Reign of Gaming

So I've been playing a lot of Udyr. A lot of Udyr. I mean like ... hours of Udyr. Look I'm talking I played so much Udyr I woke up this morning and was like "which stance am I in?" I had a dream that manbearpig was real, Gore tried to kill me. Anyway Udyr's change has changed a lot so I figured I'd just do a short little review on his changes. Udyr was the first champion I ever bought (and promptly thought I was terrible at this game when it was Udyr that's sucked.) I've put enough time in to Udyr to get a PHD in Udyology. Get it? I'm a Dr. of Udgenics. 

I'll probably put up a video of responses to comments later, for now enjoy Udyr!

I thought I'd go with something a bit more simple and basic this time. Most of my articles are aimed either at discussing balance, or maximizing itemization benefits. But that information is becoming more and more widespread, so here are some tips and tricks for basic gameplay.

Surprisingly this next patch is bringing with it some jungle changes. To be fair I expected (and I'm sure everyone else did too) that Riot was getting tired of the early golem starts giving blue side an advantage over purple (purple had the advantage too with a lane swap). When players started expanding the camp snatching to wolves and wraiths - that's what things started to get a out of hand. Riot decided to slap the change they've been wanting for the golems onto the other camps as well effectively making ALL camps spawn at the same time.

• Wolves
• Initial spawn time increased to 1:55 from 1:40
• Respawn time reduced to 50 seconds from 60
• Wraiths
• Initial spawn time increased to 1:55 from 1:40
• Golems
• Initial spawn time increased to 1:55 from 1:40
• Respawn time reduced to 50 seconds from 60
• Ancient Golem
• Base Experience granted increased to 275 from 220
• Now plays a particle effect to show who the buff transferred to
• Lizard Elder
• Base Experience granted increased to 275 from 220
• Now plays a particle effect to show who the buff transferred to

PBE Patch for 5/17

FULL STORY: So a air client only patch hit the PBE. 5 mins after, another air client patch removed all the changes. 10 mins after that a third air client hit with no changes. 20 mins after that point. LIVE SERVERS got the air client that was on the PBE

What does this mean: TBH (This is only a guess) it looks like we got a patch we should not have seen. From the Riot posts (which you can read below) it looks like some of these changes are meant for patch 3.8 while others not listed might be going in 3.9 KEEP THIS IN MIND, THIS MEANS THESE NUMBERS ARE NOT FOR OUR EYES YET. Riot is most likely still messing with these on their end.

ANOTHER UPDATE 9:44 PM EST - A fourth air client has hit
ANOTHER UPDATE 10:23 PM EST - A fifth air client has hit

Aatrox the Darkin Blade

Release Skin Name: Justicar Aatrox

Damage: 55 (+ 3.2 ) 
Health: 395 (+ 85 ) 
Mana: 75 (+ 45 ) [Rog Note: He does not use mana, this is just whats in the air client]
Movement Speed: 345
Armor: 14 (+ 3.8 ) 
Magic Resist: 30 (+ 1.25 ) 
Health Per 5 Sec: 5.75 (+ 0.5 )
Mana Per 5 Sec: 0 (+ 0 )
Range: 150 
Defense Rating: 4 
Magic Rating: 3 
Difficulty Rating: 6 
Attack Rating: 8 

Tags: carry,melee 

Tips: *Avoid engaging in a fight with low health unless your Blood Well is full so that you regain enough health to continue fighting.*Building Life Steal can be very potent on Aatrox to help compensate for his health costs.*Massacre is great at turning the tide of a battle, make sure to use it at the right moment to maximize the benefits from it. 
Opponent Tips: *When Aatrox takes fatal damage he is healed for the amount currently in his resource bar, landing a fatal blow on him while the resource bar is low will result in him reviving with a lower amount of health.*When Aatrox casts Dark Flight towards your location, avoid being knocked up by moving away from the center of impact.*Aatrox is auto attack reliant for most of his damage and survivability, reducing his attack speed by purchasing Randuins Omen or Frozen Heart can help reduce both of those components greatly.

