Yuumi Changes Discussed in League of Legends Gameplay Thoughts Post

League of Legends design director Andrei "Meddler" van Roon gave some thoughts on gameplay in another occasional post on the League of Legends forums.

The topics addressed were adjusting the matchmaking speed against the accuracy at high MMR, the direction of new champion Yuumi, and testing changes for the Rageblade item.

Meddler noted an issue this season with Masters, Grandmasters and Challengers games wherein players were experiencing games with too high variance in MMR differences, such as the inclusion of Diamond players in Grandmaster games. Meddler noted that depending on the strictness of limiting MMR ranges, this could see queue times go up from four minutes to around nine minutes. This will be restricted to high MMR for now until more data can be collected regarding other ranks.

With Yuumi, Meddler addressed three points regarding on what the developer team will be focusing post-release:

• Relative strengths and weaknesses: The champions against which Yuumi both performs well and struggles will be closely monitored. Her unique attachment gameplay means that more attention needs to be given to her intended interactions
• Skill curve: Yuumi is intended to be a champion that is easy to play but difficult to master. Her learning curve will be tracked closely
• Counterplay potential: Yuumi will need to be appropriately balanced to ensure that her kit is reliable but has room for counterplay. A lot of attention will be given so as to fine-tune as early as possible.

The Rageblade will also potentially see changes in the next patch which shifts phantom hit from every second hit to every third hit, "with a goal of decreasing just how much Rageblade performs better on champions with very strong on hit effects in their kit," and then buffing the general stats the Rageblade provides. Meddler explained that developers believe that a small subset of champions getting significantly more value out of Rageblade than others contributes to its difficulty in balance.

As always, Meddler stressed that these changes were not set in stone and liable to change.

Cover image courtesy of Riot Games