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Champion Update: Ryze, the Rune Mage

Discussion in 'MOBA' started by Sarmaguy, Jul 1, 2016.

  1. Sarmaguy

    Sarmaguy Spiked Club Ogre Regular

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    RYZE

    THE RUNE MAGE
    For a millennium, the archmage Ryze scoured the world, seeking out ancient runes and storing their power in his arcane scroll. Though Ryze cares deeply for his fellow men, he must forever remain apart from them—this often causes him to seem curt and temperamental to those he protects. The world may have forgotten the horrors unleashed by runic power, but Ryze remains vigilant.


    ABILITIES
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    PASSIVE: ARCANE MASTERY
    Ryze’s spells deal additional damage based on his bonus mana, and his maximum mana is increased by a percentage of his ability power.

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    LANING
    Legend has it that an unkillable demon king once said "Ryze is the champion to learn when you want to understand the importance of hitting the right keys at the right time and in the right order." Ryze is about combos, and this rework isn't changing that. At his core, the Rune Mage is still a mean purplish-blue dude who uses dynamic combinations of spells to lay the whoopass on his opponents.


    So let's get into it: what combos should Ryze players know when they're in the laning phase?


    WAVECLEAR OVERLOAD (E > W > Q) Drop Spell Flux on a minion that's near-death, then finish it off with any other spell to spread Flux to all other surrounding minions—Cannon minions are a perfect target for this, since they tend to sit near the center of waves. You've now got a powerful way to wave clear with a bouncy Overload.


    PRIME THE WAVE, STUN SOME BABES (E > E > W > Q) Flux-infected waves pose a threat to your lane opponent, since Ryze can recast Spell Flux on fluxed-up minions to spread the effect to nearby targets. If Ryze catches an enemy champ with Flux in this way, he can instantly root them for an extended period with Rune Prison. An added strength of the E > W portion of this combo is that it fully charges a Rune, ensuring that his next Q grants him a shield and a brief movespeed boost to help him chase down a kill (or kite away from a bloodthirsty opponent).

    TEAMFIGHTING AND LATE-GAME
    When full teams clash, Ryze players have to rapidly compose spell combos that solve the problem at hand. Do you need to burst down one specific target? Are you better off applying damage to as many targets as possible? Or are you cleaning up after a successful engage? Bad Ryze players pop open a can of ability spam. Great Ryze players choose their combos wisely.




    FLUX ME ONCE, SHAME ON YOU... (E > E > Q) Ryze may not be able to burst down tanky frontliners, but that doesn't mean he's useless—he'll just have to temporarily play as an AoE backline mage. Sting a nearby champion with Spell Flux, then hit them with it again ASAP to apply the effect to any and all enemies nearby. You'll then only need to hit one of them with your Q to deal damage to the whole crowd.

    Ryze's Realm Warp never achieves the same lane-swapping potential of a Taliyah or Tahm Kench ult. As a result, the fact that he brings allied minions along on his ride is usually nothing more than a happy little accident, and his displaced friends soon return to their rightful lane. This doesn't hold true inside the enemy base, where lanes converge and Ryze's level 18 ult can actually transfer one lane's minions to an adjacent lane. If, for instance, you've got a massive wave that just destroyed the enemy's bottom lane inhibitor, you might Realm Warp to bring a pile of them with you to attack the midlane inhibitor turret. They'll dutifully give up their allegiance to the botlane and attack the turret closest to them.


    NO ESCAPE (E > W > R > E > Q > FACEROLL ON KEYBOARD) The scariest thing about Ryze's ult is his ability to reposition himself and his team mid-fight. Nothing prevents Ryze from moving about freely and casting his other abilities after the initial cast ofRealm Warp, so if he or an ally lands a stun (like an empowered Rune Prison) on a low-health opponent, he can immediately begin casting Realm Warp and aim it behind them. While Realm Warp channels, Ryze can unload the remainder of his spell combo on his opponent, then immediately afterward warp his entire team behind them to cut off their escape. When his cooldowns come back up after the warp, somebody is gonna go down. The best way to stop this if you're up against Ryze is to tag him with a crowd-control ability—that'll cancel the warp altogether.


