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Special Announcers

In-game announcers, LeBlanc, Lissandra, and how to tell your mom you’re a Yasuo main.

Welcome to Ask Riot! Have a question?

This week, we’re talking in-game announcers, LeBlanc changes, an update on Lissandra, and how to break a hard truth to your mother.

Q

Will the special announcers ever be permanent?

A

We’ve talked a lot about what Announcers might look like in League of Legends since we know players are interested in them. We’ve experimented with different Announcers through the years during various events like Star Guardian or Bilgewater, and the reaction from players was mixed.

There’s a couple of obstacles we have to tackle before making Announcers permanent. Right now we’re exploring more region by region Announcers with MSI, but we still have some work to do to understand the appetite for this product worldwide before we invest in the infrastructure required to make it permanent.

That said, we will be doing more tests this year, so stay tuned for that and let us know what you think!

Product Manager
Q

Why did you decide to bring back the mechanics of old Leblanc? Wasn’t she changed due to being unbalanced?

A

LeBlanc was a balance problem before the Assassin Update, but she continued to be one after as well. We made a slew of changes to LeBlanc’s kit during the Assassin Update, with the goal of slowing down her time to kill and allowing her to be more tricky at the expense of some of her burst damage. Looking back at the rework, it was clear that some of the changes either introduced similarly unhealthy mechanics, like choosing your Mimicked spell freely, or were unnecessarily painful for LeBlanc players, like the delayed Sigil of Malice passive.

Rather than continuing to try to balance reworked LeBlanc, we believed it was better for both LeBlanc players and the rest of the game if we went back to the drawing board and took another stab at increasing counterplay against her, while remaining respectful of the champion LeBlanc mains know and love. We began with pre-rework LeBlanc as a starting point and made another, less disruptive attempt at solving her game health problems, the result of which is the changes that shipped in Patch 8.8.

Game Designer
Q

It’s been a long time since I read about a possible change to Lissandra’s passive or other abilities. Are you still planning on changing her?

A

We are planning to do some more work on Lissandra, which likely involves giving her a new passive and some small tweaks to the rest of her kit. Those changes won’t be for a while though, so we recently buffed her Q mana cost and R cooldown to put her in a better spot power-wise until we can get to those larger changes.

Game Design Director
Q

how do u tell ur mom ur a yasuo main?

A

Sit her down. Tell her you have bad news.

It started when you were a young child. In your first game of kickball you kicked the ball the wrong way. Repeatedly. They told you you had no skills. Desperate to find a hobby in which you excelled, you joined another team. A dodgeball team. The first time a ball hit you, a rage began to smolder. Your team had let it happen. It didn’t matter that you didn’t doge, what mattered was your team was bad.

Teamwork was just talk. Sick by the notion that they could win, you were taken by a tempest of emotions, until a single thought shone through. They said you had no skills. But they were wrong. You had a very, very good one. You stood still, a mad grin spreading across your face, silently requesting, no, demanding, the enemy to hit you. And they did. The cries of your teammates were lost to the wind as they were defeated. And deserved it. Elated, you took your last breath as an ordinary person. You’ve since joined the ranks of the most anathematized group known to existence, Yasuomains, whose glory is known across the globe.

You take your mother’s hand in your own and tell you have found a place where one has no need of skill. You have found a home, one to which only another inting interested recruit has a key.

… or just dodge the question until she rage quits.

Writer

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New Keystone Runes?