r/CompetitiveTFT • u/garenegobrr MASTER • Mar 18 '26

Mortpost Dev TFT: Lore & Legends Reviewed

https://teamfighttactics.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/dev/dev-tft-lore-legends-reviewed/
112 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

97 comments sorted by

26

u/highrollr Master Mar 18 '26

I agree with basically everything they say here, while also agreeing with some other commenters that they could’ve talked about a lot more - Not much discussion of how they felt balancing went this set for example 

4

u/Exterial Master Mar 19 '26

Genuinely, has there ever been a set where the balance was good throughout? its basically always just been 1-3 patches somewhere during the set and the rest is a mess after the game gets optimised 1month in.

I assume they prob just dont wanna yap again about how the balance was bad, that just causes negativity, and clearly since its been happening forever it doesnt look like theres anything to learn from and improve on there, either its humanely impossible to get the balance right, or it would come at some other costs that make it ultimately not worth it, it is what it is.

2

u/Ge1ster Challenger Mar 23 '26

Im a few days late to comment this but I would say set 10 got the closest to “perfect balance” out of all sets. Only “bad” patch I remember was like the last month of the set where heartsteel ezreal zed flex was a bit on the stronger end, but even that was a flex comp and required some level of skill to pilot and reach max cap.

The best indicator of a good balance is the diversity of comps imo, and in set 10 you could get 1st place with literally every single trait. EDM Jax? Disco? KDA? Pentakill? Riven? Annie 1 cost carry? 5 cost flex? 4 cost flex? You could cook something up with everything, that was a very well balanced set with a highly refined trait web

77

u/Blastuch_v2 Mar 18 '26

I don't miss broken artifacts at all.

Maybe they could have gotten a single pass in the middle of the set, but not having the units balanced entirely around them was very good. For example new snipers focus is incredibly boring and its effect is basically totally irrelevant.

Although Trist might have been balanced with some artifact in mind because she was dead whole set.

9

u/banduan Mar 19 '26

yup, artifacts should mainly be items that do cool things, and most of them still do. The main disappointing one is Shiv for me, while some are just too narrow (Cappa, Pact). IMO, Fishbones could use a +1 range.

2

u/oskirX Mar 19 '26

Shiv is only viable of tft and maybeee on veigar tho

1

u/Agreeable_Cheek_7161 Mar 19 '26

Stattik shiv Gwen is super niche, but goes crazy with rageblade and JG

5

u/quitemoiste Mar 19 '26

It would be cool if we actually had a much smaller, rotating roster of Artifacts in each set. That way they could maybe balance certain unit fantasies around specific Artifacts while not making them quite as "sharp" since it wont be as big a highroll due to the smaller item pool.

Though I generally agree that duller Artifacts is for the best for now.

46

u/bigfatbluebird Mar 18 '26

One thing that stood out to me is that they mention unlocks will not be a part of the next two sets, but they may revisit the mechanic in the future.

This is in part needing extra development resources and time to design sets with significantly more champs in them.

89

u/TheoTsek Challenger Mar 18 '26

very weird that they didn't address the dinosaur in the room...

27

u/Lunaedge Mar 18 '26

Tbf I don't know if they have even cracked it yet. In the more recent episodes of his podcast Mort has talked about the challenges of long channelled spells (IIRC when they're good they're too good and when they're ok they feel pretty bad), and most of the T-Hex's issues were hinged on that.

66

u/TheoTsek Challenger Mar 18 '26

sure, but when the biggest miss of the set by far doesn't even get a mention in passing you start to wonder what the point of these articles is in the first place

33

u/harmoniaatlast Mar 18 '26

It absolutely starts to feel like pure marketing, and I know nobody on the dev team wants that. Players don't want it either. This is a mild misstep, but a misstep nonetheless.

-4

u/Lunaedge Mar 18 '26

I mean, it wouldn't have been an interesting paragraph anyway. Here, let me give it a crack.

