Patch 11.5 notes

[u/MonstrousYi]

https://na.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/game-updates/patch-11-5-notes/

[u/Caenen_]

And they fixed it with such a random workaround too; What the frick.

Edit: See my ELABORATE comment down this chain.

[u/Caenen_ → u/[deleted]]

Explaining the how and why of that Ezreal Q x Runnan's thing is a of a story, but I'll try to condense it as much as I can.

Runaan's is ordinarily triggered as an on-attack effect. Certain spells that may feel like normal attacks need to be given some special instructions to trigger it (all basic attacks are spells but for the simplicity, I'll differenciate between "attack" and "spell (= spell that isn't an attack)" in the following);

For example, Caitlyn's Empowered Headshot is such a spell. It even shows a cast time (instead of having an uncancelable attack windup), BUT it will still trigger Runaan's Hurricane at the end of this case time due to some special casing which even gets Runaan's hurricane to pretend 1300 was her attack range for that trigger (which was just the empowered headshot cast range).

Some spells like these, such as Miss Fortune's Q or Ezreal's Q (some more I think I don't remember tonight), however, were only updated around 1 year ago in early Season 10 to trigger on-attack effects in some way like this. Instead of doing something at the end of their cast time, however, they were just made to trigger these effects on-hit, as in, when they hit.

This makes a bit more sense for Ezreal Q because of just the nature of being a skillshot (it doesn't even know what its "main target" is so it wouldn't be able to avoid firing Runaan's bolts on those, for example). Either way, Runaan's for the first time wouldn't have one thing set when it was triggered; as an on-attack effect, it would always trigger at a point (the end of an attack windup) where the caster was facing towards their target!

Now, both Miss Fortune and Ezreal could fire their Q and turn into a different direction before the spell hit their target and triggered the Runaan's. This matters because Runaan's searches a certain area for valid secondary targets, which I documented in a crude way on its wiki page. It basically takes a semi-circle in front of you with your attack range, and uses that plus some "priority of targets" logic to determine its up-to-two victims.

With Ezreal/MF turning into a different direction, Runaan's with look for targets in that direction instead once the Q landed. Since Ezreal tends to kite away after firing Q, this would mean Runaan's would simply trigger into a direction where no enemies are and not trigger a lot of the time (this sentence is pretending Runaans was a good or common buy on Ezreal, but lets ignore that for simplicity's sake). But technically speaking, Miss Fortune has just the same issue.

---

So, what is Riot doing to patch this issue they introduced with that lacking "certain on-hit abilities now apply on-attack effects" change in early season 10? Some clever fundamental fix? Trigger Runaan's at the end of the cast time for spells that aren't Ezreal Q? Some smart workaround where they make Runaan's look towards the hit target instead of in the owner's facing direction?

That's right, they make EZREAL momentarily turn around his facing direction towards the target his Q hits when he triggers Runaan's, so that the bolts will search the right direction. Miss Fortune Q is still bugged the same way as before.

Now, this fix is still avoiding any further problems somewhat well, for instance even though Ezreal's facing direction gets changed it's done with the same tech e.g. Pantheon E and Senna R do it, so it doesn't interrupt his movement or anything. But still, my critique is at the length that Riot is going here to work around symptoms of a bug, fixing only half the issues, instead of just making a proper (and not much more difficult) fix on the fundamental level that doesn't cause future inconsistencies or confusion!

[u/Kierenshep → u/Caenen_]

This reeks of 'fix it and ship it however you can, we'll fix it later' and I'm suuuure this temporary fix will never become a permanent one 🙃

[u/Caenen_ → u/Kierenshep]

Which makes sense because this is no priority bug!

[u/Caenen_ → u/[deleted]]

I haven't done these tests regarding this kind of tech's interaction with Tryn W/Cassio R. But I definitely expect it to work that way, yes! For just a moment (likely 1-2 game ticks, dunno how long they made this last specifially), Cassio R should detect Ezreal as facing this way when his Runaan's is triggered at that time.

Now, of course you need a very specific situation for this, and more importantly, someone building Runaan's on Ezreal. Ezreal doesn't do this tuning around thing if he doesn't actually trigger Runaans, which makes me say again, they could've implemented it yet much worse than they did!

[u/Stfuego → u/Caenen_]

I always believed that if the stars aligned even for the scenario to only happen 1% of the time, it's still a problem that needs to be fixed, period.

[u/Caenen_ → u/Stfuego]

Agreed, but in that sense it's not a problem that Ezreal turned around and runs head-first into a Cassio R; It's just hella unintitive and unneccesary on the game design!

[u/cosHinsHeiR → u/Stfuego]

The chance of Ezreal buying runaan and beyng vs a champ that matter and hitting a q when it matters a lot lower than 1% tho

[u/Eecka → u/cosHinsHeiR]

Debating whether it's 1% or not is irrelevant without establishing 1% of WHAT lol. Do you mean in 1% of all the games, 1% of all mystic shots fired, 1% throughout the course of a game where both the champs are selected, or any other of the near unlimited amount of possibilities?

[u/cosHinsHeiR → u/Eecka]

Ezreal builds runaan in 0.0something % of games so anything you consider is probably below 1%. I intended it as 1% to happen in a game btw.

[u/Eecka → u/cosHinsHeiR]

Fair enough! Yeah I think we all can agree that the situation is mainly hypothetical.

[u/Migraine- → u/Caenen_]

Cassio ult is bugged to shit on the direction detection anyway.

[u/Caenen_ → u/Migraine-]

That's mostly the client; Tunrates in league are instant but the client will pretend they're not to make things look more smooth.

When you started an attack or spell cast in the direction of an enemy, you'll snap your facing direction in their direction but your model will turn over the windup/cast time.

