Red Post Collection: Honor Explained, Runes Reforged: Picking Your Playstyle, Riven vs Yasuo, and more!

Today's red post collection includes a new dev blog with more info on upcoming Runes Reforged changes, a brief video overview for the upcoming Honor System update, the data behind Yasuo vs Riven, and more!
Continue reading for more information!




Table of Contents



June 28th Mid-Patch Update

The official 7.13 notes have been updated following a mid patch update to fix issues with Gnar and Rakan.




Runes Reforged: Picking your playstyle 

A new dev blog is up featuring more information on the upcoming Runes Reforged, giving a tentative look at how systems will work, possible types of runes, and more.
"This preseason, we're combining Runes and Masteries into one streamlined system that you can use to customize your playstyle. We've already given a high-level overview of the changes, but now we want to dig into some specifics by showing you examples of how you can select Runes from two Paths in the new system. 
Before you ask, we’re still working on the details of how players will transition between the old and new systems, but don’t have anything new to share yet. Onward! To Runes Reforged. 
Picking your Playstyle 
When building out a page in the new Runes system, there are a number of decisions to consider. The largest decision will be your primary path, chosen from one of five options. The Paths are currently called Domination, Inspiration, Precision, Sorcery and Resolve but could definitely change.
Icons for Domination, Inspiration, Precision, Sorcery and Resolve
The path you choose will give you a number of slots you can set a rune into, and within each slot, you’ll have to choose between three or four runes that are unique to that path. The most powerful of these slots is called the Keystone Rune slot.
Slots in a primary path
Your primary path will also grant a small stat benefit that's meant to help differentiate how your champ feels and plays. For example, Precision might grant a small amount of Attack Speed. 
Once you have your primary path selected, it’ll be time to pick a few Runes from a secondary path. 

An example of a primary and secondary path together
From your secondary path, you get to choose two of any non-keystone slots, and then take one rune from within each slot. You’ll still need to select both of your secondary slots from a single path, so these aren’t entirely a grab bag. 
These Runes help you set your own goals and define your own playstyle. Here are some rune options from the Resolve path that can be tapped into via your primary or secondary path: 
Quick Reminder: We’re showing stuff that’s heavily WIP so expect some silly names, temporary values and funny looking icons that are VERY much subject to change! 
Early Bird or Enduring Turtle? You might have a lane opponent you want to answer, whether to bully with a little more abandon, or survive a weak early match-up. Or maybe you’ve got the lane on lock and you want to spec for teamfights. These runes from the Resolve path let you choose one of the following: 

Sweet, Sweet Combos: While all of the Paths lend themselves to specific styles of play, sometimes you’ll find keystone and rune synergy off… the beaten path. Here’s an example: 
Maybe you’ve grabbed the Keystone Rune, Ruined King’s Tribute, when you have Resolve as your primary path. Now you’re looking to amplify this keystone’s effects.The Third Path in Inspiration is a great option: 

Build-focused Runes: Alternatively, there are some ‘neutral’ Rune options you can take in your secondary path to augment your champion’s build or other playstyles, rather than your keystone. Check out the path of Inspiration again.
Maybe the combo you want is for our most well read champion and getting every item under the CDR tab. Yes, we still have you covered for that 45% CDR build. 
Perhaps you’ve got that super powerful item spike, and you want to hit that breakpoint way ahead of your opponents. Or maybe you just want to be more flexible on your back timings.
These are just a few examples of why and how you can get the most out of your secondary paths. We’ll have a lot more examples coming soon. 
Before we go, we wanted to answer a few questions here that we’ve seen cropping up: 
We’ve seen plenty of folks worried about having enough base stats to make an off-meta build work, play their favorite champion in a particular role, or otherwise feel strong enough in the early game. We’ve been watching this issue for a large part of Runes Reforged development, and it's something we're confident we'll be able to address. We’ll talk about the world around Runes soon, but know that we've heard the concerns. 
We’ve also seen a few questions about the new player experience. We’ll be talking a lot about this in the future, but we can assure you, every player, from level 1 to level 30 will have the same number of Runes in every game. More soon, but we wanted to at least throw that out. 
Thanks for the read! We'll stick around in the comments to answer your questions."
When asked about how they would deal with 'optimal playstyles', Riot Reinboom commented:
"Quote:
You guys are aware that no matter what you do, there's always going to be an optimal setup that use a champion's strength to its maximum potential, right?
We expect some portion of runes to optimize out on specific champions. e.g. Nasus hooks very strongly into CDR and Intelligence is a fit here. In this way, you're right. These things do take awhile to solve out though, and that discovery process is still ongoing and being disrupted for many champions even with the current setup. 
I don't believe the "no matter what you do" statement is correct though. "Optimal" can be meaningfully changed by situation, such as who your allies are or who your enemies are. e.g. In the last article, we showed Overheal - which gets MUCH stronger when you have a healer on your team, and more so in your lane. Switching to overheal causes other decisions to switch as well, and this is what the "splashing" is all about here. To get overheal, you have to also change your other splash rune choice."

