Reign of Gaming

RoG Article Recap

• Evaluating Players and Teams: Why Attitude and Outlook are more Important than Individual Skill
• Statikk Discusses Preseason Jungle Changes
• Item Preview: Dust Sweeping

More Item Stats Revealed, and More Q&A

Xypherous has been on a roll today revealing items left and right. Yesterday during the EU article, and today in the comments of his latest post. Read below to see the new item as well as a great deal of Q&A. If you missed the original article "Item Preview: Dust Sweeping", you can find it here.

Just going to leave this here.. sneakily.. :3

Sightstone (650 Gold)
+125 Health
Unique Passive - Refresh (Ward) : Starts with 4 charges and refills each time you stop by your shop.
Unique Active - Ghost Ward: Consumes a charge to place an invisible ward that reveals the surrounding area for 3 minutes. You may have a maximum of 2 wards from this item at once.

Upgrades to...

*is dragged away by internal Riot teams*

(--From EU Thread--)

Just going to leave this here... and let you wonder where it might go...

Unique Toggle: Your basic attacks and single target spells drain an additional X% of your current mana and deal twice that amount in bonus magic damage over 2 seconds.

Edit: Also, don't worry about Nidalee. Just an oversight on the preview. Tears will still proc off everything it has ever proc'ed before (including Pounce) but in addition, it will now proc off things channeled/toggled effects that drain Mana.

(--------------)

Are there going to be any "after full build" items available? With Elixir of agility gone, theres only blue and red elixirs, and oracles. 
We're combatting this in a couple of ways - but in general, the gold value of a 'full build' is higher than before.

Holy ****ing passive play Batman, especially if it upgrades in to anything remotely worth a slot. 
Here's the core difference - Sightstone doesn't net you advantage if you are passive. Having wards provides safety - but Heart of Gold actually nets you advantage by passive play due to your passive GP/10 will override the value of active play.

You're not going to win the lane any harder by being safe - whereas HoG causes you to win the lane harder by being hard to burst.

So you've put out to dry EVERY single non mana champ in the game from having a gp/5 item if they dont use ap..... 
Well, to be fair, resource-less champions get a huge advantage in the fact that.. they're resourceless to begin with. Your early itemization starts can be far more aggressive due to this fact.

Soo, Xyph, we gonna see any gp5 for manaless ad supports, like Lee Sin? 
Manaless supports aren't something I'm sure is a good idea to support. There's a weird flow to manaless supports where if they *can* support effectively - then the only option left is to burst because sustaining / harassing are effectively free for them.

You can't burn down the mana bar of something that has no mana, essentially. It's a very dangerous concept in general.

Xypherous I appreciate the thought you put into this, but by removing items you're just removing options in a seeming attempt to close champions to one build.

Case in point. You are expressing your opinion, and holding us to it. 
In general, the removals have focused on ones that warp gameplay around itself to the point where no other items can exist or ones that prevents the creation of items that would encourage flexibility in builds.

For example - There is no item that can compete with Heart of Gold. It fits into any build that doesn't run raw damage and is never a bad idea. There is no reason for any other tier 1 item to exist when Heart of Gold does.

In the case of FoN - You can't create many additional MS% or MR options when FoN exists - because the stacked potential would excessively strong. MR and MS% destroy mages when they're readily available as a mage's main safety is range and burst. 

Any additional MR/MS% options added to the game would have to also necessitate nerfing FoN as well the items would've had to be balanced to the stacked case - rather than the individual case.

I actually, for once, disagree with you.

Having 2 wards protecting every easy gank path lets you play extremely aggressively and overextended in lane. This is hugely important for pushing your advantage and only doable with proper ward coverage. 
Luckily, in lane, there are 3 main gank paths.

It's a STUPID amount of gold effectiveness if they're even remotely near Sight/Vision wards. 
12 minutes of ward coverage = 300 Gold. 

Sightstone = 650 Gold. 

There's a starting cost that makes this balanced - as the alternative to Sight Stone is to just buy wards with Gold.

Cost-efficiency is luckily one of the easiest statistics to tune - by raising the cost of the item (especially on small items like this) - you warp the efficiency of the item quite a bit.

or this, it all comes down to sightstone's upgrade path, even then tho, sightstone will still be a set item, that you MUST get, EVERY game. 
Indeed - I thought about this pretty hard - and came out the other side with - what is the alternative? What is the set item that you must get every game?

