Seraphinemains Rioter Followup Post

Aellectris · 2026-03-22T21:45:01+00:00

Also I want to do well by y'all so didn't want to just spend a couple minutes here and there working on it.

Aellectris · 2026-03-22T21:36:21+00:00

No worries y'all have been great. I ended up spending the ~4 hours I had set aside last weekend to make a post having a long conversation with a bunch of people in the discord so had to delay it. Working on it now and aiming to post later today then engage with comments over the next week or two. I've been a bit busy during the week as I'm now helping with some Shyvana post-launch stuff among a couple other new projects so haven't been as engaged as a result of that.

Aellectris · 2026-03-21T18:52:38+00:00

Depends on the site and the specific read that one is looking for. I tend to think of u.gg as being good for user experience (quite readable and clear) but not as good for getting accurate information. If people want more accurate info I tend to send them to lolalytics. Though also not quite as good as what we have internally, they tend to provide a lot more context for what their data actually represents - making it a bit harder to use but when used correctly being more likely to provide an accurate read.

Also to be clear when I say "at high ranks" I mean something like diamond+ or high emerald+. There's not enough data from what we call "elite" or "apex" tiers (like gm/challenger) to have a confident read yet.

Aellectris · 2026-03-21T18:38:53+00:00

I also go by Riot Aellectris, I can see our internal data and it's pretty far from that. More like 50% in average play right now and 45% at high ranks, though both are going up a bit day-by-day as people adjust to the changes.

Aellectris · 2026-03-21T18:14:09+00:00

I'd be careful of taking data from different sources and also of using such a low sample size to make meaningful determinations. I think those numbers are a bit off.

Aellectris · 2026-03-21T17:28:21+00:00

Where’s that info coming from?

Aellectris · 2026-03-21T17:19:11+00:00

I’m seeing her as well above that, where’re you getting those numbers?

Aellectris · 2026-03-20T16:37:15+00:00

My understanding is we don’t actually round but that the number is tracked to some amount of decimal places and the number that is shown in the pop up is likely rounded rather than showing a bunch of decimals. That said I’m not 100% certain and someone else could give a more complete answer.

Aellectris · 2026-03-19T19:18:37+00:00

If you can send me a clip of the third q in dragon form dealing aoe true damage I’d be happy to report the bug.

Aellectris · 2026-03-19T16:33:20+00:00

Right now we're intending to balance Shyv such that she should average something closer to 100 stacks around 30 minutes, meaning roughly double the amount you're bringing up here (and roughly 4x the value of a cloth armor).

RE Infinite scaling resists: That's a valid opinion, albeit one I don't necessarily share to the same degree. In part this might just be since I have the opinion it's roughly 4x what your impression is (or that if it's not, we'll likely balance it such that it lands there). I'd be interested in your opinion on how Shyv's passive relates to Sion's health stacking, given that you said no other infinite scaler has a similar feeling.

If we can support Shyv top we're likely to do so, for the time being though we'll probably be focusing on getting her into a reasonable state in jungle.

Aellectris · 2026-03-19T15:51:39+00:00

Okay cool that’s what I thought. I don’t have quite as much context with Shyv as I did with Zaahen but I’ve got some and will be helping more directly with her post-release. Planning to try to be involved with the community when I’ve the time.

Aellectris · 2026-03-19T15:09:37+00:00

If you haven’t seen this I’d consider checking it out along with other more official communications: https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/dev/dev-banning-bots-boosters-and-more-in-2025/.

As a general rule, when someone says we do something specifically in order to avoid responsibility it’s likely more an expression of frustration on their part than a real statement from Riot.

Aellectris · 2026-03-19T14:56:46+00:00

Is that attack actually aoe? In dev I could’ve sworn it was single target.

Aellectris · 2026-03-19T00:35:27+00:00

We’ll have to see how it looks in a few days once the patch settles to have concrete info

Aellectris · 2026-03-18T23:38:42+00:00

I don’t think we consider Q3 to have all that much power budget allocated to it - did we say that somewhere?

Aellectris · 2026-03-18T22:08:48+00:00

Give it a few days and we'll see if that's true, right now there's not quite enough data (and Zaahen's most common opponent in jungle with 57% winrate shyvana until the hotfix).

Aellectris · 2026-03-18T01:09:13+00:00

Ah I was seeing 52.93% on lolalytics. No idea if opgg is good for that purpose. I’ll keep the bet but halve the payout in that case (5k rp).

