Riot's latest Ask Riot looks back on the hot topics of the year-end, namely the update of the account system, the balancing of Senna and the exits of the latter and Aphelios, the last two champions to join the League of Legends.
Exit the LoL account, welcome the Riot Games account.
As you probably noticed, your Riot Games account has changed recently. In preparation for the studio's various upcoming games, Riot Games, it seemed easier for current players to have a single account to play all these future titles, hence the change from your League of Legends account only to a Riot Games account. Most of you have already made the transfer.
However, some players have not been able to keep their login name. The goal is to avoid duplicates so that everyone has a unique username. Don't panic, this will only affect the username you use to login to League. Your Summoner name will not be affected. A small twinge of sorrow, though, for those who have lost the name they've been using for years.
Senna, ADC or support?
Let's get one thing straight, the balancing team wants the champion in both roles.
It’s always been a goal for Senna to be playable as both a support and an ADC. To help make this a reality we added a few position-specific tuning levers to her kit during development. The primary place we’d look to tune is her Passive’s mist collection game. Mist stacks influence the power of nearly everything on Senna’s kit, and making a specific role get more or less of them has shown to have meaningful impact on that role’s effectiveness. This is why souls are less likely to drop from minions Senna kills—ADC Senna gets more gold and more items, so she needs less stacks to be effective. If ADC is too strong in the future we can make it less likely to see souls drop from cannon minions, whereas if support is too weak, we could consider upping the number of souls that drop from minions she doesn’t kill.
Other adjustments outside the passive to consider are how Senna scales with the item system. Support Senna has access to AP builds, and buffing those ratios could help her in a way that ADC Senna cares less about. ADC Senna on the other hand has an easier time saving up for big AD items like Infinity Edge, which makes adjusting her Crit Damage ratio a potent tuning lever if her carry role needs changes.
At the end of the day, we want ADC and support Senna to be close in power level, but they don’t need to have the exact same winrate. The dream is that they both feel viable without one being so strong that it requires us to destroy the other. I’m optimistic that we’ll be able to tune around and preserve both playstyles for years to come, but, if that proves impossible, we’ll prioritize support Senna over ADC. (August, Senna's Designer)
Two shooters in a row, why not?
Rarely has Riot Games released two shooters in a row: Senna and Aphelios. Indeed, the team prefers to alternate in order to satisfy a maximum of players and offer more diversity.
We started early exploration on Aphelios before we began working on Senna. He was a complex champion that required a pretty long ideation period to get his kit right, and then also a longer-then-average production cycle to build due to the complexity of his kit. As we were working on Aphelios, we started thinking about which champions we could make for League’s 10 Year Anniversary, and we felt creating a champion that would be exciting to long-time League players would feel really good for that moment.
After some brainstorming, we decided that bringing Senna out of the lantern would be impactful and feel nostalgic to all the players who’ve known about Senna since Lucian and Thresh were released. At that point it became more about doing what was right for Senna, and not what was right for the champion release schedule. We quickly came to the conclusion that it made sense for Senna to be a marksman since she was portrayed as one in all the previous lore. We also felt it would be important for her to interact and lane with Lucian, which is why we decided to build her as a support marksman despite the fact we had already released a support this year (Yuumi) and already had Aphelios planned for the end of the year. (REAV3, Lead Producer of Champions)
Tired of losing games and looking for an easy way to win? We've got what you need with these top 10 skins that increase your chances of victory.
