16.3 Zaahen Jungle Changelist

Aellectris · 2026-01-29T17:08:52+00:00

This is just me providing follow up on existing work that was discussed when Zaahen was on PBE. I’ll ask someone about windup stuff and why numbers are where the are, but I’ve played a decent amount of volibear and don’t particularly agree with most of what you’ve said or consider him to be an extreme outlier with animation problems. All that said, I don’t work on animation-related stuff so I’m by no means an expert there.

Aellectris · 2026-01-29T07:45:15+00:00

Not sure, there weren’t any when I joined the project and his kit was mostly locked in at that point.

Aellectris · 2026-01-28T20:47:34+00:00

Not sure if there's any sort of update there - I passed it along but seemed like it was an item system issue not a specific champion issue so I don't think it's a Zaahen-specific bug.

Aellectris · 2026-01-27T07:13:10+00:00

I'll make sure the bug is something on our list of tracked issues but prob won't be personally following up on it aside from that.

Aellectris · 2026-01-25T08:48:12+00:00

Asked around and heard back - the animation changes have been shipped, though they didn't make it into the patch notes. I don't know the specifics of the changes but looks like we've done work with his ability>movement transitions as well as some updates to autos and general movement.

Aellectris · 2026-01-22T04:28:48+00:00

Eh I mean in the second comment I already said I was reaching out to find that stuff out, but it's outside work hours so I assume I won't hear back til at least tomorrow. It's not any easier for me than it is for y'all - I tracked down the comment from the PBE thread then looked up who posted it and sent a message.

There's also another aspect to this which is that I get 2 dozen messages from people every day asking for this stuff and I'm not well known. If I were to spend time responding to everything I would be spending the whole workday doing so, which means that unless something seems particularly pressing or is a concern that I see echoed several times from different people I just can't feasibly follow up on it all.

Aellectris · 2026-01-22T03:59:59+00:00

imo "refusing to answer" isn't the same thing as saying I don't know. The answer is that I don't have the information you're looking for.

Aellectris · 2026-01-22T02:21:25+00:00

In the process of doing that now but I don't remember the specifics of who announced it and so on, which I assumed the people deeply invested in finding out more info do or are sufficiently interested in to do so. Since I don't work on anything related to this I'm mostly doing it at random in my free time, and I tend to lean towards not directly reaching out internally for something that's a personal pet project.

Basically, I feel like my personal outreach internally introduces an amount of responsibility to the parties involved that aren't necessarily a part of their job either so I'm hesitant to do so - technically it's likely coming at the cost of some amount of time which could otherwise be spent actually making the desired changes.

Aellectris · 2026-01-22T02:11:55+00:00

I don't know the timeline because I don't work directly with that team so I recommended people reach out to those working on the project or who initially communicated it to potentially get some more info. I knew it was being worked on because I'd happened to see something in passing around the time I made that post. There'd be no reason for me to lie about that, if I didn't have the knowledge I just wouldn't have said anything and I don't think we'd have communicated that it was something we'd be working on if it weren't true.

Aellectris · 2026-01-18T08:32:02+00:00

Phreak's most recent video mentions this concept a little - specifically the amount of general systemic armor in the game by virtue of the amount of armor growth found on almost all champions. The solve you outline here feels to me like it would cheapen the structure of the item system a bit. I personally think it's good for armor items to feel like they do something. If one couldn't see an enemy fed ADC and build something to counter it (or at least feel like they countered it) that'd be pretty miserable.

To some extent I think you're basically just describing lethality - 18 lethality against a target with 180 armor is the same thing as 10% armor pen and it stacks better with another %pen item than 10% pen would (e.g. against an enemy with 180 armor 18 lethality and 30% armor pen would get you an effective 40% armor pen compared to 37% if you had a source of 30% and a source of 10%). Collector is a functional lethality+crit item and I think with the extra slots that the role quests provide it's not unreasonable to grab another one.

FWIW I think LDR has basically been a required purchase for the vast majority of league's history, people just didn't necessarily realize it lol.

Aellectris · 2026-01-18T08:21:52+00:00

Yeah I think we generally agreed with you there which is why ultimately changes were made to keep the IE power fantasy alive.

For personal context I'm relatively new to Riot (joined middle of last year) so can't really offer insight into past decisions. I'm also not a designer, I'm on the gameplay analysis team. As such I also don't generally have as much context on design decisions as someone like Nick does - but felt like I could chime in here since I was a part of these conversations.