    These combos are just a starting point, and the hope for this rework is that players smarter than us will figure out more surprising ways to combine the tools in his kit.

    “ The scariest thing about Ryze's ult is his ability to reposition his team mid-fight.”
    CHAMPION INSIGHTS
    From a narrative perspective, Ryze has been a total enigma—nearly a blank template, as far as characters go. What is there to say about him, other than that he's a magical hermit with a bigass scroll on his back? His few scraps of in-game dialogue told us that he's an impatient old coot ("Let's go! Let's go! Come on already! Don't hold me up!"). Beyond that, there's never been much substance there.


    The challenge was to flesh out that shell of a character without screwing up the impressions that players have formed about Ryze over the last seven years of playing as him. "It’s a little intimidating to update Ryze," says senior narrative writer John "JohnODyin" O’Bryan. "He's almost a poster boy of League."


    Instead of ditching Ryze's existing story tidbits, we set out to answer questions we've always had about him. Why is he nomadic, what’s up with this big scroll, and why is he so blue? Slowly, JohnODyin and others on the narrative team filled in the blanks: Ryze is nomadic because he’s on a mission to find and gather up ultra-powerful runes that are effectively weapons of mass destruction. He stores these runes in the scroll on his back, and is very protective of them; they'd be terribly dangerous if they fell into the wrong hands.

    “We set out to answer questions we've always had about RYZE. Why is he nomadic, what’s up with this big scroll, and why is he so blue?”
    Ryze is centuries old, and is kept alive by runic magic. He’s traversed the world on foot, and seen empires rise and fall. Anyone who endures so much would become a bit world-weary—Ryze has been alive so long that he’s seen humans make the same screwups over and over. "The blue thing we didn’t necessarily solve," admits JohnODyin. "But we think he was a regular guy who was changed over time by the magic he wields."

    THE RE-RE-REWORK
    Certainly, many players will agree that Ryze has changed a lot over time. This rework is arguably our third or fourth attempt at redefining the Rune Mage, and players have rightfully called us to task for not getting him into a better spot sooner.


    Champion designer David "RiotRepertoir" Capurro has done a lot of thinking about this problem. A year ago, RiotRepertoir worked on a gameplay redesign of Ryze with the goal of giving him "windows of power" to play within. The idea was his passive and ult would (after careful management of stacks) combine at key moments to make Ryze incredibly powerful. To get the most out of Ryze, players needed to carefully manage their spell stacking and implement combos that reset their cooldowns. With the Rune Mage currently sitting at around a 50% winrate, some might argue that the last round of changes turned him into a more-or-less balanced champion. So why rework him again?


    But winrate doesn't tell the full story. The Rune Mage had three major problems: he's too difficult to learn, too strong once you've mastered him, and too confusing to lane against for players who haven't memorized the nitty gritty details of Ryze's stacking and spell-combo gameplay. The Rune Mage is sometimes unbearably strong for reasons that aren't necessarily clear to his opponents. The windows of power we'd imagined for Ryze have, in practice, acted more as two-way mirrors of power. The knowledgeable Ryze player sees and understands what's going on with his kit, but other players see only darkness.


    Historically, the problem with strong Ryze players has been that they're hyper reliable and impossible to deal with when they're ahead. All they really do is deal tons of damage and instantly root you—with the last set of changes, we didn’t fix that.

    “ The Rune Mage is sometimes unbearably strong for reasons that aren't necessarily clear to his opponents. The windows of power we'd imagined for Ryze have, in practice, acted more as two-way mirrors of power.”

    It’s not that we have a problem with high skill-ceiling champs, or that you shouldn't have to put in effort to learn them. Deep, challenging characters are actually vital to League's long-term success—they're often the most rewarding ones to master. The problem is when champions feel impenetrable for those learning the champ and for people playing against it.


    So, how do we apply this thinking to Ryze? First, we killed the stacking/cooldown mechanic on his passive, but reworked some elements of it into his other abilities. The idea is that Ryze players (and their opponents) will have to spend less time keeping track of nearly-invisible stacks and think more about their very recent actions. Ryze's buffs and debuffs are now tied to a three or four second duration, which means that generally speaking, there are specific, memorizable combos that Ryze players will have as options at any given point.