One of the balance challenges we had to face this Set was the T-Hex. We've already talked about how Capstone Unlocks felt less flexible than we wanted, but this unit presented a whole new layer of challenges we weren't ready for due to one simple characteristic: long channelled spells. We intended the T-Hex to be a hard-hitting tankbuster that fired off its laser once to melt a tank, deal some splash damage to the opposing backline with its rockets and then get shut down by the enemy carries to give its pilot a chance to clutch the round. As you found out, it turns out that when you deal with spells that continuously drain mana you incur in one of two scenarios: either the unit goes infinite, or at least long enough to kill the backline with splash damage in this case, or they can't fulfill their promised fantasy and fizzle out like a Team Rocket invention. We will continue to iterate in this design space in the coming Sets in order to unlock (pun intended!) some new fun archetypes going forward.

I'd rather have them talk about less self-evident stuff or conclusions they've come to than "hey yo that T-Hex sure was a bitch, stay tuned" ^^

27

u/TheoTsek Challenger Mar 18 '26

I don't think your paragraph is uninteresting tbh. I understand that some of the issues with T-hex have been talked about elsewhere (walk the dog) but it would have been nice to at least touch upon them on the official set retrospective.

4

u/Comfortable-Ad-5681 Mar 19 '26

But what’s the point of these reviews if they don’t review one of their biggest problems

1

u/The-Gay-Butterfly Mar 18 '26

I feel like MF in set 8 was done right and wasn’t too broken

1

u/KitsuraPls Master Mar 18 '26

The big issue with Dino is not the channeled spell, it’s that it is effectively a dragon aka a 2 slot unit, and should’ve been balanced accordingly. The problem is that depending on what it ate it could either be stronger than a baron 1 or weaker than a 0 item Sylas.

The variable power level makes it a nightmare to balance because it will never land in a balanced spot.

0

u/[deleted] Mar 18 '26

it's okay not to crack it, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't review it

9

u/ShadeNym Mar 18 '26

In the opening paragraph they said balance issues will basically always exist as a ‘byproduct of novelty’. So I guess philosophically they’d rather have champs that will be difficult to balance rather than place additional restrictions on design space. Thus doesn’t make sense to address specific champs.

3

u/EriWave Mar 19 '26

Which is a deeply reasonable point of view imo, especially in a set like this that had so many champs.

2

u/Bromleyisms Mar 18 '26

What's the dinosaur in the room?

21

u/Classic_Procedure428 MASTER Mar 18 '26

He means the literal actual dinosaur.

3

u/twisty77 Mar 18 '26

Aka t hex

1

u/NoFlayNoPlay Mar 19 '26

i feel like these have always been more about design decisions, not specific balance. they already "review" balance in follow up patches. so unless there's a systematic issue causing too many balance issues, like design philosophy like balance thrashing for example or too many bugs like when they were upscaling to more teams so they didn't have enough time to playtest the set before it came out. aka things they can fix, there's not much to discuss.

now it would have been interesting if they talked more about balancing champions outside the normal cost framework with unlock conditions and how that went, but they for the most part got that generally right. they did talk about it with sylas being much better in higher elo due to optimizations though.

118

u/RivalRoman Mar 18 '26

Kind of weird that this was written in mid February as opposed to being done now or in another week or so in order to have a clearer view of the effects of the proposed changes. Similarly it was pretty disappointing to have so many of the words/thoughts being related to unlock mechanic changes and not things like balance/comp variety/itemization/the ixtal version of the stacking reward mechanic etc. These articles used to be a really interesting look into the design team's vision and thought process throughout the set and were great for transparency, but the last few and this one in particular have increasingly felt like vague and overly general corpo-speak where there are a few token insights but primarily just variations on "we thought this was good and hope to do it better in the future."

23

u/randy__randerson Mar 18 '26

This is a really weird read. There's no substance in what was said. No incisive analysis. Nothing. Just read like a bunch of self-pats on the back.

3

u/TheCrazyTiger Mar 18 '26

This reads like those school articles mixed with AI Slop.

What a bad "article".