[Passive] - Blood Well	Aatrox - [Passive] - Blood Well  When using an ability that costs Health, Aatrox stores the self-inflicted damage into the Blood Well. Upon taking fatal damage Aatrox extracts the blood from the well and recovers it as health over a brief duration.
[Q] - Dark Flight	Aatrox - [Q] - Dark Flight  Aatrox takes flight and slams down at a targeted location, dealing 70/115/160/205/250 (+) physical damage to all nearby enemies and knocking up targets at the center of impact for 1/1/1/1/1 second.  Cost: 0/10/10/10/10 % of Current Health ()  Range: 650  Cooldown: 16/15/14/13/12
[W] - Blood Thirst / Blood Price	Aatrox - [W] - Blood Thirst / Blood Price  Activate to switch between Blood Thirst and Blood Price. Blood Thirst: Every third attack, Aatrox restores 20/25/30/35/40 (+) Health, increased by 200/200/200/200/200% when below half Health. Blood Price: Every third attack, Aatrox deals 60/95/130/165/200 (+) bonus physical damage and loses Health.  Cost:  Range: 0  Cooldown: 1/1/1/1/1
[E] - Blades of Torment	Aatrox - [E] - Blades of Torment  Aatrox unleashes and sends forward the power of his blade, dealing 75/120/165/210/255 (+0.6) Magic Damage to all enemies hit and slowing them by 40/40/40/40/40% for 1.75/2/2.25/2.5/2.75 seconds.  Cost: 5/5/5/5/5 % of Current Health ()  Range: 900  Cooldown: 12/11/10/9/8
[R] - Massacre	Aatrox - [R] - Massacre  On activation Aatrox draws in the blood of his foes, dealing magic damage to all enemy champions around him equal to 15/15/15% + 0.01% of their current Health. For the next 12/12/12 seconds, Aatrox's Maximum Health increases by 100/175/250 + 50/65/80 per champion hit, Attack Speed increases by 25/35/45% + 10/10/10% per champion hit, and he gains 175 Attack Range.  Cost:  Range: 0  Cooldown: 120/100/80

 Recommended Items

Recommended Items: We have them, however they are not formatted!
Update: jayjinde on reddit has formatted them for us. Make sure to give him thanks for his time!

• Starting Items: Doran's Blade
• Essential Items: Blade of the Ruined King, Ninja Tabi, Maw of Malmortius
• Offensive Items: The Bloodthirster, Zephyr, Ravenous Hydra
• Defensive Items: Randuin's Omen, Warmog's Armor, Spirit Visage
• Consumables: Health Pot, Sight Ward, Red Elixir

5/17/2013 Context Post - PBE for Patch 3.08

Originally Posted by Riot (View RedTracker Source)

Hey Summoners,

As you know, we use the PBE servers as a testing ground for a lot of our experimental changes, but we’ve run into situations where sometimes a change requires a bit more nuance to understand. As a result, we’ll be driving these PBE context posts when we can offer some more context.

Also note that these changes are tentative, like anything else on the PBE, so they are all very subject to change.

Kha'Zix

• Taste Their Fear
• Isolation bonus redesigned as "increases damage by 45%".
• Evolution adds 8% Missing Health damage. (Which can also be increased by isolation.)
• Void Spikes
• Now slows targets hit for 2 seconds.
• Mana cost reduced
• Evolution no longer consumes passive to apply effects. Instead triples shot.

Ultimately we just wanted to increase your viable choices when picking evolutions. Kha’Zix was getting huge damage, high poke, and great utility from evolving Void Spikes. Now Void Spikes gets a slow as part of the base skill, so W is a reasonable one-point wonder. Evolving and maxing it first also works though, just not so well that it dominates the other skills. Taste Their Fear’s evolution was previously reliant on having targets isolated. Now it works whether they are isolated or not, but does more damage against isolated targets, making it a more reliable choice.

Lissandra

• Ring of Frost
• Cooldown reduced
• Damage reduced
• Frozen Tomb
• Slow increases per level
• Damage reduced at later levels

For a control mage with a kit she has, Lissandra was throwing out a lot of front-loaded damage in team fights. The intention of these changes was to lower her damage, but to also increase her crowd control abilities. These were made to better highlight her core strengths as a strong DPS mage with high in-fight control.

