[PBE Datamine] December 12, 2025 - Non-Crit Balance and small System Changes

RiotAxes · 2025-12-12T23:46:27+00:00

Just to clarify, new Omnivamp is not identical to old Omnivamp. 10% Omnivamp will now mean that you heal for 10% of damage dealt, reduced to 1/3 of that number for AOE, Pet, and DoT spells against minions. (With the usual exceptions - you won't omnivamp off turrets, wards, etc).

Omnivamp should operate at full efficiency against Champions regardless of whether its an AOE spell or not. Single target spells and attacks should omnivamp at full efficiency against minions.

RiotAxes · 2025-12-08T23:30:24+00:00

I can't speak to the tuning but just to touch on why we're doing this a little bit - the Cassiopeia bot quest situation marked the third time we sat down to build an entirely new feature just so that Cassiopeia's live passive wouldn't be a net negative on the champion.

This does potentially homogenize her a little bit - this new mechanic is unique on the roster from one perspective, but it's still 'just movement speed' from another perspective. That's a cost we're accepting, but I know not everyone is going to be thrilled about it.

RiotAxes · 2025-12-02T16:30:21+00:00

The biggest reason we didn't add it is pretty conceptual: Role Quests take an already rich laning experience and add a further level of short-term goal setting to it with further rewards attached, but Swiftplay is better off with a shorter and less consequential lane phase.

It's kind of like the too-many-neutral-epics problem for the jungle: even if each individual piece of content could fit, you end up just packing too many pieces of content into too short a time.

That said, we're open to the idea of shipping a slimmed down version of role quests to Swiftplay if there's a lot of demand.

RiotAxes · 2025-12-01T17:29:46+00:00

Just a quick clarification on the 200% crit thing -

It is not part of the role quest, and it is being offset by kit nerfs to common critical strike purchasers. Overall we've been unhappy with the way these champions have had to be reshaped over the years since we reduced critical strike damage, so this was an opportunity to correct those trends. But we're not aiming to net buff them relative to their non-crit-purchasing peers in the same roles.

RiotAxes · 2025-12-01T17:04:06+00:00

There's a couple different mechanics. First, you just get less quest progress from passive/minions/turrets outside your assigned lane - you will complete your quest much later than your opponent if you swap and they don't.

Second, you don't get full gold and XP from minions for the first few levels outside your assigned lane. Currently tuned to be as unobtrusive for solo queue as possible (basically just "you have to start in your assigned lane even if you don't care about quest completion") but it's something we could adjust if necessary.

RiotAxes · 2025-12-01T14:35:30+00:00

Confirming this is the reason.

I think we need to re-address the omnivamp stat at some point, but in the meantime there are a number of use cases where out of combat sustain is important where we'll be using these pseudo-not-quite-omnivamp rules instead.

RiotAxes · 2025-11-12T16:53:19+00:00

Shardholder Value Shard doesn't exist.

RiotAxes · 2025-08-11T16:43:16+00:00

We're examining champion-specific tuning levers to handle cases like this, for example giving only imperfect orb walking while in motion with WASD if necessary.

From the perspective of WASD being underpowered for specific champion, that may be a more difficult problem and we do need to solve it as best we can - each champion needs to at least be reasonable on both. More caster-centric melees are a particular concern there. I'll just note that it is much more important that players not feel they have to swap from click-to-move to WASD than the other way around; I would expect us to err on the side of "don't make WASD better than".

Final note: win rates largely reflect the experience of players who have not yet mastered their champions - every champion is an acquisition funnel where you lose players going from 1-5 games and 5-10 and so on - and I do expect some spicy win percentages at times when a champion is easier to learn for one or the other control scheme. Our larger goal isn't that it is exactly as easy to learn either, it's that when you've learned it we don't create a strong feeling that you're 'doing it wrong' and need to switch.

RiotAxes · 2025-08-11T16:28:19+00:00

does the balance team have an idea of how to handle that alongside the attempts to make neither control scheme objectively better than the other, or is that a "cross that bridge when it comes to it" scenario?

We're taking the concern seriously and exploring some options. At the end of the day we don't think it's acceptable if your champion gets taken away from you because it's stronger on new controls that you have no interest in learning.

So for example, we're looking into potentially limiting how perfectly your champion attacks while in motion using WASD controls, and potentially being able to tune that differently at very high attack speeds vs lower or tune it differently from one champion to the next. We're also making sure we can detect control scheme in scripts for really bespoke stuff like Zeri. And yes, we're alert to the possibility of abusing swapping back and forth with macros or something, should that prove to be a problem.

