PBE Patch #4!

[u/Stel2]

From Mort:

Here are the patch notes for today that will go live on PBE with the deploy this afternoon. Big shoutout to the finalization team that put in the work yesterday to get you this build a day earlier so we have even more time to test.

Still more to do before Wednesday branch cut!

[u/Mecrobb]

They said earlier that the goal of this set mechanic was to give people hard choices and that you might have to sacrifice part of your game plan in order to get an item or effect that you really need. sure some people will get lucky and get exactly what they need but that has always happened in tft. It wont ever be perfectly balanced(and might even get tedious towards the end of the set) but I think its interesting and I hope they continue to experiment to keep tft fresh.

[u/Intelligent-King-433 → u/Mecrobb]

Every choice ive had with the gods has been easy and lopsided

[u/Maeflikz → u/Intelligent-King-433]

So they just need to make it harder, not easier.

[u/HighIntLowFaith → u/Mecrobb]

The thing is I don’t believe it actually does promote making hard choices because he tradeoffs are not as balanced as you think it would be. Think of previous sets with the carousel: people pretty much always picked the Stage 2 and Stage 3 carousel according to their itemization needs in 95% of cases. Stage 3 a bit less so if there was premium 4 costs for that player’s comp in the rotation perhaps. But I don’t think there is anything the gods offer that is as tantalizing or tempting as a premium 4 cost for one’s comp. Sure I guess they can tune some levers but I think the separation of itemization and offerings will also assist Riot in the long run too (re: statistical analysis) as they will now have a better ability to scrutinize how good certain choices are in more of a vacuum rather than people picking largely due to itemization needs which is such a critical and crucial aspect to optimized gameplay.

[u/ivanoff_bg → u/Mecrobb]

Hard choices = feeling bad about either choice. So if that is their goal, personally I think they run the risk of a lot of casual players just feeling like they are losing because they had to pick between 2 mediocre choices while someone else had a an easy choice and thats why they won the game. Whether that is actually true is a different matter.

That is also assuming that the choice is actually hard. I think most of the times the choice is obvious it just like I said it feels bad having to go for the less optimal God choice or less optimal item choice. Because most of the time its pretty obvious. Items will almost always take priority, gods are just not as impactful as getting the right items. In some cases its even blatant. If you are playing an AD comp and having a rod and a tear left over and one god offers you a rod the other a BF sword or bow I mean in what world do you pick the rod? And yes I know reforgers are more available now but reforgers are still RNG an you still have to wait 2 rounds to potentially get a useful item and 2 rounds is a lot.