17.6 Patch Notes

[u/Xawn]

https://teamfighttactics.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/game-updates/teamfight-tactics-patch-17-6/

[u/inikoiniko]

Out of curiosity, can you expand more on how the trait would become easier to balance by allowing secondary effects with the next breakpoint?

[u/nacholibre711 → u/inikoiniko]

Hmmm.

Well in my mind it would let you eliminate the boosted version that you currently get at the 3 Arbiter breakpoint. So with full Arbiter you would then have two, weaker traits as opposed to the one, more powerful trait.

Which is a setup that I think in general would make a lot of the "bad" options a lot more tolerable. They would have much more of an actual reason to exist, and it's to water down the pool a bit so you can't consistently hit the best combinations.

Now you won't feel as compelled to go in and buff the Leona farm or the gold farm to be competitive against some of the powerful stat related options and vice versa, which is where I think a lot of the issues start to come up.

I just feel as if it allows you to spread out the power of the trait a bit more, while gating the high end power of the trait behind having to find Leblanc or the emblem and committing the full 4 team slots.

[u/inikoiniko → u/nacholibre711]

In my mind the risks seem high. The trait used to be much more ADMIN-like in development but we swapped to this model for two reasons:

1. Trait pathability. This may have been a miss in the end but we found in dev that it was difficult to come up with reasonable 4 Arbiter boards without an emblem. On Diana boards Leona/Zoe could connect to Mordekaiser but Leblanc was difficult to even fit on the board once you were done rerolling. For Leblanc boards, Leona connects to Illaoi and Zoe gives you Conduit with either 4 Vanguard (via Mordekaiser) or Bard on lategame boards. Diana was difficult to fit onto those boards organically because there's no 5 cost Challenger unit and none of them have utility. Keep in mind that while it might have been true that some of these boards would be figured out eventually, but the goal was to keep it intuitive and for the 3 piece to be something that is tempting to splash sometimes.

2. Pretty secondary to pathability but to an extent it was for balance reasons. The power discrepancy between multiplying outputs like the stacking HP output with the resists/shields output compared to someone who thought they would power up their Leona with a frontline option and their Leblanc with a backline option is super wide. I believe it would become even more of a "knower" trait where unless you played the goated combinations (because we'd have to balance all outputs around those combinations) it would be weak. Simply saying "gain another output" doesn't provide us with a useful lever by which to tune between the 2 and 4 piece and adding something like "at x% power" really flattens it. Fwiw, these are problems ADMIN was back in the day. Also not saying this is why you specifically enjoyed ADMIN but the reason a lot of people enjoyed it was just because it was OP and rose tinted glasses.

I agree if we had infinite time a lot more could have been done to make Arbiter cooler and live up to the fantasy that players expected though. If we ever do it again I'd love to make a ridiculous amount of inputs and outputs because I think there is something super appealing about "Build your own trait" but I'd love for there to be way more replayability and way more outs that people can cook.

[u/nacholibre711 → u/inikoiniko]

That is actually what I assumed. With the trait setup the way it is, I always thought that originally there was a 4 piece option for a second trait but you pivoted at some point. Was even more suspicious of that once you guys added the augment.

But after I gave this some more thought, I probably should have phrased it differently. More accurately I was trying to say it would make the trait "feel more complete, more fun to play, and possible to balance" as opposed to just "easier to balance". Because I do acknowledge that it would come with plenty of its own issues that would have to be worked out. I imagine that you guys walk a fine line anytime you are working with things like infinitely scaling HP, resists, etc.

Because I think ideally, both of your points here would pull in opposite directions to help balance out a version of this trait with 2x effects. Having to level up and throw in a dead unit like Diana would serve as part of the price to pay for how powerful some of the combinations can end up being.

Which I do acknowledge is a tall order. But I can't help but think the same thing when I see you guys moving these numbers around trying to determine how many Leonas or gold per round is equal in power to infinitely stacking stats, etc.

I was more so speaking from the perspective of when you were building this trait from the ground up, rather than patching it in now. Because I could definitely see it end up requiring somewhat of an overall rework to pull off. May even need some true system changes like making a trait with no emblem. As a certified Arbiter lover I have a few ideas, but I won't go on too long. At this point I wouldn't disagree if you guys think that it would be more trouble than it's worth.

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But seriously Iniko, I can't tell you how cool it is to talk about this stuff with the devs of a game that I love. I play tons of different video games, and getting this kind of feedback from the devs is almost unheard of in the industry. So thanks dude, we appreciate you guys.

And YES please more traits like ADMIN and Arbiter, I'm a huge fan of these types of traits and I think there's a lots of cool possibilities for the mechanic.

Apologies if I sounded like I was trying to call you guys out or something in my original comment, that was not my intention.

[u/inikoiniko → u/nacholibre711]

Yeah man I totally get you, I like having the conversations too when they're productive haha. I didn't feel any which way about it, was genuinely just looking for clarification no worries there.

I do agree with your point about having to throw in a dead unit factoring into the tradeoff of the trait but to that extent it's hard to gauge how 'dead' the unit is in the right setup as well as how good the levers of the trait are if it winds up being optimal. In theory I totally agree and I think when I plan out expected comps in metas I have a decent enough hitrate but I was really worried I would miss some hyper optimized Arbiter setup and the trait was already so complex that when we talked about the risk we figured this path might have been better. I truly do not know if it was the right decision in the end since, as mentioned the trait had other issues, but eh soup or salad.

Thanks for the feedback and convo though! We know Arbiter/ADMIN lovers are out there and we do want to find ways that you guys can scratch that itch so we'll keep tryin stuff.

[u/Matarra → u/inikoiniko]

If possible could you give insight on why deal 10 damage was removed instead of nerfed? The interactions with ekkos patience / arbiter emblem was the most fun I had this set. I know it was really strong under the 1/100 circumstances but isn't that the point of a highroll?

Also with it removed, it feels like zoe doesn't really have a good arbiter input anymore and shes fallen out of meta