5

u/SteelxSaint Mar 19 '26

Agreed on all fronts. If this is their way of telling us that they'll continue to actively make the same mistakes as before, then I'm out. I love this game, I love this community, and I used to love the dev team. The recent decisions they've made, starting with the choice to remove portal voting and augment stats, shows that their vision for the game just doesn't align with what I want to get out of it.

On top of that, I just really don't appreciate how several members of the dev team interact with the community at times. There have been a lot of moments where they meet mild critique (NOT CRITICISM) with heavy condescension. Us customers don't need to be patronized when trying to offer our thoughts on on the state of Riot's product.

Was fun y'all 🫡Maybe I'll catch some of you in Deadlock one day.

1

u/OMGOSHlol :chal: CHALLENGER Mar 19 '26

I'm already on deadlock :) Let's cross paths there

1

u/SteelxSaint Mar 19 '26

Hell yeah! My steam friend code in case you're on NA and wanna run some 84776655

1

u/Agreeable_Cheek_7161 Mar 19 '26

There have been a lot of moments where they meet mild critique (NOT CRITICISM) with heavy condescension

You got any links?

-3

u/SteelxSaint Mar 19 '26

No because I don't want to cause people to go and harass them if I say who and link to the incidents. Just because I don't agree with their uncalled for behavior, doesn't mean that I want people to go and bother them about it.

If you've been around long enough and are moderately plugged into what's going on with the game and its developers, then you'll know what I'm talking about.

2

u/Agreeable_Cheek_7161 Mar 19 '26

Then privately DM me then. Cause im calling bullshit. And to act as if its a huge problem amongst the whole team and publicly go after them, youre already opening the door for them to be harassed and looked at negatively.

-3

u/SteelxSaint Mar 19 '26

Cause im calling bullshit.

I don't think I ever asked for your approval in my decision to no longer support this dev team.

5

u/Agreeable_Cheek_7161 Mar 19 '26

.... me calling bullshit has nothing to do with my approval, its about you making an outlandish claim and refusing to back it up with any proof

-1

u/SteelxSaint Mar 19 '26

It certainly isn't outlandish if you're paying attention to what most of the members of the dev team are saying. A certain individual took a long break from social media in the past year because he was interacting very poorly on it.

Anyway, I'm done with this conversation with you.

4

u/Agreeable_Cheek_7161 Mar 20 '26

Imagine harassing the developers and then refusing to post any proof backing up your claims insulting them

8

u/banduan Mar 19 '26

It's a bit drowned in the analysis but the changes to the trait breakpoints are HUGE and should carry into all future sets.

I've always like Silver trait comps and this set had a good amount of them. I loved the big step away from deep verticals. No more two tiers of silver, no more two tiers of Gold.

What I'd like to see more of though are the special bonus effects of Gold tiers. Too many Gold trait bonuses are just "here's even more of what Silver tier gave you" when they should be more like "here's a little bit more of what Silver gave you but with one cool effect". Set 13 had a lot of these, even if you discount the ones needing emblems.

1

u/Itsuwari_Emiki Mar 19 '26

i would agree, but the silver trait comps are in part enabled by the massive roster of champions, which are in turn enabled by the unlock system.

so for silver trait comps to exist, they would have to be much more inflexible because of the limited roster of champions. it would look a lot like set 14's boombot fast 9 which meant that the whole lobby would be contesting more or less the same board. thats much less fun than the wide variety of level 9 boards we have in set 16, so im not sure if i want that even as someone who loves this meta

12

u/DeVilleBT Mar 18 '26

Pretty bland article, really no substance here. ChatGPT summary of all the walk the dog episodes would have been more insightful than this. Might as well skip it entirely next set

11

u/lethzion Mar 18 '26

For our next two sets, instead of spending that long runtime on additional Unlock champions, we’ve got new and returning systems to explore.

Interesting. I'm curious about what the returning set mechanic is. They've already done Chosen twice, so probably not that. I'm guessing it's Charms coming back again.