Jungle

• Wolves
• Initial spawn time increased to 1:55 from 1:45
• Respawn time reduced to 50 seconds from 60
• Wraiths
• Initial spawn time increased to 1:55 from 1:45
• Golems
• Initial spawn time increased to 1:55 from 1:45
• Respawn time reduced to 50 seconds from 60
• Ancient Golem
• Base Experience granted increased to 275 from 220
• Now plays a particle effect to show who the buff transferred to
• Lizard Elder
• Base Experience granted increased to 275 from 220
• Now plays a particle effect to show who the buff transferred to

We’ve increased the initial spawn times of jungle creeps to get rid of the frustrating experience advantage players could get by killing certain jungle monsters before laning phase begins. This was a much requested change from a lot of pro teams around the world, as the only real counter was to switch lanes or to try to prevent it altogether. The other changes are to reassure junglers since they’ll feel like they’ve “lost” a full camp clear since they won’t be able to start wolves or wraiths before heading to their buffs. So Elder Lizard and Ancient Golem will give more EXP, and jungle camps will spawn a little faster. Faster spawns will also help some champions who have exceptionally high clear times and want to just stay in the jungle.

Items

• Madred's Razors
• UNIQUE Passive - Maim
• Now deals bonus damage to monsters with every basic attack
• Wriggle's Lantern
• UNIQUE Passive - Maim
• Now deals bonus damage to monsters with every basic attack
• Attack Damage increased
• Life Steal increased
• Combine cost increased

These changes are currently tentative. We just want to increase consistency on Madred’s and Wriggles in order to let players plan their jungle routes better with these items. There were a lot of odd cases where junglers would accidentally steal a buff from their teammate due to a random proc, or a jungler would fall behind because they weren’t getting enough procs. Overall we had to lower the damage output in comparison to the old Madred’s and Wriggle’s (if you simply average out the old Madred’s and Wriggle’s damage by four) because of the consistency involved and the fact that it never deals “overkill” damage, where it would proc on a small creep (or on a near-dead jungle unit), thereby wasting its damage.

• Wit's End
• New Recipe: Recurve Bow + Null Magic Mantle + Dagger + 600 gold = 2300 gold
• Attack Speed increased slightly
• Revised Passive - Your attacks steal Magic Resist from the target, stacks up to 5 times
• Nashor's Tooth
• Combine Cost increased
• Ability Power reduced slightly
• Additional Passive - Your attacks deal 15 + 15% of your Ability Power bonus magic damage on hit
• Malady
• Removed from the game

We've moved Malady's passives to the two other Attack Speed items to further solidify Nashor's Tooth's niche role as an Ability Power focused auto-attacker item, while moving the magic shred onto Wit's End to better synergize with magic damage based fighters (even for those that don’t deal magic damage, Sunfire Cape synergizes quite well with Wit’s End). Malady has been removed as it has simply been a poor fit in the current space that it was in.

One thing some of you may notice is absent are the Shyvana buffs i'd talked about a few weeks ago.

The buffs make sense, and we're going to do them. Just not for this patch. The reason being that along with the change to Wriggle's Lantern proc'ing on every attack, Wits end reducing Magic Resistance, and lowered respawns for jungle camps - we couldn't accurately assess Shyvana's balance.

As with all of our balance changes, there is always a rippling effect. Items being buffed or nerfed can mean more success or failure with champions who buy them. Taric's nerfs saw a universal increase in performance across every support. In the same vein, each of the above changes are also buffs to Shyvana and until we can judge the effect of the item/jungle changes would have on her power level, i don't want to pull the trigger on the changes just yet. Statikk and i are looking to have Shyvana Balance changes with Patch 3.9 pending iteration after 3.8 goes live.

[3.8] Improvements to the PVP.net experience on smaller resolutions

Originally Posted by Riot (View RedTracker Source)

Summoners,
As part of the 3.8 patch, we've introduced some code in PVP.net that will automatically scale itself down to 1150x720 or 1024x640, whichever is most appropriate. The most common desktop resolutions that will see their experience impacted are:

• 1366x768
• 1280x768
• 1280x700
• 1182x864

Prior to 3.8, the client defaulted to a specific, unchanging window size; for those of you with widescreen laptops running 1366x768 or smaller footprint monitors like 1280x720, this has meant having key functionality hidden behind the Windows task bar. No more!

