Reynolds (LoL Anti-Tank) Aesthetic

So I started trying to draw some form of freehand concept for Reynolds but I have lost the ability to draw. I don’t know what happened, but everything I came up with looked horrible. It’s weird because Hilde looks quite good (passable at least), the monstrosities of Reynolds in front of me are too embarrassing to share! I doubt I will learn to draw again soon, but I wanted to show you the sort of look I want Reynolds to have.

What has been established so far is that Reynolds is likely to be from Zaun (a haven for mad scientists), he has a whole host of weapons for his abilities and a very active teleporting system which activates after his weapons have cooled down.

For his look, I have had the idea of a hunched over crazy scientist with a massive teleportation pack on his back for weeks. I haven’t even watched Back To The Future but I kept getting Doc Brown’s image in my head.

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Doc Brown from Back To The Future

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The doc’s hair is a bit wild for me and his lab coat is a bit white for a dude who needs to pack some serious weaponry. Reynolds is a scientist and an inventor, but he also likes to get his hands dirty with shotguns, grenade launchers, machine pistols and his auto attack weapon (need to decide what that will be). He needs something that can carry the weight of all these items. He needs a trench coat.

Was Reynolds all in Vayne?

Riot just released some details about the next champion for League of Legends. She looks pretty cool, I’m definitely gonna save up for her. Why? Because she seems to be anti-tanky DPS! My 2nd champion suggestion project is for an anti-tanky DPS, so lets see what tools she has and how they compare to my suggestion…

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Tumble: Vayne tumbles, maneuvering to carefully place her next shot. She rolls toward the cursor and her next attack deals bonus damage.

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Teleport/Dash type move, like Reynolds’ RELOcator. Helps with kiting and positioning her other skills.

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Silver Bolts: Vayne tips her bolts with a rare metal, toxic to evil things. The third consecutive attack or ability against the same target deals a percentage of the target’s maximum Health as bonus true damage. (Max damage vs. Monsters is capped)

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True damage percentage based attack. Similar to Reynolds’ Let It Rip in both its damage type and that it forces enemies to stay in your range and take massive damage, or get out of your range (which aids kiting).

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Condemn: Vayne draws a heavy crossbow from her back, and fires a huge bolt at her target, dealing damage and knocking them back. If they collide with terrain, they are impaled, dealing bonus damage and stunning them.

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Knockback shot, helping with kiting and protecting squishies in general. Similar to Reynolds’ Shell Shock. When combined with Tumble, it’s like Reynolds’ RELOcator + Shell Shock combo… teleport into position and knock back.

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Final Hour (Ultimate): Readying herself for an epic confrontation, Vayne gains increased Attack Damage, stealth during Tumble, and quadruple the bonus Movement Speed from Night Hunter.

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This skill is pretty interesting, will have to see exactly how her passive (Night Hunter) works. This has no similarities to Reynolds.

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Night Hunter (Passive): Vayne ruthlessly hunts evil-doers. She gains bonus Movement Speed when moving toward nearby enemy champions.

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Another pretty cool ability, helps with chasing but not with kiting… which is interesting. Also has no similarities.

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Riot have seemed to go in an AD carry direction with Vayne, whereas Reynolds is more about utility and support. Vayne will be capable of destroying all targets with her ultimate (not just tanks, like Reynolds). She has a few aspects of Poppy, who is one of the hardest carries in the game (useless when not farmed, insane when farmed). Plus bonus damage move? Check. Terrain based stun and knockback? Check. Movement speed increaser? Check. She has some pretty crazy chasing ability (Poppy also has this, but the descriptions for Vayne seem pretty insane).

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Vayne, the Night Hunter

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SunnyD and Rum(ble) – Yum, yum!

Despite a torrent of negativity towards the newest champion in League of Legends, I’m actually quite excited about him. The last champion, Brand, was really lacklustre from a design standpoint. He was an AoE fire mage, whoopty doo… haven’t seen that in like 1million games before.

Rumble’s skills are individually quite boring, that I will admit. His Q is just an AoE damage cone. His W is another shield skill (don’t we have enough already?). His E is a skill shot slow, although it has a nice double cast feature. His ultimate is pretty interesting, a long range wall of AoE and slow pain with a new targeting mechanism. He doesn’t sound that exciting does he?!

Fortunately, Rumble’s passive is a really cool skill and is what makes him an exciting champion. All his abilities use Heat, he has no mana or energy. When Rumble is over 50 heat, he enters the danger zone and his skills are buffed. If he reaches maximum heat (120) then he overheats. When Rumble is overheating, he is silenced and has a magic damage buff to his auto-attacks until he cools down. It’s a superb mechanic that is both original, tactical and challenging to manipulate. For maximum ranged effectiveness, you’ll want to time your skills so that you stay below 120 heat but above 50. When you feel like pounding face, you can spam all your skills to reach maximum heat and then pound enemies into the ground with auto attacks.