On the Rune system giving comparable stats to what is available now, Riot Reinboom responded:
"Quote:
Will the minor systems that will be in place give me comparable stats to what I am used to now? 
It's not uncommon for a marksman to go into lane with 13% attack speed. Removing this will be like putting on weights and will make it difficult for a marksman to CS effectively. I understand that there can be a learning curve but it's what helps marksman stay relevant in the early game. 
I did read your last paragraph about your consideration for specialized build paths. I'm just curious as to the path being taken by Riot for the common place.
We're investigating stats from many angles. Starting items, base stats, or even some in runes themselves (see: Intelligence here)."

As for how the example 'shop debt' rune worked, Riot Reinboom  confirmed:
"Quote:
So at the start you have 150 debt max. Meaning if your 150 gold short, you can buy the item anyway, but have to pay back the 150 back later, PLUS a 50 gold fee. Atleast thats how i think it works.
This is correct."

Riot Sparkle continued:
"Quote:
Will the credit card rune work at the beggining of the game? So you could buy items for 600 gold at the start?
This wasn't explicit in the article but Store Credit turns on at 2 minutes, the same time that ambient gold earning turns on. So while it may have an effect on completing an item, etc. it won't really impact your starting items."

Riot Sparkle explained that the new system would not be coming out until preseason:
"Quote:
is this for patch 7.13 because it shows I'm on the patch but no new honor system is up and nor is this.
This is not for 7.13, it's for Preseason. The team is trying out this new thing where we talk about what we're doing WAYYYY in advance so the community can weigh in."

Riot Sparkle also commmented that the runes would take a while to finalize since the new rune system will not be on the PBE until preseason time:
"Quote:
I guess you still have almost half a year to finalize the Runes, but how far in advance do you think you'll be able to confidently say "These are the Runes you'll have when the update goes live!"? 
I'm really excited for this update and want to start planning my Rune builds.
Even right before launch I doubt we can give you the EXACT exact runes - as in, maybe Intelligence will end up giving you 7% in one area and 4% in another or something weird like that (it's still the same as it was posted in testing right now though, that's just an example). 
That's actually one of the drawbacks to showing the community work in progress stuff; we can't promise that any particular piece of content will remain unchanged or make it through 'til the end of the process. We think the benefits around talking to the community about Runes outweigh that drawback, but it does make me sad to not have a more satisfying answer to that question or be able to give you a timeline like that. :c "

Look for more information on Runes Reforged as we approach preseason later this year.

Honor Explained

With the new honor system set to be released to global sometime in 7.13,here's the HONOR EXPLAINED video covering the basics of the new system and what to expect:

"Everything you need to know about Honor in less than three minutes. 
Dive into every detail of Honor here! http://na.leagueoflegends.com/en/feat... 
Honor FAQ: https://support.riotgames.com/hc/en-u..."
The Honor update is headed our way in 7.13!  Draggles tweeted out to watch for more info soon:
"Honor will be switched on at some point during the patch (not immediately) - will keep you posted; it'll likely be later this week!"

