2013, ¿Os gusta Teemo? pues viene su padre.

Continue reading for posts concerning Darius's balance, a reminded on preseason balance, Scarizard discussing his thoughts on what makes a jungler a jungler, and confirmation that Sivir is not the next champion to be visually updated.

The Future of Darius
CertainlyT took a little time to discuss some regrets he has with Darius's kit and what the future may hold for the Hand of Noxus:

"... In Darius' case, I regret including an attack speed slow on Crippling Strike and making Hemorhage damage type magic. I did these things as last minute reactions to concerns from our live designers about his viability (at the time, Draven would just 1v1 him even in the rare case that Darius could get to Draven and Darius was considered hard countered by cloth+5pot starts). I should have just designed him in a way that was logical and let our player base figure out where and how to best use him."

He continued on, saying:

"... It's unclear what should be done to Darius. He's balanced, has clear strengths and weaknesses, and is much less matchup dependent than the average forum post would have you believe. Even if we remedied some of the specific complaints about him now, any bruiser that does not lean heavily on raw statistical bonuses to be successful will often generate a lot of frustration from their opponents. Raw stats tend to play out almost unnoticeably over time whereas abilities manifest their power in dramatically noticeable moments. Take Jarvan's Demacian Standard -- it's primary power is in the armor/AS boost it gives, but a good number of players don't even notice it exists.

I would say that, in the case of changing Darius' bleed damage to physical, be careful what you wish for, you might not like it."

CertainlyT finished by mentioning he plans to correctly the previously discussed problems of Darius toting around magic damage and an attack speed slow on his W, saying:

"I will get rid of them. It takes time to test changes and to assess what needs to be done to compensate for them. They also weren't possible prior to Season 3 when armor was ridiculously undercosted relative to its power.

It's worth noting that we have a lot of lane bullies, of which Darius is only one. If you straight nerf Darius, then people who want the lane bully experience will just play Garen or Renekton, champions that *actually* counters all other melee champions (Darius does not... a lot of melee champions have decent matchups against him)."

Issues with the Preseason Balance
When questioned about upcoming plans to "fix" the jungle, CertainlyT dropped off a small reminder to ease the minds of summoners troubled by the recent preseason changes.

"I can say that Statikk is still iterating on the jungle. Remember, this is the pre-season for a reason: the game is in a huge state of flux that will hopefully make it much more dynamic and interesting. If any Rioter promised you it would be perfect on release or that there would not be hiccups along the way, please direct them to me ;-)"

What Makes A Jungler?
Scarizard, an associate live designer, chimed in on a thread about "what makes a jungler in Riot's eyes" and give his thoughts on what defines the role.

"I think something that makes a champion successful in the jungle is how much that champion values - and can thrive - being in Fog of War. In Rengar's development, we knew that he didn't have a competitive clear time, but he also didn't need it - his lane-ganking (with Thrill of the Hunt) or just basic sidelane ganks utilizing his passive along with Empowered Bola Strike made him incredibly strong there.

Kha'Zix, Elise, Diana, and Vi as well all had a significant number of jungle tests - even if we didn't expect that position to be their primary/popular roles, they are all champions that have strong dueling/cc and prefer to get the jump on the opponent.

Zed is a champion where i'm probably the most happy with how his jungling turned out - CertainlyT and i got to work very closely on Zed, and at the time he was a poor jungler at best. He was functioning as a solo laner just fine, mind you, but when he was only a laner (and balanced to be one) he was incredibly frustrating...on demand slow (at the time it wasn't tied to mimicked shadow slash) and potent ranged poke + super escape made laning against a Zed so frustrating some of us didn't even want to participate in playtests. However, opening him up to play in the jungle allowed us to not only drain some of the strengths of his laning, but also increase his mobility/trickiness across the board - the Zed player was casting W more often and jumping over jungle walls, and the opponents had specific windows of time they would be expecting him within the laning phase, which ended up just being more fun across the board.

