Short Term Gameplay Project List

Something I thought would be good to update you all on are the various improvements and additions that the SR team has planned for the next few months. Timelines may change, and nothing is guaranteed to ship, but we still want to share our plans and goals for a few small projects in flight.

• Rammus - Almost done, so close! We’re hoping to wrap up the tuning and art changes to get the small Rammus update in for patch 11.8.
• Sona - Some of you may have seen already, but we’re working on some buffs and quality of life changes to Sona. Overall goal is to clean up some of the feel bad mechanics (like the mana cost restrictions) and build up her fantasy as a “super scaling with AP” late game enchanter. We’re removing the mana refund when granting an ally aura and lowering costs across the board. Also we’re adding a new permanent stacking buff that gives her Ability Haste and AP throughout the game.
• Taric - Taric isn’t in a terrible spot, but we think he’s being held back from the best state he could be in because of the unhealthy synergy he has with Yi using a jungle funnel strat. In particular the Taric E + Yi Q combo removes the intended counterplay. So our plan is to make adjustments to the way that combo works, giving us some room to buff Taric more generally.
• Top Lane Agency - We talked about split pushing last time, and paired with that we want to put a bit more power into the top lane position generally. We’re still exploring a few different options, but a few promising leads include buffing items primarily used in top lane, adjusting turret plating to allow for more gold opportunity for top, and adjusting objective focus towards top side. These changes will take a bit of iteration because systemic work like this often risks incentivizing bad strategies that we’ve seen in the past like lane swaps.
• New Tank Item - We had talked previously about a new “split push matching” tank legendary in the works. With the loss of a few split push focused items over the years we wanted to fill the gap for tanks who wanted to create solo pressure in a side lane. We’re very close to a design that we’re happy with, and starting to move into the next phase of fully building out the item with final art and scripting.
• Tahm Kench - Tahm Kench update isn’t forgotten, but still has a good chunk of work to do on the art and audio side to be shippable. We’re still making slow and steady progress.
• New Enchanter Item - We’re still iterating on designs for a personal defenses focused enchanter legendary. A lot of the high level goals are testing well, but we’re still ironing out the exact details that we think gives us a unique and healthy item to fill this space.

Keep in mind, outside of these small projects we have many big changes still in flight - new champs, VGUs (Mundo and Udyr), Preseason (top secret still), and Player Behavior systems.

Ranked LP Adjustment

We have a small but positive adjustment for our ranked LP system that just shipped in patch 11.7. It’s a small shift in LP gains to make them slightly smaller but more positive skewed. So smaller gains and losses might take a player getting (+16/-16) to (+14/-14). And positive skew would take a player from (+14/-17) to (+15/-15). The specific differences will vary from person to person, because of everyone’s unique rating and match history.

Thanks again for playing with us.