Riven vs. Yasuo: 1v1, Data Only 

With the Vs. Event coming to a closea new Clairvoyance blog is up and takes a data driven look at c Riven vs. Yasuo including win rates, skin usage rates, and more!
JEOPARDY: Hey everyone, I’m self-proclaimed “only Riven at Riot” Jeopardy, and I’m here today with “second-best Yasuo at Riot via one unseeded tournament” Blaustoise. 
BLAUSTOISE: Welcome to what is likely to be the last data-related blog post Jeopardy and I are allowed to write. If Nancymon invites us back for more Clairvoyance, we will have failed. 
JEOPARDY: I’m here to talk about the champion with the most inherently-talented player base in all of League of Legends: Riven, the Exile. For extreme juxtaposition, Blaustoise will be sharing data about Yasuo, the champion who treats his team’s Nexus like his own master — not being around to defend it and letting it die while he’s off on his own. 
BLAUSTOISE: Whether or not your Nexus falls is inconsequential, as long as you get that sweet, sweet 1v3 for your Yasuo montage. Even in his backstory, Yasuo knew his priorities. 
JEOPARDY: For this next section, we will be looking at data pulled by our newest gameplay analyst: Benign Lime. His data sample covers all ranked games in Riot regions from May 20 to June 1, 2017. 
RAW COMPARISON DATA


BLAUSTOISE: Yasuo has a higher win rate. Boom. This article is over. 
JEOPARDY: Although Yasuo’s overall win rate is higher than Riven’s (51.3% vs. 51.0%), Riven has a higher win rate if she and Yasuo are on opposing teams (51.0% to 49.0%). Maybe this shows that Ninja Tabi sick Riven mechanics counter Yasuo facerolling when they lane against one another? 
BLAUSTOISE: But what happens when two unstoppable instalocks meet an immovable team comp amidst cries of “oh god we need magic damage?” Despite the mixed-damage tears of the other three innocent souls trapped in champ select, the win rate when Yasuo and Riven are on the same team is 50.0%. Perhaps double-solo-lane AD compositions aren’t all that bad. You still won’t find me duo’ing with Jeopardy anytime soon though. 
JEOPARDY: But I really wanted to play down four divisions in ranked.

BLAUSTOISE: Yasuo has more Double and Triple kills than Riven, and around twice as many Quadra and Penta kills. With a champion designed for combo chains and CC chains, you would think Riven mains would learn to chain their kills together, too. And even when Yasuo isn’t spamming his Mastery 7 after solo-killing Marc “Tryndamere” Merrill’s Lux, he’s dealing more damage than Riven to champions, turrets, and objectives. 
JEOPARDY: Dealing damage is nice, but you know what else is nice? Not being a meals-on-wheels service for the enemy team. Riven dies one fewer time per game on average compared to Yasuo—that’s at least 300 gold right there (excluding assists and shutdowns), not to mention about half a minute’s worth of gray screen time. 
BLAUSTOISE: Sure Yasuo’s KDA is worse, but KDA is a meaningless stat. You can forget your 0-5-2 game as easily as you can cut your 5-0-2 game into a highlight montage. 
JEOPARDY: Look Blau, I’m not saying you haven’t made a sick outplay or two in any of your 250+ Yasuo ranked games this season. I’m just saying that, on occasion, I have seen you use your E button as a 300-gold delivery system for the enemy team. And, I am saying that mashing R after your team’s Malphite does all the heavy lifting shouldn’t count as montage material. 
BLAUSTOISE: It takes more skill than playing Malphite, but that’s low hanging fruit. And speaking of skill… 