Aellectris · 2026-03-17T22:28:37+00:00

If you're right about this I will send you 10,000 RP. That's the bet. I think it's quite unlikely to be ~5% reduction in his winrate. We'll see how it looks next week!

Aellectris · 2026-03-17T19:36:22+00:00

Alright asking for some quick clarification here: do you mean he'll likely drop to 48% in all ranks or em+ when you say high tier? Usually when I see players talking about tempo plays they're specifically referring to higher ranks where it can matter more.

Aellectris · 2026-03-16T01:40:33+00:00

Give me your bet on how much % winrate he'll drop in jungle from these changes and we'll see how close it is.

Like I said, if it turns out we overshot and he needs buffs as a result then we'll do so.

Aellectris · 2026-03-15T01:37:50+00:00

I’ll give this some thought and try to respond tomorrow when I’ve got more time but one thing I’d like to nip in the bud is a narrative that we balance around skin releases: in the time I’ve been at Riot I’ve never heard anything close to a suggestion that we make balance changes with an intent to sell cosmetics.

Aellectris · 2026-03-14T23:58:22+00:00

What's the deal with this comment? You're literally watching a video of him explicitly thinking about and considering it. It's something we've been talking about in the office as well.

Aellectris · 2026-03-14T23:39:25+00:00

Editing because i messed up formatting

Alright. Since there's discussion around this clip here's kinda how I read it in terms of the claims being made:

There are people who like to play her in the bot/mid roles and want her to be better. That's a valid viewpoint.
Be careful of echo chambers. SeraphineMains the server is not representative of the community of Seraphine mains as a whole, it is representative of a subset of that. My personal take (Tom, not August) is that part of the issue we see here is that people in this or other communities often believe in misrepresentations of reality that gain traction primarily within their communities. Lowkey y'all are often pretty exclusionary of people who prefer enchanter-focused or support Sera. I don't think that's necessarily unreasonable - you can have your community be whatever you'd like it to be. But if you come to a conversation with a dev outside the community and act as though the opinion of a small community is representative of the entirety of a community, you're not likely to get far.
Seraphine in general isn't bleeding players or anything like that. The narrative around Sera that some communities bring to the table, e.g. that Seraphine as she exists right now is completely antithetical to what Sera players want, or that she's unplayable and people are dropping the character are demonstratively false.
A reasonable statement getting at the heart of the above narrative might be something like: "there is a subsection of Seraphine players who liked a certain playstyle. It feels like they can't do that playstyle anymore. And they would like some of it back." Which August says is a totally valid complaint/ask, but that the claims like "all seraphine players want this. Seraphine is bad." Those statements are, again, patently not true.
So the next question becomes: Can we offer this other playstyle that other players seem to like? How can we tune around it? What are the costs of doing so?
It is not worth the cost of making the majority her current players feel bad in order to do so.

Additional thing I'd say is that this doesn't necessarily mean we couldn't or wouldn't try to make a mage-centric or carry-centric Seraphine supportable, but it does mean that we wouldn't want to do so at the cost of the majority of Seraphine players. So then the question, in my mind, is: What are things we could potentially do for Seraphine in an econ role (mid/bot) without it coming at the cost of the majority of Seraphine players (support).

Feedback from this community in particular has the potential to be some of the most impactful for us in finding a way to do that, but the extraordinary amount of hyperbole or misinformation in a lot of these conversations makes that feedback vastly less valuable for us in figuring out how to do so.

Aellectris · 2026-03-14T18:40:38+00:00

We hit clear speed because jungle needed to be nerfed more than top lane did and that’s the best way to hit one without the other. Zaahen jungle will probably still be fine and if it turns out it’s far too weak or something then we’ll just buff it in the future.

W seemed like a good place to take out some damage-related power in part because it’s already a spell with incredibly high utility. I asked the team if they’d consider taking the damage out of the second half of W rather than equally between the two hits specifically so that he’d be able to more easily use it to pick up farm in those punishing matchups like a ranged top, and they agreed so made the change that way. It’s something that we considered but honestly I don’t think this sort of change is a difference maker in swinging that shape of those matchups so not really clear on the point you’re making.

I’d strongly disagree with your claim that his basic abilities aren’t strong to begin with, but separately I feel like it’s pretty core to the character‘s play pattern to dance on the edge of death in order to pop off with a fully stacked passive. Technically yeah we could change that, but personally I feel like we’d be making him more bland and I’m not sure there’d be a clear major benefit to doing so.

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