A stack of wards that continuously consume gold every minute of the game.

You see the problem of pigeonholing supports is an odd one - mostly because supports are pigeonholed into getting zero items at the moment - due to the high price of consumables.

Are you saying a new item will drain gold? Oh lordy lordy. 
No - just that the current set item for supports is basically wards that they have to purchase every single time they go back to lane. While the optimal number of wards on a map is roughly around 5 depending on which objectives are up - the current optimal number of wards you should buy on a given trip back is as many as you can and afford anything else.

This item basically non-linearizes the cost of wards for supports. There is a gold efficiency curve for wards to gold spent.

i'll hold off judgement on it until i see the upgrade path, as it stands i still see no reason not to buy sightstone for laning phase, then once you get out of laning, you need the stack of additional wards for more coverage (granted your team should help support ward but how often does that REALLY happen) 
Yes, that's the theme of the upgrade. 

However, we do want "overwarding" to actually have a significant cost - which comes in the form of inventory slot premiums like you're talking about here.

Are you saying a new item will drain gold? Oh lordy lordy. 
No - just that the current set item for supports is basically wards that they have to purchase every single time they go back to lane. While the optimal number of wards on a map is roughly around 5 depending on which objectives are up - the current optimal number of wards you should buy on a given trip back is as many as you can and afford anything else.

This item basically non-linearizes the cost of wards for supports. There is a gold efficiency curve for wards to gold spent.

i'll hold off judgement on it until i see the upgrade path, as it stands i still see no reason not to buy sightstone for laning phase, then once you get out of laning, you need the stack of additional wards for more coverage (granted your team should help support ward but how often does that REALLY happen) 
Yes, that's the theme of the upgrade. 

However, we do want "overwarding" to actually have a significant cost - which comes in the form of inventory slot premiums like you're talking about here.

I couldn't care less about the sightstone, explain in greater detail the idea behind the removal of the MBR and Ionic Spark 
On MBR - If you were getting it hoping to counter tanky bruisers - you were doing it wrong. Almost every item combination involving PD / BT / IE would let you deal more damage to high health bruisers.

Why is that? Mostly because Carries aren't expected to have a linear damage curve whereas MBR is a linear effect. Secondly, the primary statistic for determining whether you were tanky or not wasresistances not health. The difference between a carry's health and a tanky bruiser's health ranges less than 50% porportionally a lot of the time - thus attacking % health doesn't really help out all that much.

Ionic Spark

Ionic Spark was a niche item made odd by the fact that much better options exist and it seems to fill an odd triple-niche: Survivability, On-hit, Wave clear. Who is this item supposed to be good on? It requires a very specific sub-set of characters (Tanky characters with zero wave clear that scales off attack speed) in order to be good - at which point it really starts to conflict with Wit's End for the same case.

Ionic Spark turns out to be a trap for most characters if you ever picked it up. It requires you to be ahead to be effective as the effect is highly conditional (every 4 hits.) It requires you to pick it up early as there's no scaling effect on the item (fixed magic damage). It requires you to be a specific sub-set of characters in order to be good in the first place.

A niche item with a huge set of conditionals, both champion-specific *and* context specific is an item that will never sit in a good place for very long as the thing that'll make it viable is most likely an abuse case that'll have to be nerfed in the future which makes all the other problems worse.

I'm not sure you're saying the real truth, it look like you are trying to hide the fact that tanky dps with madred were too strong because madred had linear dmg effect, and potentially too powerfull combined with 0 or 1 dps item, and removing this item would be a good nerf for bruiser. 
Nope - in this case, the bruiser in question should've gotten Wit's End instead - as they get similar damage and defenses for roughly half the cost.

yes, But what items would actually go well with malady now... NONE
They just removed 2 On-hit/ AS Items for ON-hit builds
We should be happy for this. MBR was a trap item - it is never, in any circumstances, the buy, as any character or against any opponent. If you were building this item, you've been weaker each game as a result. Same with Ionic spark (except maybe for Shen or Kayle).

I doubt it's the real reason. imo riot team couldn't buff madred because it would be very op.