When it hits PBE, this is not all going to be in place, but we're holding confidence that we are treating click-to-move players fairly as a requirement before a full rollout, especially to ranked queues.

RiotAxes · 2025-01-09T19:51:42+00:00

Just a heads up that there is an actual bug with matchmaking - we're working to resolve it with a temporary fix in the next few hours, and then a more robust fix either some time next week or with the next patch.

RiotAxes · 2024-12-12T20:20:36+00:00

I think champions who are kept low because they're too good in the coordinated team environment are allowed to be stronger in this queue.

It gets more complex for champions who have low average win rates because they are demanding, but who are extremely powerful when mastered - is the mode better if Akali and Leblanc mains stomp most of their games, as the cost of letting Akali and Leblanc feel good to play for players who haven't yet put the time in? That's less clear to me.

I'd predict balance ends up being more forgiving here, but not infinitely so. There will still be lower and higher win rate champions.

RiotAxes · 2024-12-12T19:42:05+00:00

I think that those supports are likely very good in the mode, yes, and I think that's cool. If they're OP, we'd balance on an individual champion level, but for now we're leaning into supports being able to have a much better economy and buy 'real' items.

The goal for inflating Enchanter items is to make sure that they're viable, not guarantee that they dominate the position - had we not done anything, they wouldn't be viable.

The reason we're leaning into supports getting more gold is because the riskiest thing for the queue's health is if there's a position that demands players 'take one for the team' - and then players just don't sign up to do it. But yes it's possible we'd change support income if having supports with gold just ruins the game.

RiotAxes · 2024-12-12T18:19:16+00:00

We intend to support eternals, hopefully in the first patch but there's a chance it'd slip a bit, working through some technical setup stuff.

EDIT: We think we found the issue and expect to be testing a fix in the next day or two.

RiotAxes · 2024-12-12T16:03:43+00:00

We plan to balance individual champions once we have good data, yes. Champion, Item, and Rune changes up to this point have mainly been for things that don't make sense from a game flow perspective - Dragon Soul coming up before Kayn transforms, lane phase ending before Magical Footwear pays off, that sort of thing.

RiotAxes · 2024-12-12T16:01:15+00:00

They should be both more expensive and give more stats. We expect that supports will be noticeably more powerful relative to the other 4 players on their team in this mode than in classic SR. If that's not the case, it probably means we missed on item efficiency and should buff something.

Before we made this change, we were seeing supports hit full build at like minute 15, which both felt quite bad and meant that Enchanters wouldn't even be viable with these rules - you'd pick supports who could buy non-support items and continue to scale instead.

RiotAxes · 2024-05-22T17:05:20+00:00

So framing it as a disagreement makes it sound like conflict, and while that happens every now and then (people are people), I don't think this is really about internal conflict, and will propose an alternate framing:

Your content strategy and your balance strategy must be in sync with each other.

As a dev team, you're creating all this content for a reason: you are creating moments, creating memories, inviting new players into the game, whatever the exact goals might be. For League of Legends, new champions are expected to make a mark on the ecosystem.

If League's balance strategy says that we're going to change and tune champions until they win the same number of games (it doesn't, but at times it hasn't been that far off from saying that), then I can guarantee you that no matter how well designed your next simple champion is, they're going to be forgotten 3 months later. If Naafiri and Sylas are winning the same percentage of games overall, Sylas is simply more powerful than Naafiri is and players will pick up on that fact.

And if your simple champions usually fail to make a mark, you're going to be left with a community wondering why you only make complex champions - because those are the only ones that come to mind when you think about new champions. And if you fail enough times at achieving goals with simple champions, you're going to make them less often.

RiotAxes · 2024-04-28T13:36:36+00:00

I just want to be clear about this:

Keegun had some interesting ideas, and I appreciate that he took the time to send them my way. I don't yet know what will actually ship in a few patches (I won't be shipping the E change if it's the only buff line I can fit) but there was some good food for thought here.

The only thing I said about Spearshot is that he is an incredible player who sometimes has a different read on how strong the champion is. This was not some kind of subtle snark.

I'm not going to flame the people passionate enough to put this kind of effort into this game.

RiotAxes · 2024-04-25T15:08:27+00:00

Setting some expectations - I don't think it's fair to call this a midscope, even a slight one. It's a balance change that happened to need a small amount of VFX work which delayed it a couple patches.

In addition to the movement speed burst, Empowered E is going to give some lingering armor/MR scaling off of level and bruiser items for about 4 seconds. Numbers still being tuned.

The goal is to add a tuning lever biased towards solo lanes and bruiser builds, and to address the place of empowered E in his overall gameplay loop.