This change represents a shift in the player experience and we felt it was important to reach out to those of you affected to see how you feel about it, and better understand what else we can do to improve the PVP.net experience on the above-named resolutions. Please spend some time poking around on PBE once 3.8 has arrived and feel free to share your thoughts on other ways we can improve the smaller-resolution League experience.

Riot on Vi's Change this PBE Patch

Originally Posted by Riot (View RedTracker Source)

The change currently on PBE is obviously still in testing. However I need to jump in here to clarify that even with this change Vi's ultimate is still unstoppable it simply doesn't discard the CC, however she will feel the effects of the CC when the charge ends. Knockbacks and Knockups however since they are displacing the charging champion's movement are completely ignored to allow the Ultimate to complete.

What does this mean in game? 
If Vi uses her ultimate on Lux who lands a light binding while charging. Vi will finish the charge and smash Lux into the ground. Then, Vi will be rooted for the remainder of the duration of the binding. 

The other ultimates with similar mechanics such as Malphite also have this change, however totally blocking CC effects was not directly referenced in tooltips outside of Vi's before which is why you are only seeing a change in hers. 

Champions effected by this change iirc are Malphite, Hecarim, J4, Nocturne, and Vi. The goal here is to add a little bit more counterplay to these abilities while still keeping them "unstoppable". We want these abilities to be uninterruptable and they will, however we also don't feel that them completely nullifying other champions crowd control effects and cooldowns even after the charge is compete is fair. We felt this was a nice and logical compromise, but we'll see how testing goes. 

I'll work on the tooltip wording to try and make this a bit more clear. I don't feel this will ultimately be a bit power hit but if we feel it is - or becomes one we'll adjust the individual champions effected as needed.

Riot on the Lissandra Changes

Originally Posted by Riot (View RedTracker Source)

Our goal with the Lissandra changes currently in testing was to shift Lissandra's power a little bit more towards utility (lower W CD, stronger slow at higher levels on ult) and away from burst (base damage at higher ranks on W and ult). These changes aren't intended to be a nerf and shouldn't impact her laning phase much at all, bar the lower W CD. We suspect they may actually may be a slight buff, though it's that realignment of power towards desired strengths that's the key thing here.

In terms of overall performance Lissandra's also still pretty new so we're still assessing her overall state as well, particularly given some people started playing her in her first week, others when she dropped to 6300 IP and yet more of course during her current free week. This means quite a wide range of experience on her from individual players, resulting in a fair bit of variation in performance still.

Riot on Annie Changes

Originally Posted by Riot (View RedTracker Source)

Please realize that the PBE changes are datamined from just the tooltips.

The tooltip for the stats just got moved to the spell level up tooltip. There is also another siginificant buff we are testing that the datamining missed.

Abilities

Super important - Everything below is from the air client, which has now been removed (5 mins after being uploaded) by a second, third, and fourth air client patch. Read up top for a quess on why. These abilities look to have been released too early.

Items

We're just a week away from the All-Star weekend, and Riot has a wild weekend planned for fans of competitive League of Legends. The best of the best will gather from around the world to compete for more than just bragging rights. For full brackets and roster information check out Leaguepedia's All-Star page!

Not only will there be a double elimination tournament taking place between the 5 regions, but a "skills" challenge will pit players in the same roles against each other in interesting competitions. Riot hasn't announced just what these skill competitions entail yet, but a 1v1 between Wickd and Soaz brought 140,000 viewers to Twitch. Just imagine what 1v1 between Misaya and Alex Ich would bring.

The Format and Challenges for Teams

Each region voted in their All-Stars to represent their scene in a double elimination tournament. Southeast Asia receives a bye into the second round because they won Season 2, and that leaves North America to face off against China while Europe is paired with the Koreans. These aren't simply showmatches.

Riot made the winning region earn an extra bid to the Season 3 World Championships later this year, meaning these players might be playing for the right for their own team to compete for a title. Not only the extra spot is at stake, but the last place region will have all its teams forced to play through the brutally tough group stages at worlds.