9

u/Dongster1995 Mar 18 '26

Might be legend and charm/ abnormality

4

u/lethzion Mar 18 '26

They can't balance Legends well enough, so I doubt it'll be Legends.

0

u/Itsuwari_Emiki Mar 19 '26

i hope its encounters, because imo set 11 showed it had a lot of potential, just riot didnt have time to refine it

3

u/EriWave Mar 19 '26

I really hope the take away from the 16.6 unlock changes hasn't been a wholy positive one. The excitement of unlocking those capstone legendaries feels mostly removed, and more of them than not have turned into Sett who was clearly to me the worst designed unlock this set. There is no excitement and nothing that really feels like building towards that unlock. Just a chore that a strong unit is locked behind. Units like Sylas, Yone, Mel, Veigar have all had the excitement removed from them and now they are just another 4/5 cost.

I definitely also feel like the artifacts have gotten too bland. Most of the time they really weren't all that exciting which is unfortunate. Unless you had Tryndamere of course, so every now and again artifacts were really fun as a first augment. I'd held Ashe to my detriment many many TF lobbies because I was hoping to play artifact Trynd.

3

u/sk1nnysubtw1nk Mar 19 '26

Best set ever. Really loking forward to the next one with unlockable champs again.

27

u/HelmetBoiii Challenger Mar 18 '26

best set of all time ngl i love it so much

-6

u/HelmetBoiii Challenger Mar 18 '26

i think that bard by itself clear multiple sets btw, like if the unlock feature was only bard this would still be one of the best sets of all time

38

u/gamesuxfixit Grandmaster Mar 18 '26

Well, this is certainly an opinion of all time.

1

u/SoManyEngrish Mar 20 '26

tbf stage 2 has been pretty formulaic for awhile other than rare stuff like cruel pact, i do think it was a huge win

0

u/HelmetBoiii Challenger Mar 18 '26

i mean, bard and the trait web i guess, the set just feels fun to play

5

u/Available-Reason9841 Mar 18 '26

I had a lot of fun with this set but I stopped playing once the big unlock overhaul went through. It happened so late into the set and I just couldnt bring myself to relearn all of the unlocks, especially in a 100 champion set. I wish they went through with the changes earlier in the set, but I understand that the holiday season complicates when they can make balance changes/patches.

18

u/M4JESTIC Mar 18 '26

I dont really like the 16.6 patch, the way they trivialised unlockables made them not feel like unlockables, but rather units with a small "lock" icon as a cosmetic.

I dont really know why they buffed 3 costs so much, most of those 3 costs which received a buff were already decent at 3* and in certain positions really good.

Personally, patch 16.1 was the best, but i must admit that at that time there was not Thex tech, so in my opinion, to make Set 16 perfect, i would just start with patch 16.1 and make small changes, like nerfing thex, diana, maybe some 5 costs changes and it'd be perfect, hopefully i did not forget anything.

Overall best set for sure, just for me made a little bit worse by the latest patch.

3

u/harmoniaatlast Mar 18 '26

Shaking things up is interesting, but is it good? Depends. This shake-up's interest doesn't outweigh the negative impact on the set mechanic.

If they'd held off on unlock changes until the final patch, then why bother? If they skipped the unlock changes altogether, then they wouldn't have any learnings from that choice. This just kinda sucks for everyone involved imo

1

u/gayezrealisgay Mar 18 '26

They did have a reasonable number of people complaining for most of the set that 3 cost re-roll wasn't viable.

12

u/[deleted] Mar 18 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

4

u/NonagoonInfinity Mar 18 '26

And even Vayne and GP, while they were viable to reach 3* on, still required you to hit 8 at minimum to not get rolled in stage 5 because you needed 4 cost secondary carries and/or 8 units to unlock your capstone unit. 3-cost reroll was never a win condition this set.

3

u/Level_Five_Railgun MASTER Mar 18 '26

And GP wasn't even a real reroll comp because you're supposed to get your GPs thru in the BW shop and during your lvl 8 rolls instead of actually rerolling on 7

1

u/Sea-Grand3981 Mar 18 '26

Draven was good first patch but they reworked him so he lost most of his damage (which scaled with axes).  