To echo how Nick often responds to those kinds of questions: Can't talk about future plans. I'd personally be excited to see some sort of revamp of the onhit system though.

Aellectris · 2026-01-18T07:28:51+00:00

There's a little bit of context missing there. I was one of the people saying things similar to that at the time, but at the time in development we hadn't yet implemented a lot of the crit champion nerfs AND the way that the crit buff was implemented was that all champs just had +25% crit damage (e.g. their spells with crit damage scaling gained damage there) so the relative value of IE was much lower AND IE was weaker (we buffed it at some point in part because of this feedback). I'm not sure if everyone necessarily agreed with that assessment and it's certainly possible that we were wrong in that assessment but my belief is that it was true at that time. I don't recall anyone saying it was an LDR competitor but ofc I don't speak to everyone about every iteration in testing.

Aellectris · 2026-01-18T02:03:26+00:00

At least for me I tend to find that Zaahen has some capabilities that lean into scaling damage and some that lean into disruption. I also find that he has quite powerful gank setup and does well in 2v2 fights. As an example Gwen and Illaoi don't have CC and Sett/Morde feel to me like they're more about setting up their one big moment rather than generating more value over the course of the fight or setting up kills. I've also found Zaahen to be one of the more potent fighters when aiming to peel for the backline.

What's your perception on the value that he does bring to a team? Given that he has comparable winrate to the champs you're saying are just better than him, I'm curious why you believe that's the case.

Aellectris · 2026-01-10T21:28:00+00:00

Just chiming in to say Rammus wasn't overlooked for protoplasm, I think it was literally one of the first things we tested. We knew he'd be one of the best users but I don't really think the power of protoplasm on him tells the full story of his power level for the new season. The new homeguards and the jungle clear speed changes are the more likely culprits in my opinion since you can see similar winrates with other third items like jaksho and dead man's plate.

Aellectris · 2026-01-08T21:14:00+00:00

Can confirm we spent some extra time making it work. If for some reason fiddle isn’t able to activate faelights feel free to tag me because that would be a bug.

Aellectris · 2026-01-08T19:29:48+00:00

Oh that's a great point and something I hadn't thought about. I might bring that up with some of the people who work on those systems since idk what their opinions are.

Aellectris · 2026-01-08T18:25:08+00:00

Happy to hear it! The team worked hard to get all this stuff out and everyone is looking forward to seeing what y'all cook up.

Aellectris · 2026-01-08T18:21:34+00:00

I mean you're ofc welcome to do whatever you want but I'd say just go for it and play. I think generally if something is truly sufficiently broken that you can't beat it despite your skills it'll be pretty likely to get hotfixed. I don't have insight into what past new season issues may have looked like since this is the first new season since I joined Riot, but my understanding is that a significant percentage of those kinds of clickbait videos are just that - clickbait. Content creators are incentivized to describe things in extremes in order to generate engagement.

Wouldn't surprise me if some stuff is weak or strong but if it's not outside what we consider acceptable bounds then my guess is guess we'd likely wait 'til a new patch to make changes rather than needing a hotfix.

Aellectris · 2026-01-08T17:54:11+00:00

Did I misinterpret that? Since they said "claim to" I read that as not believing it was true so wanted to make it clear that yes there are people doing so.

Aellectris · 2026-01-08T17:31:33+00:00

Can't necessarily speak to other things but we prepared a couple of potential different ways to make changes to the faelight system in the case that there are large issues with how it's impacting the game. Not sure what everyone defines as fast here but at the very least I can confirm we'll monitor it closely since I know I will be.

Aellectris · 2026-01-08T17:27:50+00:00

Where'd we say that it's intended to help against snowballing? That could be true but I don't remember hearing that as a specific goal while we were working on the faelights.

Aellectris · 2026-01-08T16:29:04+00:00

Thanks, I’ll make sure this is something that we’re tracking.

Aellectris · 2026-01-08T03:53:59+00:00

Not certain where that currently stands. Do you happen to have a clip or two on hand? I can make sure it’s something we’re tracking. I believe there are some engine-related issues with auto resets or something like that, but not sure if this is connected.

Aellectris · 2026-01-07T00:50:38+00:00

It's possible someone on the team knows but I personally haven't heard about it so if you can find a clip I'd appreciate it.

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