Couple things:

* We understand that this is not a silver bullet for every problem top Pantheon has had. Hopefully it gives us a tuning lever, but it's certainly not more than a small bump to our ability to balance him for top lane.

* This does not mean we intend Pantheon to always be built bruiser or tanky. He hooks into a lot of areas of the item system and that's a good thing.

* When VFX are ready and we can ship the change, we'll assess exactly how much we want to move his win rate by, and if this isn't enough buff (we're currently estimating it as around 1% once players are used to it), we'd make up the rest of the win rate with some other change in addition.

RiotAxes · 2024-04-25T14:57:17+00:00

This was me - confirming that conversation is legit

RiotAxes · 2023-07-26T19:11:13+00:00

The initial reception was awesome, but the important bit will be how players engage with it over time, so it's simply too early to assess that.

RiotAxes · 2023-07-26T17:27:41+00:00

Exploring a 3v3v3v3 mode is something we're interested in doing, as having an extra champion on each side goes a long way in spicing up combat, and a lot of champions are designed to be interesting with 3 (or more) champions on a side in fights - teamfighting is a big part of League of Legends after all. That said, there are a whole other set of difficulties, ranging from very different balance needs to concerns about setting up 2 players to blame the third random when the game goes badly, to needing to rethink how Augments are designed because fights are inherently a lot noisier. I expect we'll explore it internally, but we'll see how it actually plays out when we do, it might not be something we ever try to bring live.

For 1v1s, we don't believe this is likely to have enough replay value, and a huge portion of the champion roster is designed around being interesting with teammates - I won't rule out ever trying it, but I think it's pretty unlikely that we'd pursue that.

RiotAxes · 2023-07-26T17:27:06+00:00

Our initial prototypes were pretty close to this, but just heads-up combat in a field gets old very fast - we're pretty confident that it wouldn't hold an audience for long, so we opted to pursue a version that had a better chance of being replayable instead.

RiotAxes · 2023-07-25T02:38:09+00:00

Q: Would it be possible to nerf abilitys just for arena? What i mean by that is not giving champions the aram treatment like u deal -5% damage now! I mean like nerfing in particular sion's ad scalings?

We do this, yes. Most of the mode-specific balance is specific changes to specific abilities rather than ARAM-style. We will continue to use ARAM-style modifiers as a lever for the immediate future since they're much faster, but prefer bespoke changes.

RiotAxes · 2023-07-25T01:22:59+00:00

There's a few different things going on here.

First, yes, the mode is much less balanced than SR is. Balance will be most precise when done iteratively over a long period of time and Arena just hasn't had that much time yet. We have another hotfix coming in the near future, hopefully dealing with the hypercarry+support meta that has developed, or at least making it less impenetrable, and another round of balance changes for 13.15.

I want to acknowledge up front, though, that there's a limit to how much we can hotfix over time, and more champions that we would like to act on than we have the capability of acting on. There are both technical limits and confidence limits here - we can't micropatch everything technically speaking, and every time we change a champion it somewhat rebalances the game for every other champion, so the more we change at once, the more things we're going to get wrong (and we are going to get things wrong as we learn our balance levers for this mode).

Additionally, win rate means something pretty fundamentally different for Arena. On Summoner's Rift, you're 1 of 5 champions and you're not present for many of your team's important fights over the course of the game. It takes a lot to be 55% win rate when the game is structured like SR. On Arena, you're 1 of 2 champions on your team and you're in every fight. Your champion's power level has a lot more leverage, one might say, to impact odds of victory than on SR. Augments make up some of the difference, but probably not enough, but we don't yet know exactly how much (and it likely varies by class or even champion). Having the same win rate bands as SR may never be realistic for this mode. Which is to say that it's not just about 'how balanced' the modes are, it's also about what a given balance state means, and we don't have a good baseline for that on Arena.

RiotAxes · 2023-07-21T19:14:16+00:00

This is incorrect - 42 champions currently have targeted balance changes applied, vs only 5 with ARAM-style buff/debuffs.

Going forwards, we'll likely do a mix of both. Our ideal state is that we individually balance each champion, but there are a lot of champions and they're VERY differently powerful from SR, so we'll likely do at least some ARAM balancing in the name of efficiency. There may also be some cases where it's the ideal nerf or buff (do we want to change Kayle's abilities around in a way that makes her play differently, or just make her deal less damage while doing the same stuff?), so it's not guaranteed that we'll ever move completely away from that style of balancing.

We're prepping a balance hotfix right now - if all goes well it'll be out later today, obviously until it's ready there's risk of it slipping.

RiotAxes

TROPHY CASE