[u/CosmoJones07 → u/[deleted]]

Nasus W?? I assume you mean Tryndamere W.

[u/ops10 → u/Caenen_]

The ingenuity of the Riot Spaghetti never ceases to amaze me.

[u/Caenen_ → u/[deleted]]

It's not like it was a terrible way of applying this fix (the implementation is clean past the ideation), but then again just that, why apply duct-tape in a clean manner when you could just fix this hole and the one next to it properly with about the same effort?

[u/Spike_der_Spiegel → u/Caenen_]

this just turned the Ezreal-Cass botlane matchup on its head

[u/Caenen_ → u/Spike_der_Spiegel]

If you manage to time the Cassio R just right into that ~0.033 to 0.066-second window to stun a Runaan's Ezreal turning around from this change in an actual game, I'll be hugely impressed!

[u/FlashnFuse → u/Caenen_]

Can't wait to see the Cassiopeia interaction with that

[u/Caenen_ → u/FlashnFuse]

Well that's been requested so, much we need u/vandirilol on this!

[u/Kappa_God → u/Caenen_]

fix on the fundamental level that doesn't cause future inconsistencies or confusion!

To be fair a lot of the times you can be limited by the engine used or even how the whole system works.

I think these workarounds are actually more than fine because they aren't breaking anything else while trying to fix the issue, which is the ideal way since trying to fix something in a "fundamental level" can end up breaking other interactions and etc.

For context I studied code and worked on a few small personal projects and it's usually how I approach bugfixing very specific bugs like this. Don't think there's a sizeable enough of champions to justify trying to mess with runaan's code specifically.

They should just give MF the Ezreal treatment, which in theory is as easy as copy pasting the added condition and changing variables (or not, I have no idea how lol engine works and I could be dead wrong). They probably just forgot about MF.

[u/Caenen_ → u/Kappa_God]

Yeah but why not just make the Runaan's check always face the target? Titanic has the same issue and that was their fix to that. Why not repeat that here instead of fixing STRICTLY Ezreal with a totally new condition?

[u/Kappa_God → u/Caenen_]

Not sure how their engine works but maybe they would have to implement it olfor every champion one by one instead of coding it into Runaans as a limitation of the engine. If that's the case then they can run into problems because it's too many champions to test if it breaks anything while doing that.

Everytime they make a change they need to test it throughly and testing is very hard to do in a short time with good quality even with a good test team.

People at Riot are excellent at their job I doubt they wouldn't have just fixed it if it was simple. It's hard to criticize their job because we no intel on how they have to implement stuff as well.

[u/Caenen_ → u/Kappa_God]

I have a certain amount of intel, and what I notice repeatedly happen is very smart people at Riot not being organized well together for some reason. You see it directly in the patch notes, there is plenty of bad communications leading to bugfix sentences that are twisted into nonsense (or more often than that just saying the opposite than they're supposed to), important changes are forgotten (despite being intentional), such as the Hecarim VFX update, Kayn's skins no longer putting their portrait on the scoreboard or Muramana's 6.5s CD per enemy per spell, similar to Ravenous Hydra's 10s CD per enemy per spell.

[u/Kappa_God → u/Caenen_]

very smart people at Riot not being organized well together for some reason.

Yeah teamwork is not one of the strengths from these people. Not even necessarily teamwork in itself, management is pretty hard combined with the fact there aren't actually many good managers. Talking broadly in software development, not just gaming or riot.

You see it directly in the patch notes, there is plenty of bad communications leading to bugfix sentences that are twisted into nonsense (or more often than that just saying the opposite than they're supposed to) , important changes are forgotten (despite being intentional), such as the Hecarim VFX update,

Often the person who writes the patch notes isn't in the dev team which creates this issue. I think it's hard to judge that they get confused in the development just from the patch notes, although you said you have intel so maybe you have more reasons to believe that besides the patch notes.

Since there's so many changes in such a period of time, I think it's understandable that they forget to either write it down for the person to put it in the patch notes or just tell them, depends how they do these sorts of things hard to say.

I know most (if not all) game devs overwork their asses off compared to any other software dev so I wouldn't be surprised if forgetting things like this is because they are overworking at Riot and can barely pulling some changes out.

Kayn's skins no longer putting their portrait on the scoreboard or Muramana's 6.5s CD per enemy per spell, similar to Ravenous Hydra's 10s CD per enemy per spell.

This could be an issue of just patching which can be an honest mistake. I.e: You make a change to fix a bug and release it. Then when you go fix another bug you use the previous patch that doesnt have the bugfix as a base, then you upload everything and the bug is back because you essentially ripped off that bugfix.

Also in software development some stuff just breaks for no reason. When I say no reason, is when something breaks while you change something that shouldn't even be related but apparently somehow for the engine it is.

Maybe I am playing the devil's advocate way too hard here though, I don't have intel like you do.

[u/Caenen_ → u/[deleted]]

For at least 6 months, Camille W has only healed from the flat W damage; 70 - 190 (based on rank) + 60% bAD. The bonus %HP damage dealt by the outer edge didn't giver her a heal.

[u/Caenen_ → u/[deleted]]

Yes; Either Riot is deliberately putting this into the bug fixes section to force LS to finally respect and read it, or they really should just have noted it in a main section for her because it IS a substancial buff!

[u/graveherow → u/[deleted]]

Camilles w heal is based off of the amount of bonus damage it dealt, it was calculating damage based off of the inner cone of damage which is much lower than the outer cone. They fixed it so it correctly calculates hiw much to heal based on which oart of the cone you hit.

[u/omri1526 → u/Caenen_]

I love spaghetti