understand it, Poppy is the next large-scale project, and might be released by the end of the year. But will there be one or two smaller reworks put out before then?
At any point in time we'll have multiple reworks underway. Some of those will be really large scale like Poppy (Sion level of work/change). Most will be smaller, ranging in size from fairly small adjustments like Viktor to moderate sized ones like Heimer. 
For this year that means you'll almost certainly see multiple other gameplay reworks before Poppy this year. Expectation is that she'll be the next really big one though."
When asked about Shaco rework discussed quite some time ago, Meddler explained:
"The Shaco rework we talked about a little a while back got shelved. It had some interesting ideas in it, but after testing we weren't confident it was the right solution in terms of fixing problems while maintaining Shaco's identity. Possible we'll give it another shot at some point, no immediate plans to though."
He continued:
"Some reworks are need driven (Sion for example). We also try out some opportunistic reworks in testing, if we've got strong ideas for ways to make a champion better despite them not being one of our highest priorities. The Shaco rework was an example of that, with a bunch of stuff that sounded hopeful on paper. When tested in game though, we weren't as happy as we needed to be to ship changes. Some of Shaco's issues were addressed, there was a fair bit of 'this doesn't feel like Shaco anymore' feedback as well, plus some of the new spells didn't hit the mark satisfaction wise."

Darius R Changes still planned

When asked if they still plan to make the Darius R changes removed late in the 5.6 PBE cycle, Meddler noted:
"We're still planning to make that change. I'd imagine that'll be in 5.7, though can't guarantee that yet of course."
He continued:
"Should be a fairly quick job to get it in and test it. When it gets done will depend on what other work's also on the people implementing and testing the change though."
For a quick refresher, these plans are to tentatively make Darius' rank 3 R reset completely on kill  (rather than allowing a recast for 20 seconds) and refund a significant portion  of the mana cost on kill.

Context on 5.6 Sejuani and PBE Cinderhulk nerfs

Meddler also popped up on the boards to comment on the Sejuani nerfs in 5.6 and the tentative Enchantment: Cinderhulk nerfs that are currently testing on the PBE:

"We felt Sej was clearly too strong in 5.5, relative to other tank junglers in particular, and chose to remove some power from her as a result. We kept the 5.6 nerfs to her relatively minor since the state of the game's still adapting to Cinderhulk's introduction and she hasn't been a consistent, long running problem (though was definitely strong pre 5.5). Having had a bit more time now to assess Cinderhulk we also feel it's a little bit too strong. We're glad to see tanks being successful with it, but feel it's a bit too strong compared to other options. Current thinking is to drop it from 350 to 300 HP as a result."

Missing Rengar VO Lines

With Rengar's Bonetooth Necklace now a buff instead of a trinket (and previously an item), Rengar is missing a few of the voiceover lines he once has when purchasing BTN.

"Each trophy, a victory"
"Remember every kill"

When asked  on reddit about getting these lines back in some form, Riot Scruffy replied:
"I'll def look into this, those are some of the best lines."

Riot Support Help Videos

SquidmoX has put up a post regarding the newly launched Riot Support help videos & youtube channel:
"Hi everyone! 
Riot Games Support has been busy the last couple months working on a new project to help players troubleshoot problems with League of Legends. Today we're happy to release our first set of help videos! 
This set of videos specifically focuses on one of the more prevalent causes for frustration: connection troubleshooting. Let’s be honest, wi-fi sucks, port forwarding sucks, and hell even accessing your router sucks. With these videos we hope to make complicated things easy. Our goal is for players to be able to solve a problem in an easy-to-follow and visual way, and also learn more about why problems are occurring in the first place. 
You can watch these videos on the new Riot Support YouTube Channel and we'll also be embedding these videos in the support site soon. 
In the near future more videos will be added to tackle a variety of problems, such as FPS optimization and crash prevention. We’re also working right now translating the videos into other languages, so that everyone can benefit from them. 
We’ll hang out in this thread for a while, share your thoughts and feedback. :D
P.S. We know that not every issue is your fault, sometimes it's on Riot's end. That's why we have the Server Status page. When stuff breaks on our end, we hustle to fix it as quickly as possible. For everything else we want you to have the tools and help to fix your problem as quickly and easily as possible."
Here are the five videos up on the new channel: 

Debonair Galio to be released in 5.7

After a two cycle stay on the PBE, KateyKhaos has confirmed on twitter that Debonair Galio is set to be released to live in patch 5.7:
"Debonair Galio will be coming out next patch! :]"

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