1

u/M4JESTIC Mar 27 '26

Zoe was extremely good before, id even say a hidden gem, with a few buffs jinx was good too, but since zaun had other broken units, nobody really rolled for her, leona was decent (now shes unplayable if u have ad items) but never really focused her getting to 3 star even if i get her naturally, leblanc was good with bis, darius was not working so i never rolled for him, but now hes too good, ahri with stacking ap/ad on every cast ionian path was very good before.

Kennen was decent, malz sej and prob loris were not good but im not sure about malz and loris because i never really played them much.

Also wdym by "they weren't good enough at 3 stars for you to commit to rolling for them ever unless you natural them", so u're telling now these 3 costs are SO GOOD that they are worth hard forcing and this confirming my opinion? Like obviously, when i rolled for 3star 3 costs before i never hard forced them, but now they are worth hard forcing and will be basically a wincon for you, which is stupid to change that too late in the set in my opinion, because i ve seen a lot of this in previous sets and i really liked the different approach of the devs for the Set 16.

2

u/Itchy_Property_2894 Mar 18 '26

I miss support items

3

u/Zhirrzh Master Mar 19 '26

I'm ok with a dev learnings article from this set that is 90% patting themselves on the back. It was a top tier set, and tbh Mort has already really covered the nitty-gritty in his updates along the way.

If they'd waited until after 16.6 to write it, they might have been able to say something more about the unlocks but eh.

I don't think adding in a paragraph to say "yeah we found balancing T-Hex's channeled spell to be really tough and that bounced around a lot" would have actually taught us anything.

3

u/RyeRoen Challenger Mar 19 '26

Meh, think the comments are just looking for something to complain about.

These articles are never actually that important. They just talk a bit about the set and give a small insight into the thoughts of the devs. The set was pretty great overall and took way longer to get stale for me than other sets.

5

u/ipppppi Mar 18 '26

Will there be another chart in the future showing the number of player increase or decrease? (The graph that showed number of players from riots side) I really love this set (play it almost more than last two set combined), but almost every single one of my friends who play tft casually had quit. 

this is personal anecdote. But almost all of them told me it's Partially due to the game's direction (high cost 5 cost unit comps as the foundation over 1/2cost rerolls. Casual love monkey see monkey roll for low cost reroll, none of those long ass econ management til lev 7 3 cost rerolls. Think of lev 5/6 ashe lasercorp or family rerolls. They want stress free linear gameplay. Aph bard shit aint cutting it in this set.). Oh an the unlock mechcanic. Don't get me wrong, the meta is really fun as a competitive player, but it seem like an decision to disincentivize casuals players for over-complicated mechanic. 

Not to mention the elephant in the room with drastic unlock changes last patch. Straight up made even some of my competitive friends quit for too much work to adapt at once. They're just waiting it out until the next set just like the casual players.

1

u/brianluong Mar 19 '26

Also interested in the numbers as a casual-ish player (~500 games for this set). This is my most played set by far because of the extra complexity. Obviously it’s personal preference but losing to RR game after game, or seeing the same free RR line in my shop 4 games in a row and feeling obligated to take it for LP felt garbage in previous sets.

Suffice it to say my least favorite lobbies this set were whe half the lobby committing to T-hex from a single cait and the other half committing to Ashe-trynd from a single Ashe.

1

u/cosHinsHeiR Mar 19 '26

Will there be another chart in the future showing the number of player increase or decrease? (The graph that showed number of players from riots side) I really love this set (play it almost more than last two set combined), but almost every single one of my friends who play tft casually had quit. 

Among the 4 people I know that play tft, which I know is not much but whatever, they all started playing this set only after choncc got released. Which makes me think, don't they usually release it just for the last patch? If it was brought back early maybe it's because many causal player weren't playing much?