Of the champions i've mentioned, i think their jungles are quite potent - but almost all of them have to skill/build/play differently to account for their new role. Elise forgoes a sustained damage build and prioritizes raw damage and approaches with rappel to hit-confirm a cocoon into instant-kill. Vi, Zed, and Rengar will all stalk opponents from shaco-esque angles of approach.

tl;dr IMO, the more a champion can make use of burst damage/mobility from the jungle, the more potent that champion can be played there, whereas heroes like Garen/Darius who favor accruing advantage over time and attrition-based combat don't get to exercise the full extent of their strengths. I believe junglers are less 'Can this person jungle?' and more 'Why do you want to jungle them?'" 

He continued on to explain the thought process being creating new champions and how they don't start typically start the process by assigning a specific role, like jungling, to champions in development.

"I feel like T hit this one pretty well, but we don't just say 'Time for a jungler, guys!' Or 'We definitely want this person to go toplane!' We have things like 'fighter, mage, assassin' and all sorts of subtypes that influence the design, but other than 'AD Carry' i think they are all pretty open to lane assignments (Varus as well was playtested midlane quite a bit from what i hear).

It's usually more important to our champ designers to create an experience - get a cohesive kit down, then figure out where it fits into the grand scheme of things. Mages and supports (Mid and botlane) are often times interchangeable. Toplaners and junglers are as well, in a lot of cases. For Vi, i remember having lots of conversations with Gypsylord about her production and not really until the last month and a half did we sit down and say 'okay where do we 100% expect to see her?'

Sometimes we push boundaries, and sometimes we don't. Looking forward to the future, we have some really cool designs that, in a co-ordinated setting, could lend themselves to changing up lane assignments or working in different teamcomps, but i think we've always done that. The meta is the meta, and we don't really decide it. Xypherous i think did this really well with lulu and nautilus specifically, in that Naut is a tank/initiator and Lulu is a support/enabler no matter where they are played. Both champions can be played multiple builds and in multiple roles, but the kit defines what they do, not where they go.

Echoing CerT, having champions 'be good at one role' isn't always the best - Shyvana is my example. I wasn't around at the time, but that champion feels like she was designed to be a jungler through and through - which means her state of balance is binary. 'Is she good at jungling?' If yes, she's probably top-class due to her mechanics. If no, she has no place on a team.

We definitely have a lot of characters like this (usually one build/role) that can be balanced, it just means it's often times trickier than saying 'X mechanic/build is abusive, but at least they can still perform with Y build/in different role to compensate', similar to how Zyra players used her as support after the nerfs to midlane. She was still incredibly potent after the first round of nerfs, but the option for her to play bottom was still there as something alternative she can do if her pew pew gets nerfed." 

While these two posts aren't extremely revealing or anything, I thought they proved quite interesting.

Sivir's Visual Update not next.
Finally, here is a quote., from RiotAmes, saying that Sivir will not be the next champion to get a visual update.

"We will absolutely relaunch her at some point - but she's not next. The relaunch team ( and the rest of Riot ) are keenly aware of how poorly Sivir stands up next to our newer champions especially." [/spoiler]

" Barring unforeseen circumstances, yes."

"Well, we work on champions as far as 8 months ahead of time. So yes, there is at least one more support in the works. And HE...is one of the coolest characters I have seen in League of Legends." 

"We refocused where the lore department should focus. Rather than giving small bits of trivial information we instead focused on drilling down on our IP internally. Now we feel that we can do more interesting and better things. 2013 will be a good year for lore!" 

"I hope we offer players alternate announcer packs, though honestly it hasn't come up that often. I recently brought this up to one of our design departments, and we are going to look into it again." 

"Well, our primary focuses in doing champion updates are as follows: make the character more fun, fix the core problems, and don't remove what make the character fun in the first place. So yes we redesign characters to make them more fun.

That being said, I don't believe we would update a character like Wukong. We specifically made his kit simple with easy combos and a single ability that can be used for amazing effects. Take for example a lot of our early champions. Yes they are easier to use than our newer champions, but that is by design. We want champions that new players can join the game and fully understand on their first play through. Having a wide range of characters in both skill level and play style only improves our play experience." 

"Still planned, we just need the art resources to do it. Basically we had it mostly done and then Xyph was put on the S3 item overhaul. You can guess which project was more important."[/spoiler]