PBE - Jayce

  • 7/11/2013 5:17:49 AM
    Xypherous
    A quick heads up here - There is some fairly experimental stuff on Jayce that's going into the outgoing PBE build. You guys won't have access to this for a little while as PBE builds timing and pushes, while regular - are always on a 'as soon as we can' basis.

    You may see some craziness in the next few days from Data Scrapers but this content is really ridiculously rough.

    1. Jayce should not ignore resistances.

    Yes, I know no one levels up 'R' anyway at the moment - but for the moment, let's pretend that Jayce theoretically shouldn't ignore your resistances.

    2. Jayce's poke pattern is fairly unhealthy.

    Mostly from a fog of war, long range Q+E standpoint.

    3. Jayce's burst shouldn't hyperscale and his damage shouldn't be dependent on optimizing really weird obtuse use cases    .

    This mostly pertains to the 'W' functionality changes - where people are 'rolling' W charges to string together a 6 shot hyper charge. Also, Hyper Charge probably shouldn't deal 260% damage on a critical strike - or 325% damage on an IE crit strike.

    4. No, seriously. A lot of Jayce's power is locked up in really obtuse cases.

    A little bit of why Jayce is so powerful in competitive play and not so much in regular play is the sheer amount of edge cases you have to abuse to get mileage out of Jayce. While some could argue this is mechanical mastery of the champion - a lot of it is simply unintuitive fodder that we should clean up so that his actual intuitive combos are powerful.

    So what's going on?

    We're testing a fairly experimental series of changes designed to shift power away from these three cases and into the rest of his abilities - as well as streamlining some of Jayce's muddier patterns. In general, Jayce is a decent character to have in the game but the vast majority of his power is locked up in extreme abuse cases at the moment - especially with end game super burst scenarios or long range poke scenarios.

    I'll have some more specifics as we start to refine what we have - but here is a rough list of the major changes:

    1. Transform no longer has a shred effect on it. Transform now always simply causes the first attack after Transform to deal bonus damage based on character level.

    Almost every fighter needed some form of resist shredding in Season 2 to help them deal damage in the late game. This is no longer true.

    2. You may no longer level Transform. Your abilities have 6 ranks. Armor and Magic Resistance, as well as Proc Damage of Transform is based on character level.

    Mostly clean up at this portion of the game. His abilities should be the highlight of the character - not random passive statistics on Transform.

    3. To the Skies! now deals magic damage and scales off Ability Power and has vastly increased base damages.

    To the Skies! being physical damage and having a Attack Damage ratio created a very uneven power curve for Jayce - early on, the spike case was heavy due to the prevalence of Attack Damage or Armor Penetration - while late game, his traditional AD / Penetration build makes To the Skies! extremely spikey.

    Cleaning this up allows the Hammer form to deal primary magic damage - which allows some other builds to be played if Jayce can't use his normal glass hypercarry build - like Pen / Off-Tank.

    4. Static Field no longer recovers mana on hit and damage generally reduced. It instead gives you an on-hit magic damage proc while the Static Field is active. The cooldown also goes down with rank.

    This creates some Gun / Hammer synergies as both form's 'W' can be used in the other form for damage.

    We removed the mana on hit as it simply unnecessarily added to Jayce's snowball potential and increased his base MP/5 and MP/5 growth to provide a better curve.

    5. Hyper Charge no longer scales to 130% - but stops at 100% instead.

    This is a change mostly aimed at tuning down super-high end Jayce potential.

    6. Accelerated Shock Blasts' movement speeds decay down to 1550. In general, this means that regardless of where the Acceleration Gate is, Q + E will roughly get to your destination at the same speed.

    This is a change mostly aimed at toning down Jayce's poke cases from fog of war and at long range, while still maintaining adequate ranged threat at mid-range.

    This also is a change directly at shifting Jayce's Acceleration Gate combo away from always being best used directly on himself - opening up more of a range of possible Acceleration Gate positions.
  • 7/11/2013 5:17:50 AM
    Xypherous
    Quote:
    Good news. Can we also do something to the extremely frustrating E (Melee form) that deals insane damage for a disengage tool ?
    Have not yet decided on if / what Thunder Blow needs to have changed, although with six possible ranks, it seems likely that we can rescale the damage such that per skill point, you are getting less power.