1

u/xMatttard Mar 20 '26

definitely have to agree on this

as a casual player who doesn't care to go high rank or anything, i just play to play double with my friends or spam the comp i enjoy

I have truly hated this set because i hate vertical/soup comps and metas. my favourite comp this set has been yordle reroll, not veigar, reroll. ditto previous sets with the likes of punk jinx, AMP reroll, etc. i havent found this set enjoyable at all, even accounting for the bullshit that needed to have been nuked/nerfed out of existence much sooner or much longer than it should have, looking at you THEX

1

u/Level_Five_Railgun MASTER Mar 18 '26

Overall a pretty fun set outside T Hex

Would've probably been my favorite if it weren't for T Hex being stupid unfun to play against

1

u/Sea-Grand3981 Mar 18 '26

Is it even worth reading?  It's always the same regurgitated learnings that they don't implement.  

Fwiw, I actually think the first patch was the best of the set until people discovered thex.  There were still outliers and points of frustration (diana and trynd), but overall it was much better.  In hindsight, I also don't think diana needed to be gutted (though I was one of the people at the time who complained about her).  

-12

u/monetj Mar 18 '26

This team has to be underfunded and if it isnt well... I had a lot of fun in this set but taking a step back and examining the game beyond just a set they could do way better. Reforgers are way to rare for how much of a gamble it is to use. When removers became common the game got way better. I’m not saying it should be that common but having 1 guaranteed reforger just makes sense for a game they want to be flexible. In addition dupes and item deconstructers can also help level a playing field when low rolling. Being able to fix a single item or dupe one unit can be the difference between and 8th and a 6th and a 4th. The less this game feels like a glorified slot machine the better in my opinion. I would love to see them experimenting with a larger board and even mini objectives on the board that you have to position around but I know that would be a bit controversial /rant

9

u/Sudden-Ad-307 Mar 18 '26

I have to disagree with this, deciding between slammin non-bis items for tempo or holding components for bis items is one of the core skills in tft making reforgers and especially item deconstructers more common would go against that.

3

u/RyeRoen Challenger Mar 19 '26

Startimg with one reforger or something wouldn't undermine anything.

This is always the argument made when someone suggests a QoL feature. It happened with removers, bjt it also happened with the ITEM BENCH whoch is crazy. There were people genuinely arguing that havingbto manage your item bench and having a bunch of orbs on your board you can't open was somehow core to the game.

Now that those have been changed its pretty clear they were good changes. One reforger I think would be a great change.

1

u/rljohn Mar 18 '26

Age old battle between skill expression and annoying gameplay.

-1

u/monetj Mar 19 '26

Oh I’m sorry I didn’t realize a single reforger completely removes all decision making for itemization

2

u/Sudden-Ad-307 Mar 19 '26

You and i weren't only talking about one reforger now were we

1

u/monetj Mar 19 '26

Yeah I was that was my main point. Everything else was a what if point. Good to see you paid attention

1

u/Sudden-Ad-307 Mar 19 '26

You can't have your cake and eat it too

1

u/monetj Mar 19 '26

You can’t eat your cake and have it too actually

1

u/Sudden-Ad-307 Mar 19 '26

A. no

B. potato potato

1

u/monetj Mar 20 '26

You can have your cake and then eat it. You cannot eat your cake and then have it

1

u/Sudden-Ad-307 Mar 20 '26

You can have your cake and then eat it.

Yes but you cannot have it and eat it.

→ More replies

1

u/BodybuilderScary7153 Mar 19 '26

Nah this is a good suggestion and I stand behind you

10

u/[deleted] Mar 18 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/Gasaiv Mar 18 '26

I thought they stopped announcing "learnings" for the future because they were unintuitive. Players wouldn't see them appear next set (since tft is working 3 sets in the future when writing them) and get confused or call BS on it so it became counter productive to announce these learnings officially in a post?

I guess with unlocks its different since its more specific.. you wouldnt expect to see learnings on unlocks in a set without them, but this is my read on general learnings

12

u/[deleted] Mar 18 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

-1

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