Gameplay Thoughts: What's Next?

Hello everyone, I'm Riot Axes, and today I'm going to talk about the follow-up plans for gameplay. The 2022 pre-season is currently in stable shape and as the year draws to a close, we would like to take this opportunity to talk about next year's arrangements.

Short-term plan

The overall landing situation of the 2022 pre-season is relatively stable, Hex Technology Yalong performed well, and the strategic point reward mechanism has gradually stabilized after adjustment. However, we are still actively observing the terrain and dragon soul of the alchemical technology Yalong. Based on current observations, we will introduce a small change in Patch 12.1: adding divination flowers to specific locations to improve the defender's experience in their own wild areas. We know that the new experience brought by Alchemy Technology Yalong will be exciting, and we will continue to pay attention to its performance.

At the same time, we're looking at other areas of the game. In version 12.1, summoner teleportation skills will be greatly adjusted. For the first 14 minutes, new teleportation skills have a longer cooldown and can only target towers. After 14 minutes, the cooldown is reduced and targets can be selected as in the current online version. In the 2021 season, teleportation will have too much impact on other breakouts in the early game. Our goal is to limit this effect and eliminate problems in some extreme cases, while retaining the ability to stabilize the inferior split, support late splits and create flanking attacking opportunities.

We will also adjust some of the warrior equipment. Specifically, all warriors now have to have the Straker Challenge Handguard, causing the half-flesh warriors (e.g. Deleus, Oroy) and light warriors (e.g., Fiona, Arrelia) to lose their distinction. We also plan to tweak several other pieces of equipment (most likely The Devour of Marmotius and Dance of Death) so that the heroes will have another option after abandoning Straker's Challenge Handguard. The go-live date for these changes is uncertain, but it will certainly be in the first half of 2022.

We're also preparing medium-sized adjustments for some of our heroes. The next two projects to be carried out at the beginning of the year are Gana and Aku, both heroes who were once popular and then gradually fell silent. The change, while not as large as Tam's redo, still carries considerable weight (analogous to the recent update to Lucian). Such work is progressing well so far that we are sorting out our workflows to better target and target next year. We will discuss this in detail shortly.

Long-term research

In the long term, we are looking at several larger areas. It should be noted that our current thinking in these areas is still very broad, and we have not determined a specific direction. Today's sharing is just to let you know what we think, but we can't guarantee that we will definitely come up with concrete results.

The first is burst damage. We are analyzing how and when high burst damage occurs and examining its impact on the gameplay process. We wanted the decisions made at key moments in the game to be exciting, but we also wanted to make sure the battles were easy to understand and gave the opponents a chance to counteract. The investigation has only just begun, but our current view is that explosive kills come too early and too many. We're thinking about a way to reduce damage output, at least in some cases, most notably by dealing damage to heroes with extremely low defenses later in the game. But this is not to remove the Assassins altogether; We know what's at stake, so we'll re-act on adequate research data. Friendly reminder: We do not guarantee any adjustments in this regard. Even if you adjust, the goal isn't a guarantee that you'll never be killed by a single blow, or forced promotion of the "Tank Alliance," or other exaggerated ideas.

Second, we think that the current system of props, runes, etc. provides too much healing and endurance. In 2021, we have done some work on this issue, but there is still a gap with the desired effect. We have not yet determined specific options, such as whether to drastically modify the treatment system in one step or to make small adjustments in small numbers and times. It also depends on how we eventually adjust the burst damage, because the longer it takes to kill the hero, the stronger the endurance effect.