I'm pretty sure the real reason is madred was actually a pretty strong item, but too many players considered it weak so they prefered to remove the item.
You caught us and our massive conspiracy.

(What motivation would we even have to lie about this??) o.o

I don't understand the point in removing Ionic Spark. If someone wants to spend their gold on it, why not? The only justification from the devs is its worthless. Who cares? Let people play how they want to. It allowed for interesting builds, ie. Wits End + Ionic Spark on Irelia.
Because it's what we refer to as a "noob trap" - an item that seems powerful and looks attractive, but actually gimps your build in almost any situation.

Under your justification, we should just release 100 new items with a random smattering of stats. Meanwhile, someone who hasn't done the math is buying these items and doesn't understand why he can't get the job done.

I'm a little sad that I've been effectively called a noob for enjoying Ionic Spark as an item. I built it all the time on Volibear and I enjoyed to great degrees how effective it (apparently not really) was. I still think it's a cool item idea and I hope Statikk Shiv has a similar niche fit so I can double lightning smack people with Voli 
Correct - it's good on Volibear too. 

Statikk Shiv's name sure sounds...lightning-y....

Hmm would this make Manamune a good item on Sivir after these changes? not sure.
Eh. Probably not on Sivir still. Sivir doesn't go through Mana *that* quickly to require Manamune. Corki/Ezreal/Urgot should be far less mana constrained if they do go down this route, however - which will let them lean on their spells a bit more in late game siege/harass type situations. Miss Fortune / Sivir / Ashe sit at this weird middle ground between 'I would love to cast my spells more' versus 'I should really focus on making my autoattacks hurt you.' Whereas Corki/Ezreal/Urgot are all about 'Well, my autoattack is never really going to hurt *all that much* comparatively - but I have all these spells that add DPS.'

Preseason Jungle Q&A

After posting the Jungle changes article, Statikk hit the forums answering questions. If you missed the original article, you can find it here.

 No leashing then? :s
No the leashing that currently happens on Live will no longer exist, but we've found that teammates still stick around as long as they can to apply as much damage as possible before leaving for their lanes -- still helps the jungler out a ton.

Will nautus be any good? If the monstetrs break his shield. He has a hard time jungle
Definitely keeping my eye on several cases like Nautilus. Because his utility and ganks are top of the line, his clears should certainly still be somewhat painful compared to junglers who don't bring those strengths.

We'll be taking a look at junglers across the board and making champion specific changes where necessary. Slightly buffing up the early game of tank junglers such as Rammus and Nautilus (who were in some ways overnerfed due to the current jungle meta) is certainly not out of the question.

Something tells me "Diana" will be screwed by those changes. Items wont match her playstyle and camps will be stronger :S
Diana actually performs very well in the new jungle. She has access to very high sustained damage and she benefits heavily from the increased gold flow since she scales well with items.

So question. Sejuani: Deader than she is now? Or better than she is now?
Sejuani's an interesting case because like many of the tank junglers her early clear is very painful. At the same time, she scales surprisingly well with items and so she's proven to be powerful if she can navigate through her early game troubles. Will make tweaks where they are needed.

• Jungle monsters now attack the nearest target rather than attempting to chase their original attacker to make their behavior more consistent
• Wraith camp gold rewards have been reduced and golem and wolf camp gold rewards have been increased to better match their respective difficulty and convenience
• The wraiths have reduced attack range and the large wraith has been repositioned within the camp to force mid laners to commit more when farming them for extra gold
• The golem camps monsters have increased movement speed to make them less vulnerable to kiting, especially early on by the blue side bottom lane

Whats the problem with Blue side getting golems before they go to lane? Yes they hit level 2 earlier but it isnt earth shattering. As well as the mid lane wraiths stealing yes u dont have to really walk into the jungle and can hit the big wraith with your range. Also kiting the jungle golems was the main thing in bot lane golem taking but there are some junglers that truely do need a "had leash," and it hurts them more.
They can still choose to do the golems before lane, it will just be now more difficult and thus be a larger consideration in terms of how much damage they are willing to take to incur this advantage.

Increased damage and reduced effectiveness of AoE for jungle?
RIP Jungle Karthus.
You'd be surprised because Karthus does an insanely high amount of single target damage once he isolates the big monster (after the small ones die to the AoE).