    "Ideally, Ryze's skill ceiling is similar to before, and the skill floor is now higher," says RiotRepertoir. "Anyone can pick up Ryze and have a general idea of what you’re supposed to do with him, and then get better from there."

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    DING DONG, YOU'RE ROOTED
    The running theme through Ryze's gameplay rework is that his kit needed more clarity.Ryze's visuals and animations contributed to this problem. Whether it's a total noob trying Ryze for the first time or the best players in the world taking him to his mechanical limits, it always looks the same whenever Ryze is doing stuff: his arms flail around and a lot of blue shit comes out.


    There's no question about the quality of Ryze's current in-game visuals, says art lead Joshua "HUGEnFAST" Smith. "He's in the bottom ten. He's got the pizza feet, the really weird proportions. We wanted to get him to the same level of visual fidelity of a new champ."

    “ The running theme through Ryze's gameplay rework is that his kit needed more clarity. Ryze's visuals and animations contributed this problem.”

    The solution was to make his movements more exaggerated and flavorful. We rigged him to put more punch and power into his attacks, instead of just casually flinging spells out. It’s much more physical now, and the Rune Mage's tattoos pulse and light up as his power flows through him.


    It wasn't enough to light Ryze up and teach him some new moves: new gameplay demanded a new approach to his sound design. The big problem approached by sound designer Eugene "Riot Kyugene" Kang? Our blue buddy is too damn loud.


    "There's very little dynamic range among the sound samples on Ryze's current kit," says Riot Kyugene. "They’re loud, they’re intense, and they’re all pretty similar. Because everything is loud, nothing is."


    Without a basis for comparison amongst that sea of spells, it became hard for players to use sound indicators to tell what Ryze is doing to them. Riot Kyugene's new sound work on Ryze emphasizes the importance of his new E, because it tells players that what's coming next is the more empowered part of Ryze's combo.



    Ryze is on the PBE right now, probably yelling at people trying to touch his scroll.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Jul 1, 2016
  2. Arcus_N

    Arcus_N Spiked Club Ogre Regular

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    You know that Ryze and Xerath ose same type of magic, except Ryze know how to controls it, and Xerath don't. That is why Ryzes abillities are nice and controled, and Xeraths are just blast of power.
     
  3. Sarmaguy

    Sarmaguy Spiked Club Ogre Regular

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    oh i didn't know
     
  4. Cybat

    Cybat Elite Ogre The Pit

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    thats an interesting fact, i didnt know that either...
    u read the lore? :D
     
  5. GioLegenda

    GioLegenda Elite Ogre The Pit

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    This ryze is so OP,and I dont know how they dont nerf him....
     
  6. Croco12

    Croco12 The Crocodile The Pit
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    New ryze is definitely easier to learn then the old one.
     
  7. brankomiljus20

    brankomiljus20 Ogre Warlord Ogre Veteran

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    Now mby is not "machine gun type" like before, but he can almost oneshot ppl with e-e-q combo, so much dmg, and u still can go tanky
     
  8. djolebelevode

    djolebelevode Ogre Legend The Pit

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    I guess he was stronger before ?
     
  9. Sarmaguy

    Sarmaguy Spiked Club Ogre Regular

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    Yeah he was
    I liked more old ryze just spam q-e-q-w....
     
  10. djolebelevode

    djolebelevode Ogre Legend The Pit

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    And this ultimate is confusing a bit
     
  11. LoL GAMER

    LoL GAMER Spiked Club Ogre Regular

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    I don't know what to say.I liked old ryze and his spels and passive.This Ryze is similar to old but I more liked old bcs of his ult.Old Ryze had ult in every time and it gives him such power while this is just teleporting,but ew Ryze is good for some combos.I am trying to learn to play and this new Ryze.I hope that I will do it ASAP! :D
     
  12. djordje jockov

    djordje jockov Big Brute New Ogre

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    I hate new update for ryze.
     
  13. djolebelevode

    djolebelevode Ogre Legend The Pit

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    Ryze has one of lowest win rates,hmm
     
  14. whitepaper

    whitepaper Elite Ogre The Pit

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    Ryze is cool champ good abilities
     

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