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Xypherous - Associate Technical Designer



There was a few points on gunblade that we took into consideration when changing the item that the patch preview glossed over as well:



1. It was beginning to be thought of as a viable AD/SV item - Riven/Renekton.



While it wasn't an optimal item for them, if people were so allured by the AD/SV/Slow quality of gunblade to the extent that they would ignore the fact that they wasted 70 AP worth of stats and still felt it was "worth it" - so to speak, that creates a kind of trap build if it isn't viable and an unintuitive one if it is viable - neither of which are great scenarios to be in.



Although, that reminds me that I need to follow up on what items are being tested.



2. Champions that used to have AD or AP scaling have mostly been changed to AD and AP scaling.



Gunblade's hybrid stats were made incredibly gold efficient because a lot of the characters who could conceivably want it were mostly limited to using one half or the other - For example, Katarina and Jax didn't have mixed AD/AP ratios on a few of their abilities. As they scale off both statistics now, gunblade no longer needs to offer such high gold efficiency to be worth it on these characters.

Is it because of Dominion?
Xypherous - Associate Technical Designer
What Dominion is doing is showing people that - even if every single champion is 'fed' - the amount of scaling that being 'fed' gives them is wildly varying.

The team-centric setting of SR does a good job of generally hiding various imbalances and statistical outliers due to the fact that you can shut someone out or lane dominance and such - but Dominion is kind of an intensive pressure test of repeated small scale encounters over and over again - and just how different characters become even if both characters have roughly the same level of farm.

What I don't understand if you guys at riot have acknowledged double dipping passives are a problem, you continue to make them anyway like on xerath.

RiotAmes - QA Analyst
Preface: I'm not on a design team. I just talk to people at the company and use that with my own feelings to form an opinion.

The 'buy X to get X' is an interesting mechanic. On some characters, it creates a nice synergy with an expected play style. It causes problems when an item offers both of those stats, especially so when it works both ways. Does this mean the mechanic is bad? No, not really. It just allows certain items to be an issue.

Xyph hit on the biggest point behind the gunblade nerf earlier. Simply put, it was discovered to be good on many champions it was never intended for. Because it gave you decent stats no matter who was taking it, it started to show up in strange places. Why would Riven take a gunblade? But it works, at least a bit.

I think there's a handful of problems associated with items like this, but it mostly comes down to slot efficiency.

A bloodthirster costs 3000 gold total, and gives 100 AD and 25% Life Steal.
A will of the ancients costs 2100 gold total, and gives 80 AP and 25% Spell Vamp. A portion of this is an aura.

So, two slots, 5100 gold, 100 AD, 80 AP, 25% Life Steal, 25% Spell Vamp.

A Hextech Gunblade costs 3625 gold, for 75 ability power, 60 attack damage, 20% life steal, and 25% spell vamp.

For 1475 gold less, you're get all but 25 AD(assuming a fully farmed BT), 5 AP, and 5% Life Steal. However, you're preserving a slot for something else. This also doesn't factor in the item's active. I think Gunblade is strong without it. It's simply too slot efficient as an item. When you combine in other factors, such as its non-uniqueness, it gets even more crazy for characters who can make use of both sets of stats.

Even for characters who don't have passives that allow them to 'double dip', the item has too much going for it.
so were balancing around dominion now. Does that mean we can balance around TT as well?

Xypherous - Associate Technical Designer

From my experience, I don't believe balancing around Dominion was a primary consideration.

What Dominion does is give people lots and lots of data about how small-scale fights actually go, without the complication of the laning phase beforehand and lane assignments.

You see, right now on SR, the laning phase and lane assignments can essentially "hide" the power level of a character for many players, simply because the frequency of action/games/variance in those lanes creates huge noise for judging what a character does when he has items.

Dominion strips all that away - There is no laning phase and everyone has roughly equal xp/items - Dominion forces you to realize, very quickly, that no matter what you buy or do or how much gold you have, a character like Trynd or Jax will rip your face off if they have equal farm.

That said, no, I don't believe this change was done because of Dominion from what I know.


In my opinion, stat-conversions aren't as big of a deal when it's used as a supplementary stat bonus to make up for inadequacies.

Xypherous - Associate Technical Designer

My general thinking on this is that defensive to offensive stat conversions aren't a problem - because there comes to a point where you don't need more defense - that stat essentially "caps out" so to speak - because you have enough in terms of defenses.

A Rammus with 7,000 armor, is roughly about as tanky as a Rammus with 700 armor, in so far as he's pretty much immune to physical damage - conversely with Galio.

However, I view offensive to defensive passives as problematic - because in any realistic game there *isn't* a point where nuking someone harder is a bad thing - You always want more damage and just enough survivability to protect your last hit point. Offensive -> Defensive conversions cover this nicely. :/


i think xypherous want to homogenize all the hero lategame so that's why he is against the free stats passive

Xypherous - Associate Technical Designer

I'm still sad we changed Kayle's passive actually - Offense to Offense conversion is one of the more interesting ones, in my opinion. Defense to Offense works in our game, as shown by Rammus and Galio.

Even Tank Vladimir wasn't particularly egregious - another defense to offense conversion.

Of course, I still remain puzzled by why Atmogs feels egregious even though it's a defense to offensive conversion - Although I suspect it's a question of base damages instead of the conversion itself - Atmog's Riven is subpar at best, for example.


Was Riven's innate supposed to feel so snowballsy? Underfed, you don't really notice the difference. But build an IE and crit with it, and suddenly, you have a lot of damage that came from seemingly nowhere.