He also benefits heavily from the addition of a few new jungle items that are aimed towards AP.

Does this include Dragon? That would be a huge (and welcome) change.
Yes this does affect Dragon. We had to also slightly reduce his Attack Range in tandem so that he would be able to more easily pulled out of his den by the team engaging him. Not sure of the full repercussions yet but I guess we'll find out. =)

How will the AoE changes effect Maokai? considering all his abilities are AoE, (aside from W) will he clear times diminish greatly? hes easily my fav. as far as jungle...so...? 
Thanks for this thread btw awesome info love it.
I've found Maokai to still be a strong choice, mainly because his Q provides him with a significant amount of sustained damage that not many people realize.

Let's be clear, it's not like AoE is now useless. It still allows him to effortlessly wipe out the small minions while focusing his efforts on the big one (something single target champions cannot do). 

Out of all the jungler tanks, I still feel he is near the top and probably doesn't need any tweaks to stay competitive.

Jungle Malz is now viable.
It's interesting since Malzahar's void pets now do tank for him. 

When we first initially implemented the new leashing changes, champions with pets that could tank for them like Malzahar and Shaco would literally clear the entire jungle without taking a scratch. Since then, we've had to make jungle monsters deal some amount of bonus damage to pets and we're still trying to fine tune the number to make sure having pet tanks is an advantage but doesn't necessarily mean jungle invincibility.

Now can you tell us what the Machete does. Is it like the jungler teir Dorans?
You can think of it that way, except the item doesn't dead end and instead eventually builds up to a couple of mid-tier items.

But is it going to cost 475 and leave no room open for health pots? It could totally be useless. Stats would be nice.
No it currently costs 300g meaning you can start with 5 Health Potions (numbers subject to change before release).

The Hunter's Machete actually has no raw stats but instead increases your damage dealt to jungle monsters by a % and also adds bonus true damage to your basic attacks against jungle monsters.

The item then branches off into 2 upgrade paths one being Madred's Razor and the other being a new item focused more towards non-autoattack based champions called the Spirit Stone.

How's Nocturne in the new jungle? Hopefully the small camps die to umbra blades without requiring his Q or AD items. 
Also does this mean junglers will have a larger impact on the later stages of the game rather then just getting lanes fed early and having those fed carries have the impact? I hope so cause I hate having so much less gold than the TOP/ADC/MID because they get so much more gold from their creeps than junglers get from their camps. Feels like I am another support.
Nocturne is still strong because as you said his passive and his Q allow him to ambiently AoE down the small monsters and he has the consistent auto attack damage to take down the big one.

Depending on performance, we definitely intend on seeing junglers being able to have carry-like impact on the later parts of the game.

Question, if you were playing nautilus would you consider building a spirit stone? does it provide benefitial stats to a jungle tank champ like him?
Yes, there is a Spirit Stone upgrade that is aimed towards tanks.

Not sure if you saw my RE: to this thread, but to sum it up really fast since this is almost like an AMA type of thread. How will hecarim fair in the new jungle as well as sustain lacking champs? Will jungle creeps give more health/mana to keep up with sustain/manaless junglers?
Hecarim actually has the type of damage needed to clear the jungle. What I've found is that he eats up a fairly ludicrous amount of mana trying to do it at a consistent pace.

Haven't really had time to do a full pass on his power level. He certainly has extremely deadly ganks, great team fight presence, and fairly good scaling with items. Considering those strengths, we'll see if we have to do some early game tweaks to make sure he stays viable.

Haven't made any changes to the health/mana runes on the big monsters at each camp, but that's certainly a lever we can pull if necessary.

so.. statikk can kassidin jungle now?
No not really. =/

I beg of you, please make it so I can play jungle Volibear without having teammates rage at me. When I was new, one of the reasons I bought him because he was tagged as a Jungler, but the general consensus is that he is not a competitive jungler because his clear time is so low, and his form of sustain leaves him vulnerable in pvp fights for the next 2 minutes.

The increased gold gain sounds promising for him, but I don't know yet :x
To be completely honest with you, I don't think Volibear is a good jungler both on Live and in the new one currently in iteration. He feels currently much better suited for Top Lane.