SKILLS & EXPERIENCE


JEOPARDY: Let’s not front. Regardless of which champion you side with, we have to admit that we were BOOTY with our champions when we tried them for the first time. Both champions have a win rate of about 40% for first-timers, or if you spell “Blastoise” with a “u”. 
BLAUSTOISE: Good thing most Yasuo and Riven players can’t spell after years of chat restrictions. But back to the charts: the x-axis tells us how many games players have played on a champion. The colored curve indicates the champion’s win rate at a given number of games played, as labeled on the y-axis to the left of each plot. 
JEOPARDY: As expected, a player’s champion win rate tends to increase with the number of games played. However, there are a handful of champions with flat mastery curves, meaning their win rates early on (like by game five) could be pretty close to their win rates on, say, game 100. Champions like Malphite, Volibear, and Miss Fortune have flat curves. 
BLAUSTOISE: Other champions such as Aurelion Sol and Ivern have steep mastery curves: Their first-game win rates are low, but they unlock a lot of power within 15-30 games. But real champions have extended curves: Yasuo, Riven, and Nidalee slowly gain winrate with each game, and have mastery curves that only start to flatten out after hundreds of games. 
JEOPARDY: It’s likely that the difficulty of Yasuo and Riven is what makes them appealing. We enjoy learning these complex, high-execution, flashy champions for a variety of reasons. Some of us are intelligent, sophisticated gamers who enjoy a challenge (me), and some of us are weebs trying to star in our own anime (Blaustoise). 
BLAUSTOISEN-n-naniThe gray density plots tell us how many players have played that many games on the champion, matching with the y-axis labels on the right (percent of plays). They also correlate with time spent seeing gray in game! 
JEOPARDY: Riven is a very popular champion that many League players love taking out for a test drive; however, those who pick up Yasuo for the first time are more likely to commit after just a few games, rather than dropping the champion and moving on to something that doesn’t make the entire champion select lobby audibly groan when hovered. 
JEOPARDY: But who cares about us jacketless plebs who will shiver in the freezing Los Angeles winters come December? In Challenger, Riven’s win rate is 54.6% versus Yasuo’s 50.0%. This is indisputable evidence that Riven has a higher skill ceiling that allows her to excel at the fiercest levels of competition. Meanwhile, Challenger players can flip a coin to predict whether or not Yasuo is going to be valuable for their team. 
BLAUSTOISE: And with the new 10 ban system, Yasuo faces a 66% banrate in Bronze and Silver leagues while Diamond+ players only ban him in 43.4% of games. Thousands of gifted Yasuo-one-tricks are being held back because they only have the chance to get their champion in 1/3 of their games. I only interpret the Challenger win rates as dirty Riven players getting to practice more… 
SKIN TO WIN 
JEOPARDY: If you see a Riven on the enemy team rocking the Crimson Elite skin… well, first off, that’s amazing, almost nobody plays that skin—and second, do not worry: That skin has the lowest win rate of all Riven skins. I’m sure there’s a disclaimer to be made here about causation, but I’m a Riven main and I have a short attention span. 
On the other hand, the highest win rate skin is the new school 2016 Championship Riven at 52.8%, followed by the OG Season 2 Championship Riven at 52.4%. This makes sense, because the skins have the name “champion” in them, and “champion” implies winning. Everything in this section checks out. Trust me, I’m a data scientist. 
BLAUSTOISE: As for the top Yasuo skin? Blood Moon (52.6%) barely eeks out High Noon (52.4%), but that’s just the base High Noon. The data that Yasuo mains of culture want to see is the definitive stack ranking of the oddly-gemstone-titled High Noon Yasuo chromas:
And of course, we couldn’t talk about Yasuo skins without shaming PROJECT: Yasuo at 51.2%, the lowest of any of his skins. It’s well-accepted in the Yasuo community that this is the “noob” skin, and the numbers don’t lie. Trust me, I’m a researcher. 
JEOPARDY: I can’t wait to see what Nightbringer Yasuo brings to that metric though.

PLAYER SURVEY OPINIONS/QUALITATIVE SURVEY 
BLAUSTOISE: We wanted to show you guys a cool visualization of a word cloud of vocabulary that players associate with the champions Yasuo and Riven. However, we examined the responses we received, and concluded that there may have been a mixup in which the survey question was somehow misinterpreted as some sort of query for medical terms and terminal illnesses. We’ll try to fix the survey and share the results with you at a later date.
JEOPARDY: We hope the data we shared with you today was insightful and worth our inevitable meetings with our respective managers. Before we sign off, we’d also like to remind you to consider participating in the VS. event, even though we have no obligation whatsoever from anybody at Riot to mention that event in this article. Like at all. 
BLAUSTOISE: Or better yet, queue up Top/Mid in Ranked Solo, hover Yasuo or Riven, tell your team not to ban, type “I’m a smurf,” mute all when the game starts, and enjoy the Unforgiven and the Exile as they were truly meant to be played."

