League of Legends, with its extremely frequent patches, inevitably releases changes which upset certain portions of the community. Typically, however, Riot staffers do a excellent job performing full explanations of nerfs, buffs, and other game balance changes in their patch notes. Should anything fall through the cracks in these exhaustive updates, it is usually found to be a small back-end change or other small tweak which could not impact gameplay. Forum posts by Riot Games developers reveal that this time around, significant changes (in the form of bugfixes) to Pantheon’s mechanics have been made without breaking the news to players.
League of Legends’ massive player base includes a wide range of detectives who pore over the contents of each patch, and several forum users discovered that Pantheon had apparently been nerfed upon a mid-May patch. Though based in a series of “bugs”, the results of these hidden changes significantly impact Pantheon play: during his ultimate, Grand Skyfall, users are no longer able to queue up spells to be immediately cast upon landing, and the ability’s animations have been lengthened by a full second.
Clearly, this situation presented a very difficult design and communication problem for Riot Staff. Riot staffer Pwyff took to the forums with pages-long posts to explain the tough decisions, characterizing the depth of the problem, “When a bug is taken for granted so much that it essentially gets factored into a champion’s power budget… we need to take a more nuanced approach to fixing what was, at the end of the day, a very real visual clarity issue.” Pwyff goes on to explain the finer points of the issues and changes in a series of posts on the League of Legends forums.
Virtually every player who has ever even tried out Pantheon in-game before this patch has likely experienced both of the elements that have been patched out, using the ability queuing to their advantage while trying to work around the delayed damage hitbox that results from an overly long animation. In a long-term scale, Riot’s decision process seems stable and forward-thinking. Their communication regarding the matter, on the other hand, definitely needs some work. While rarely-experienced or insignificant bug squashing might not merit space on patch notes, huge impacts like the ones caused by the Pantheon patch definitely warrant warning the community about. That being said, Pwyff and other Riot staffers have made statements claiming that the issue emerged due to a lack of internal communication between the design and art teams – the bugfix was an animation issue, not a design problem.
All things considered, Pwyff and the rest of the Riot team are taking a solid, defensible stance in favoring visual clarity and proper functionality over bugs which the community had adopted. Pwyff promised that, irrespective of this bugfix, “We will be fixing Pantheon.”, so, if all holds well, proper changes should be on the way after the massive shakeups recently in the wake of Feral Flare’s introduction.