    Unsure if he needs it exactly at the moment - as we're doing quite a bit at once here.
  • 7/11/2013 5:17:51 AM
    Xypherous
    Quote:
    im not so sure making jayce like old karma is such a good idea in ability leveling, you end up feeling gipped of damage at lvl 9 when everyone else has at least 1 skill maxed
    Potentially - Jayce differs from old Karma in that he has two abilities he is ranking up base damage for per point.

    Karma was ranking up side bonuses with her ranks - while Jayce is levelling both To the Skies! and Shock Blast simultaneously.
  • 7/11/2013 5:01:17 AM
    Xypherous
    Quote:
    Question: Was any of this inspired by Dominion? We've seen these problems basically since Jayce's release.

    They look good so far. I'm not sold that Hyper Charge will be fixed after this, but it looks promising.
    I generally don't look at Dominion for changes because I'm more of a theoretical designer rather than a solve the current problems one.

    Quote:
    so at rank 6 in a skill it will do more damage than most other champs rank 5 skills? because if that isnt the case you cant reach your true rank 5 damage till lvl 10.
    We'll see based on tuning - no guarantees yet here.

    Quote:
    So is distributing the power through 6 levels of skill a solution for that weird power curve?
    Not particularly. In this case, it's just a simple recognition that there was no amount of passive power that we could put on Jayce's Transform level ups to actually make it feel worthwhile to rank up unless we went to ridiculous overpowered passive stat land.

    He also didn't need any *more* complicated mechanics to get him through - so the simplest solution here was to simply stop trying to make Transform a compelling level up and just rebalance his spells around assuming people simply weren't going to put points in Transform anyway.
  • 7/11/2013 5:06:17 AM
    Xypherous
    Quote:
    Part of my frustration comes from the fact that his Thundering Blow does absolutely insane amounts of magic damage that is not only percent of max health, but scaled 1-to-1 with bonus AD. Do you have any concerns that the further shift of To-the-Skies magic damage with 'vastly increased base damages' will be an unnecessary buff? I am afraid that while I will see a Jayce with some lower damage on his truly problematic abilities, I will also see a Jayce that will be impossible to defend against in top lane and thus still difficult to deal with.
    I suspect that this is true somewhat - though lane tests right now seem to indicate that Jayce really needs to use all his abilities well in order to do well. We have a couple of other minor changes as well such as reducing his health regeneration in favor of more mana regeneration as he should really win the lane by using his abilities on you a bunch.

    I'm not sure I have a whole lot to assuage your fears, other than the fact that I just ripped off 1.0 Bonus AD scaling from his Q, reduced the levelups on his 'W' TAD scaling, roughly 5% armor shred in his early game. While I'm sure that Jayce will have a great deal of magic damage punch to him in his Hammer form - I'm not sure that his first couple of purchases will actually cause the lane to be unconquerable.

    Essentially - I do think he will be harder to itemize against but most of the changes are targetted at limiting abuse cases when he's ahead and figuring out where the balance lies in that paradigm.
  • 7/11/2013 5:13:17 AM
    Xypherous
    Quote:
    AP Melee Jayce gonna be any good now? :P
    If anything, possibly Magic Pen / Off-Tank Jayce?

    Quote:
    My friend who plays fotm Jayce is just a bit sad though ^^
    The FoTM Jayce is a good playstyle - it just needs a bit more counterplay - which is why we opted to really target some of the more esoteric high end abuse cases like 'W' priming.

    Quote:
    I just wanted to add that I understand your viewpoint that you are leveling 2 different skills at the same time and that doing that in comparison to other champs should take slightly longer. in that way it makes some sense, the overall playerbase may not see it that way no matter how well you describe it though.
    No - you're right. It's still important that each level-up still feel good, regardless of what form you're in. When you hit rank 6 and have the same base damages as other people's rank 5's - it just means that those level-ups you got along the way were awful. You would level up 'E' on Karma and get 40 shield compared to Janna's 55 and seriously question why you are putting points in skills. :P

    For example, Acceleration Gate right now feels like M'eh with a side of Blah - even if it definitely needed the longer cooldown. Still thinking on that though - as Acceleration Gate just doesn't have anything that it seems we can make scale up to the extent that it should.
  • 7/11/2013 5:17:17 AM
    Xypherous
    Quote:
    What do you think about swapping his Q augmentation. Q by itself does explosive AOE damage great for farming minions less skill / aiming / mana required, Q with Acceleration does concentrated single target damage.
    Oh - Interesting.