Quick Hits

[Quick Hits is our own collection within a red post collection, often including easy to digest stories, specialized information, and/or repeat info you may have missed in other posts!]

1) FeralPony tweeted a look at his beautiful MS Paint placeholder loadscreen art for Kayn:
"As promised here's the Kayn load screen art!"


2) Robbie Daymond tweeted that he is the voice of our upcoming champion Kayn.
3) Following the recent dev blog, Aatrox's gameplay update has been added to the champion update schedule.
4) The EU LCS Summer  finals are heading to Paris, France! More information [here].

5)
Riot jinxylord stopped by the boards to provide some context about Jinx's CD on her Q:
"Hi Roosebury, 
Saw your thread and thought I'd stop in and explain the reasoning behind the fixed CD on her Q. 
When I was designing Jinx's kit one of the first major decisions I made on her Q was whether she was going to be a stance dancer or a stance chooser. Stance dancers are characters like Udyr and Sona, who are heavily encouraged through things like their passive to constantly be swapping stances regardless of in game circumstances. Stance choosers are characters like Elise and Jayce who try to pick the right stance based on what's happening around them and stay in it until the situation changes. 
While thematically, stance dancing feels like it would be a great fit for Jinx (she is a manic gun nut after all), I ended up making her a stance chooser because it gave more weight to Pow-Pow and Fishbones as individual weapons. I wanted each of her guns(friends?) to feel like it's own special entity with a clear purpose, instead of one being tied to the other as a combo piece where you were constantly forced to switch to gain optimal DPS. 
This is the reason for the fixed CD. Because of range, splash, and bonus damage Fishbones rockets are strictly better than Pow-Pow bullets for a single attack in all situations. The only thing holding them back is the mana cost and AS decrease after using more than one. If the Q had a CD lower than Jinx's attack speed the optimal play would be to constantly swap between Fishbones and Pow-Pow every attack to ensure you got the attack speed benefits of the first AND the range, splash, and damage benefits of the second. 
There are ways to make a fast swap less optimal, like making it so the first rocket after the swap LOSES Pow-Pow's AS bonus, but in testing that made rockets feel super clunky. I started getting really positive feedback about the "smoothness" of the swap after I ensured that the first rocket maintained Pow-pow's attack frame. I'd be scared to go back on that, especially after seeing players' negative reaction to the super slow level 1 rockets we added to her during the marksman update (and later removed). 
All that said, if we did want to make Jinx a stance dancer in the future, a suggestion like yours (Q CD scales with AS) is a pretty good one. Thanks for thinking about her :D 
Hope this context helps."
6) The Riot Games Merch Facebook page released an update on an issue with the Ultra random figure promo, where a few buyers received duplicate of the figures they purchased:
"Hello channel, we found a bug in our Thresh + U.R.F. promo in North America only, where a few orders received the same mystery figure as the original figure that they ordered. We had put in some shopping cart logic to prevent this but a few orders slipped through. If this happened to your order we can help you with a re-roll just submit your ticket here: 
https://support.riotgames.com/hc/en-us/requests/new 
This will only apply to people who got the duplicate."
7) In response to a reddit thread on the subject, dArtagnan reminded that "To put this bluntly, you cannot get leaverbuster penalties or Lower Priority Queue from Practice Mode, similar to Custom Games (without any other human players)."

Reminders

Last up, a few reminders on upcoming and ending soon promotions and sales!
  • As mentioned in 7.13 notesLegend of the Poro King  returns to the RGMQ 6/30/17 12:00 PT - 7/04/17 04:00 PT and 7/07/17 12:00 PT - 7/11/17 04:00 PT.
  • VS. event featuring Dawnbringer Riven and Nightbringer Yasuo up through June 29th!

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