Unlike other champions where I feel there are small tweaks we can make to ensure they are viable in the new jungle, Volibear feels fairly off and would need some significant changes (both buffs and nerfs) to switch him more into a jungle role.

If you're going to change the jungle monsters to be stronger, then consider making it so that Fiddlesticks could have more health, because if not, he will not be able to take on the Golem once pulled, and he won't be able to jungle effectively.
Fiddlesticks has proven to be strong in internal tests. His level 1 can be a bit scary if you don't rune or mastery at all for at least some early mitigation, but other than that, he's pretty solid.

Honest I think this just made the game to passive, got to be optimistic though
Well jungle pressure is a double-edged sword. 

Sure junglers can create action by ganking, but overbearing gank presence in and of itself causes lane passivity. Why would you ever risk harassing or going for a kill on your lane opponent if you know their jungler is just going to pop out and take you down?

How's trundle? I got gold with him S1 and now he sucks. Tell me good things. (please)
Actually just hopped on the internal server to do a jungle run with him.

To say the least, it's pretty impressive. His passive and Q debuff provide him with fairly good resilience in the jungle and the single target changes have definitely benefited his clear speed.

Couple this with what I know about late game Trundle with items (hint: it's pretty scary if he ults the right targets...), I think he has a better place in this new jungle.

So, from my understanding, the first few levels in the jungle will be built around getting through your initial clear then considering the risk and rewards of a potential gank. These changes though are making me think that about 70% of the time the jungler is either going to go back to buy or just continue farming, and that ganks won't come around until levels 5 or 6. I'm sure that early ganks will be possible, but only on certain champs who are able to come out of the new jungle with higher health.
Pretty good summary of what the early flow looks like for most junglers. 

I still think that early ganks can be chosen opportunistically (ex: top lane if way over pushed to the turret) even with non-optimal early gank junglers, but it's no longer an automatic thing unless you are someone like Lee Sin or Shaco who are built to gun for early ganks.

Does Jax benefit from this new single-target jungle? I've always felt his armor was low because of his dodge ability, but after that's gone he takes huge amounts of damage from the jungle monsters.

Would Jax be due for an armor buff, or is he still a decent jungler?
Jax is actually one of the champions I feel has possibly become overpowered with the changes.

He has strong clearing speeds (Counter Strike for AoE and Empower and his passive for single target) and decent resilience (Counter Strike dodging) in the jungle. His ganks are scary because of Leap + Counter Strike stun. He also scales monstrously with the increased gold for later game.

We're monitoring him very closely.

Staikk tell us more about the EXP and Gold changes...

Will jungle be worth a another solo lane again?
It's hard to sum up since it can vary so much based on jungler type and performance.

Most internal game end results have shown that strong farm junglers (especially when factoring in successful ganks and lane sharing/covering) can keep up in gold with the lanes and often end up with experience levels slightly between the solo lanes and the duo lane.

Would it be safe to assume that the new jungle also indirectly gives Fiora a large buff then? Fiora and Jax have some pretty similar mechanics, they both have gap closer, a way to negate auto-attacks (Riposte for Fiora, Counter-strike for Jax), and AS steroids. The things that Jax has over Fiora are CC and AoE damage, but Fiora also has built in sustain with her passive to kind of off-set that.
I feel Fiora is significantly weaker than Jax in the jungle.

She has no AoE at all so the smaller monsters are a non-trivial time sink for her. Her resilience is much lower considering she only gets to negate 1 attack as opposed to the many Jax dodges at each camp. Additionally her ganks are significantly less scary due to no CC.

How are the new items going to impact in lane?

Because, meanwhile i'm happy to see new ap jungle items, i feel it could break mid lane, as the state is it now, like wriggles is still a strong pick in top lane for brusiers (even if is not that common in competitive play) 

Or make huge part of even more early dragon pressure due the mid laner can now, contribute with the jungler who already have a wriggles to stack damage, and make something like a 2 man, lvl 5 dragon or something like that.
We tried to ensure that jungle items were non-optimal to laners. This doesn't mean that there's no possibility that someone may buy the AP Spirit Stone mid lane to help farm wraiths or do fast Dragons and Barons. We're open to the possibilities and will address problems only if they are actual problems.