    So, the unfocused ball hits the gate and turns into a piercing beam?

    That kind of change I definitely can't get out in the timeframe required for this change - but that's actually something we should look into as to whether that pattern makes more sense.
  • 7/11/2013 5:21:21 AM
    Xypherous
    Quote:
    Have you considered giving his shockblast combo similar treatment as Sejuani's ulti.

    IE if you don't hit a target it doesn't deal damage. Right now if you're close to max distance of his shockblast it's hard to dodge it, since it blows up next to you then, and then you're hit by explosion.
    I have not currently tinkered with that - that might be an interesting change if we deem it necessary, although at the moment I want to tackle the fog of war reaction issue first.
  • 7/11/2013 5:24:21 AM
    Xypherous
    Quote:
    Are you worried about Jayce maxing his W second instead of his Q and ignoring E entirely?
    I suspect that's kind of what you should do on Live right now, given the Acceleration Gate changes in 3.9.

    So.. not particularly, as it can't be worse than the current optimal Jayce style.

    Quote:
    That idea somewhat terrifies me, since I am imagining that the trade-off for single-target damage will involve increasing the damage significantly. Imagine a mid-late game Jayce Q that hits your ADC for 50% of his life instead of just 20-30% of the AOE. With the amount of spam that Jayce gets and the range, Jayce with concentrated single-target Accelerated Q sounds more and more like a 1000 MPH Nidalee Spear.
    It is terrifying notion - but the benefits are that it opens up space for both unempowered Q and empowered Q to be satisfying without one drastically outclassing the other.

    It would also mean that then we have additional space to play around with Acceleration Gate duration / cooldown to open up some space as right now Gun Q isn't actually a spell, since it's Gun Q + E that is the actual spell and thus the cooldown / conditions of 'E' tie directly into Q's satisfaction level.

    For example, if Q by itself was satisfying - you could put an absolutely ridiculous cooldown and duration on Acceleration Gate. You could make the Gate last 12 seconds and have a 40 second cooldown - because now normal Q's and empowered Q's have a purpose - which would actually open up a lot of interesting team cases without making Jayce 'Team Speed Up all the Time' guy - but rather Jayce brings 'Giant Semi-Perma Zone Control in a Team Fight' guy - or you could set up a siege and start peppering multiple empowered Q's forward - but as soon as that Gate drops, you know you can rush Jayce, etc.
  • 7/11/2013 5:34:20 AM
    Xypherous
    Quote:
    So any plans to change/rework Jayce's current passive? Why the flat speed boost?
    I have no idea why the flat speed boost is there - but I suspect it's there to actually cover a bit for the mind-share it takes to transform mid-fight.

    As in - it does take more planning and execution to perform swap combos as Jayce - thus the additional movement speed and ghost allows for a bit of grace in terms of mental mind share allowing you to focus on the combo, rather than mouse moving while doing so.

    It also has some way additional side benefits in making the transform "feel" right from a visual perspective. Because Jayce changes his walking posture - intuitively, you think that Jayce has slowed down because his center changes.

    Agreed that the ghost effect is probably superfluous - but there doesn't seem to be any real reason to remove it. I also agree that the shifting to lane case is a bit odd but outside of it feeling silly I don't see negative implications to it.

    Quote:
    In order for the bare Q to farm creeps like Jayce does currently with his Accelerated Q, Q alone is going to have to do a lot more damage and probably have a higher particle speed. That means that his new Accelerated Q could even have a reduction in damage and still do as much damage as it does currently. Having a skill that reduces your damage so directly seems odd, so that single target damage will probably have to stay just as strong in order to make it worthwhile. As a result, the new rocket Q remains terrifying.
    There are really straightforward ways to solve that: 100% bonus damage to minions.

    Or potentially, massive AoE spread - with falloff near the edges.