Do LoL developers have specific strategies when introducing boosts and nerfs to their champions?
Buffs and nerfs are an integral part of League of Legends. With more than 160 characters and a huge number of items, it is virtually impossible to introduce a perfect balance. Each new hero, item, or rune change can mess up the meta quite a bit.
Regular updates come to the rescue, which aim to equalize the strength of champions so that none of them is overly strong or weak. As you can easily guess, the right approach to balance is not easy and requires certain strategies that have specific goals.
Strategy for introducing buffs in LoL
Riot Axes, the chief gameplay designer for League of Legends, has commented on the developers’ approach to strengthening and weakening the game’s heroes. Introducing buffs can be divided into different categories, which require different amounts of time and produce different effects on Summoner’s Rift.
Just a quick update to how we’re approaching buffs and some nerfs these days. Over the last couple years, we’ve tended to do most buffs and nerfs as what we call “bucket changes”—given that we agree a champion’s win rate isn’t quite right, we look for safe numbers changes where we can easily predict the outcome in terms of winrate.
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We also have a category of work we call “patch work” where we take a longer period of time to do a more careful change intended to solve some larger problem or to make a champion feel noticeably better to play. For context, most bucket changes can be done within a day, however patch work typically takes 1-2+ weeks depending on the scale of the changes.
We’ve always had both types of work in our toolkit, but we’re placing more emphasis on Patch work specifically for buffs right now. It won’t be a huge swing players will immediately notice and we’re still definitely doing smaller pure numbers buffs, but more of our changes for the next few patches will be aimed at improving the feel of a champion rather than simply increasing their win rate through numbers tweaks. Keep an eye out for some of these like Pantheon and Azir coming in patch 13.5.