Xypherous - Associate Technical Designer

I'm fairly certain her passive doesn't crit, as it is coded like Sheen instead of like Parley, although I could be wrong.

But I was merely trying to heavily incentivize AD rather than snowballing out of control - Snowballing tends to be created when you have many multiplicative factors at hand, rather than spiking one statistic. (For example, Yi has an AS steroid, a psuedo crit and a base AD steroid - Thus allowing him to snowball like crazy.)


Why give it a great ratio and a terrible base?

Xypherous - Associate Technical Designer

See: Warmog's.

I'm of the opinion that a lot of tanky DPS have ridiculous base damages and utterly atrocious scaling - which is why they're all pigeonholed into triforce + tank items. Part of Riven's design was to be a test of this theory - If you gave someone the proper incentive and removed their base damages to force them to build AD - would they be viable? Would that even work? Why is buying AD such a hard sell?


That may be the case but the overall question i believe is whats going to be done about the champions who relied on the item as a core part of their build. Sure Riven may have taken a hit but you have to remember AD casters have no alternative but an item like this while Jax is pidgeonholed into using it because there is simply no other item that gives what he needs.

So by hitting gunblade you hit a problem but you also hurt champions that didnt need to be hit and were already struggling on certain aspects of the game. Even with this nerf akali will still run rampant and as the OP said i have a strong feeling that the champs that were indirectly nerfed will not be compensated further weakening them when they are already in a struggling state.

RiotAmes - QA Analyst

So, I played Akali for a long time, and quit for the last 3 or 4 months to try other champions. There are games with her where I was just completely useless- the tanky DPS meta was a big factor in that and heavy AOE/CC teams were the other part. Other games, where the enemy was mostly bursty AP champs or squishy ranged AD, I'd do very well.

The simple fact is that Akali, like some other champions, is an assassin. She is meant to take advantage of your weaknesses and kill one or more of you very quickly. It is what the role does. Assassins are also meant to get in and out quickly. None of these things are unexpected. Most of them can be countered with good game play. That said, if the gunblade nerf doesn't fix the issues that need to be fixed across the board, then I'm sure champions who need a closer look will get one. I have a lot of faith in our balance team, and moves such as nerfing the gunblade without nerfing the champions that are using it only reinforce my trust.

I don't really mind Dominion influencing balance decisions. Xypherous has pretty much covered why. As a player, and not an employee, I think it does a good job of showing what can happen. It highlights potential issues. So long as we're balancing with the understanding of how those changes effect SR, then I think it's a move in the right direction.


If everything we can say Akali does is just the role of an assassin, then why do we see her a top ban across a large span of ELO's in all modes of the game and not Katarina?

I think it's pretty obvious that Akali is in a much stronger position to thrive in the current balance state than the other assassins. Yes, on paper, technically, Talon can do the same "actions" as Akali. But when Talon goes in it is most likely to the death, and he has no natural sustain of any kind. He's not going to fight someone when he's at half health, win with 75% health, and then continue on to a triple kill. At least nowhere near as easily as Akali will.

RiotAmes - QA Analyst

I'm not in a position to argue whether or not she's too strong. I think that, given the opportunity to gain early kills, her potential goes up quicker than some other champions because of how well she behaves with a few key items. She still needs to build sustain, same as anyone else, in order to start getting close to the amount that you're mentioning.

I'll reiterate my stance on Dominion once more. I seem to be getting quoted with my caveat in place and then having it ignored. Dominion highlights potential problems. It is not realistic to expect that those problems will never show up on Summoner's Rift. All Dominion does is remove the laning phase and provide everyone with equivalent strength of items and experience. If a major problem presents itself in this environment, then that is something that should probably be looked at.

Everything I've said is personal opinion and doesn't reflect the views of our balance teams. As much as I like discussing things with everyone, the thread is turning in a direction that makes my opinions-good or bad-potentially more harmful than helpful, so I'll bow out.


Is it fair to say that the same Dominion balance logic works in reverse? That is to say, if a champion is not performing well even with high-end items, they will be looked at for immediate change? Or is the focus only on champions that over-perform in Dominion, even though they can be shut down on SR?

Xypherous - Associate Technical Designer

I don't see any reason why this wouldn't be true - Dominion gives you a lot of information and combat readiness on how characters scale. If it's apparent that no amount of gold and items will help a character, then it's a pretty good sign that the character has some scaling issues.

For example, I think Irelia highlights this really well on Dominion - After a certain point, even if she wanted to build more damage, she literally can't find a single gold efficient item - except I guess certain dominion items - Entropy, I think is a decent fit. (Although, I think that's because Entropy is insane. XD)

Of course, I'm not in live design so I can't tell you how these things are prioritized for change but Dominion gives us a wealth of information on combat tests on scaling/itemization/et al in a large scale environment and it gives players more information in a smaller compressed period on trying builds and fighting small scale encounters continuously.


So should the change be made for Dominion only since this is where the problem is actually a problem?

Xypherous - Associate Technical Designer

Let me reiterate, since I'm clearly not communicating as clearly I could be. Dominion does a lot to remove a lot of the noise you suffer on SR. That's not to say the same problem doesn't exist on SR, it's just more hidden because game starts are more highly variant on SR.

It's not that 'X is a problem on Dominion' - it's the sheer number of data points on equal item/xp characters that it gives in small scale fights without the noise of early laning phase - This kind of noise hides certain types of problems from player sight and designer sight - to the point where it isn't a "problem" - but it only isn't due to obscurity. Not being problematic due to obscurity isn't acceptable as it means that it just means that the abuse isn't just widely known - rather than actually not being a problem.