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Rumble, the Mechanized Menace

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What Rumble’s passive does is give you a very interesting choice of item builds. You could go full caster and hope that you never need to overheat. You could go full tanky DPS and spam all your abilities to ensure you’re getting bonus magic damage on your auto-attacks as much as possible. The optimum playstyle will have to be seen, but I hope you can really kick ass with overheat attacks. I want to create a hybrid build that focuses on…

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• Cooldown Reduction: More spam = more overheat
• Attack Speed: More speed = more bonus damage
• Ability Power: More ability power = stronger shield and buffed AoE damage
• Resistances: AR and MR so you can stay in the fray and pound face.

A New Champion Approaches… Hilde, the Kinslayer

First Concept Art, click to expand

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Balancing Hilde – Finishing touches on her skills…

To finish off my skills, I need to add the cast ability for Fyrone Temblor, add the energy values and then create her passive. Since Hilde is such a complicated champion, I want to make the passive very simple. I’m thinking something along the lines of Soraka or Fiddle (AoE buff/debuff auras). It’s a shame because I really like complex passives, ones that define the entire way you play the champion. I’ll have a think about it.

For now, I need to finalize Fyrone Temblor…

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Mountain Divide: Hilde leaps towards a target, dealing XXX true damage and XX bonus true damage per XX armor and magic resist below her own.

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This is what I said last time about balancing this particularly tricky skill;

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Mountain Divide will probably be the most difficult skill to balance. Hilde’s ultimate abilities are not going to be massively powerful in damage, so Mountain Divide could be her de facto ultimate. However, I don’t want this to be the case because it will ensure that every Hilde player will skill Fyrone Temblor first, which reduces the versatility of the champion. This situation can be combated by reducing the base true damage of the ability, but increasing the bonus damage component. 

Aegis of Kaladoun increases the damage of Mountain Divide (by increasing your armor and magic resistance), Icathian Blades‘ ultimate ability will also increase the damage (twofold, by increasing your armor and MR and reducing theirs). This means that players will have to find a balance between all 3 skills to figure out the most effective skill sequence.

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Now I have the extra values, I really think focussing on the bonus damage component is much better. It will reward Hilde players for finding the best skill combinations and punish those who just max Fyrone Temblor for its uber nuke (she’s a tank, this would be ‘abuse’ of her abilities and a poor way to play).

The bonus damage is based on the differential between Hilde’s armor and magic resist, and her targets. It’s designed to absolutely destroy enemy carries (a bit like Cho’gath’s Feast) so that the enemy team has to deal with her. However, because of the huge amount of variables that can influence her resistances and those of her target, this is tough to balance!

Balancing Hilde – Damage and Effects Pt.II

Click here for Part I

This time I have to finalize the damage and effects of Hilde’s last 2 skills; Aegis of Kaladoun and her ultimate.

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Aegis of Kaladoun

Persistent Effect: Enemy attacks increase Hilde’s armor and magic resistance by X for X seconds. Stacks up to 5 times.

Aegis is the stance Hilde wants to pick when she’s doing a good job and enemies are attacking her. As with her Fyrone Temblor passive, she wants to gain as many stacks as she can and then switch out of it.

Lots and lots of champions have armor and magic resistance buffs. Galio’s Bulwark (90! Instant activated increase to anyone!), Mordekaiser’s Creeping Death (30), Rammus (150 for self), Poppy (50 AR at 10 stacks + damage). Poppy’s ability is basically the same as Hilde’s, but it gives damage and she is not a tank. Therefore I want Hilde to have more than Poppy, but probably less than Rammus (since she has another defense boost).

Persistent Effect: Enemy attacks increase Hilde’s Armor and Magic Resistance by 15 for 8 seconds. Stacks up to 5 times.

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Activation: Hilde forges a XXX health shield for all nearby allies for X seconds.

Originally this was going to be an AoE AR/MR boost. But I’ve already got an AR/MR boost, so having a shield is more supportive and interesting.

There are no AoE shield effects in the game, only single target… so I have to take that into account when balancing. Morgana’s Black Shield (300 magic damage), Janna’s Eye of the Storm (240 damage) and Karma’s Soul Shield (280 damage) are the allied target non-ultimate shields in the game.

Balancing an AoE shield will be interesting. If I reduce the health to compensate for a potential 5 shields, then it might be uselesss for Hilde. If I make it too high, it will be severely overpowered. Therefore, I might make it similar to Taric’s heal, having double the amount for himself but the standard values for his allies. Also, remember that this can be activated every 10 seconds. My only conclusion is that the values for this ability are highly speculative!

I’ve also added an effect that if the shield is broken on Hilde, it breaks on everyone else. This acts a bit like a taunt, since attacking Hilde will cause (indirectly) 150 x allies damage.

Activation: Hilde forges a 150 damage shield for all nearby allies for 5 seconds. Shield strength is increased by 50% on Hilde. If Hilde’s shield is broken, all allied shields are lost.

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Keeper’s Will*: Hilde creates a bond between herself and an ally, splitting damage taken by the target by 50% for X seconds.

*activated ability whilst using Aegis of Kaladoun

I love this skill. It allows Hilde to massively increase the effective HP of squishies, doubling their resistances (at the cost of her own health). The damage taken will also force stacks on her Persistent Effect, which is an extra bonus!

There is a balance problem though. Tanky DPS is already owning up the League, so if Hilde cast this on Renekton he’d be unstoppable (he already is in most cases). This is mainly a problem with the tanky DPS metagame (nerf it already, Riot!), but I should take it into account.

Keeper’s Will: Hilde creates a bond between herself and an ally, splitting damage taken by the target by 50% for X seconds. Damage split is reduced to 25% for targets with over 100 armor & magic resistance. 

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Base numbers are in, lets look at the skill descriptions!

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Reynolds (LoL Anti-Tank): Ultimate and working on more details…

Unlike Hilde, when I’ve been working on Reynolds I’ve kinda had chaos going on in my brain. This is mostly due to the passive teleport effect which I want to give him. For the purposes of organizing my thoughts and settling on skills and their effects, I want to do a summary and just outline exactly what Reynolds has so far. I’m also going to come up with some names because I’m sick of using ridiculously annoying acronyms like ASSS.

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 Purpose:

• Kiting multiple enemies with knockback.
• Reducing the resistances of tanky DPS.
• Reducing the lifesteal of tanky DPS.
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Notes:

Originally this was supposed to slow, but I now have another skill that slows so it could be removed. The problem with many tanky DPS is their healing. Irelia, Xin Zhao, Sion, Olaf and Renekton all have lifesteal or healing abilities which make them even more difficult to kill. Since the slow was removed, I thought it would be nice to add the additional effect of reduced healing. All junglers rely on lifesteal and most junglers are tanky DPS, so this is a good addition.

LoL Anti-Tank – Inspiration and more brainstorming…

I don’t like to mock brainstorm (deciding an idea and then doing a brainstorm to make it look like I figured it out through planning), so let’s get some stuff out the way! Firstly, I want to call my Anti-Tank champion ‘Reynolds’. The story behind picking the name is actually pretty stupid so I’ll explain that. When thinking of names for my Armor Shattering Shotgun Slow skill, I was thinking of what to call a big badass double barrelled shotgun. It’s got twin barrels, it unleashes hell… what is better than ‘Twin Hellfire Cannon’? I was thinking to myself “where did this genius come from?”, since I had a healthy dose of deja vu. So I Googled the term and was instantly reminded… .

Captain Edward Reynolds, as played by Evan Stone

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Yes… I am ashamed to say that the name of my new champion is a homage to a character in the adult movie Pirates II: Revenge of Stagnetti.

Balancing Hilde – Damage and Effects Pt.I

Almost done!

In the last post I decided on the cooldowns and new visual style for Hilde’s skill descriptions. After getting to play Lee Sin, he does indeed have changed icons when he has used his abilities (although the original description labels everything, which isn’t the case for Hilde). This clarifies that it can be done and it is a much more elegant solution to the problem of a tooltip covering 25% of the screen.

In this post, I want to fill in the damage and effect numbers for Hilde’s skills. I must keep in mind that she is a tank (lower damage) and that she uses her spells in combos rather than singularly (so I should balance the combo and not the individual spell). As I made her stance ability castables 15 second cooldowns, she won’t be expected to use them all in a single battle (which means more power!).

With my DotA hero suggestion, Idol, I looked at the power of similar skills on other heroes to guide the power of my hero’s skills. I will be doing the same here. Riot also does this, you can tell by the number of single target damaging spells that deal 230-300 damage at skill level 5 (down to B in the ability list and there are already 6!). So, I will go through my skills one by one and decide on some values…

Balancing Hilde – Castable Cooldowns and UI

A quick summary for all of y’all

• Hilde has 13 skills
• Hilde’s main gameplay is switching stances and managing her stackable buffs/debuffs
• That’s complicated enough

So with those things in mind, her 3 stance abilities (the castables) can go one of two ways. They could be a shorter duration cooldown so that Hilde can throw them in between her stance switches (BAM, switch, BAM, switch, BAM) or they can be longer cooldowns (with more power of course) so that they’re used with more thought and for dealing with particularly tough battles. I think the second way is better. It also makes her less confusing and fiddly.

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Lee Sin - With a much cooler skin.

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As mentioned in my first proper skill workings post, the UI might be a bit of an issue for Hilde. There is a lot of text on her ability descriptions. While it wasn’t as bad as I first thought, there is definitely room for improvement. Thankfully, I got an idea from the newest released champion, Lee Sin. I’m not sure exactly how his UI works, but he has 3 castable abilities! If he hits his Q, his Q will change to another skill for a short while. Since I haven’t played Lee Sin, I don’t know exactly how it is shown (I think he’s becoming free this week), but it gave me an idea. When Hilde is in a stance, the button will change to show her castable and ultimate ability. When she is out of a stance, it will show the switch and persistent effect.

This looks much better.