Twitch and Eve Stealth Reworks

We finally got the official news on stealth reworks after almost a year. Here is what designers (Morello, statikk and clasick) said about the topic in forums.

Why Twitch and Eve needed change

First, I want to provide context – this might be a repeat for some of you, but it's really important to understand why we believe these changes are necessary:

Long-term stealth is a contentious mechanic. It's really fun for the person using it to gank, but it absolutely blows for the player on the receiving end.Long-term stealth encourages hugging your tower all day long, with stealth detection such as Oracles or Vision Wards being the only viable counter-play option, which is a binary and boring mechanic. Not fun.

It's also proven near-impossible to balance these mechanics. Long-term stealth isn't effective against high level players, because they know how to counter it, so it's never something we'd see in pro-level play. That runs contrary to our goals of increasing the diversity of champion picks. Today, we consistently see over 70% of champions picked in tournaments, but almost never these champions. This is better than it's ever been in this genre but we'd like to see even more.

But stealth is cool!

All that said that, there are some characteristics of long-term stealth we want to preserve. It's satisfying for scouting and concealing map movement. It allows for some powerful counter-jungling opportunities. It can set the stage for some clutch late game moments.

So in order to deliver the fun of stealth while removing the toxic elements, we explored A LOT of ideas. And we explored them in great depth. You might remember some of the ideas we floated on the forums – 'robot chicken' scouting drone, footprints, and others. Those were only a few of the ideas we designed, prototyped, and ultimately decided weren't good enough to get the job done.

Where we ended up

So, where did we end up? Twitch and Eve are both getting complete ability remakes. Eve is getting new abilities that include a reworked version of long-term stealth, with some similar mechanics to what we attempted a while ago. Twitch is getting shorter-term, tactical stealth and significant kit changes to improve his performance as both an assassin and AD carry. 

Let's talk about Eve in more detail first – because, let's face it, she's the most negatively impacted by her current state. For that, I'll turn it over to Statikk, who's working on finalizing Eve's design.

Evelynn ability remake overview

Like Morello said, Evelynn is keeping long-term stealth, making her the only champion currently in the game with such a mechanic. Evelynn's entire concept – from design to theme to aesthetic – is built around the idea of stealth, and so it was important for us to find a way for persistent stealth to live in League of Legends via Eve.

The system we've chosen to implement for her new stealth mechanic is similar to what some of you might remember Xypherous talking about a while ago.

Eve's new stealth

Eve's passive is now Shadow Walk. From Level 1, Evelynn is stealthed, meaning she can only be seen by enemy champions within a relatively short range of her, or when she passes through true sight (eg, Vision Wards). She becomes unstealthed whenever she enters combat and reenters stealth after a brief cooldown once out of combat.

That means Evelynn is still hard to pinpoint in terms of map position, and she retains the feel of roaming around and scouting out areas for her team. Her new ring of visibility also introduces some interesting gameplay opportunities for great Evelynn players. Through careful attention, Eve can strategically juke around enemies, carefully set up surprise engagements, and unlock all sorts of new options that will reward player skill.

However, opponents now have a small window of opportunity to react, since she becomes visible before she's directly on top of them (rather, she'll be closing in on them at the time of detection).

Eve's new kit

Since Eve's now slightly more detectable at close range, we've been able to give her a much more robust kit:

We've enhanced Eve's mobility: instead of just having a movement speed steroid on a long-cooldown ult, one of Eve's new base abilities passively grants her stacking movement speed on spell hits, as well as an active sprint on a short cooldown. These effects can stack.

Hate Spike is getting a significantly longer range and the ability to hit more targets.

Eve's getting a new ultimate -- a ranged AoE that damages and slows enemies while granting her some increased durability based on how successful she is at landing it.

Results

All in all, these changes make Evelynn a much more viable, flexible pick. She's still a strong duelist and ganker thanks to her stealthy nature, enhanced mobility and high damage output. These new changes also give her some much-needed team fight presence.

We'll be putting Eve up on the PBE for final testing and QA in the next content patch – look forward to her full kit details and feel free to give her some hands-on testing at that time.

Next up: Classick with the Twitch details.

Twitch ability remake overview

For a while now, we've felt like Twitch hasn't lived up to our original design vision. Our goal when revisiting his kit was to restore some of his intended gameplay style and feel without drifting away from what existing Twitch players have come to love.

We've always wanted Twitch's poison gameplay to be rewarding and deadly in the right hands. Good Twitch players should be able to deliberately stack poisons and put out massive damage with Expunge. Currently, Expunge doesn't scale well and Spray and Pray's poison-stacking isn't valued over its direct damage, making Twitch's poison gameplay feel lackluster at most stages of the game.

Twitch's new stealth

We wanted to buff Twitch's poison gameplay across the board, but in order to accomplish this we needed to address how Twitch used stealth. Because of the inherent advantages that long-term stealth brings, we haven't been able to adequately buff the rest of Twitch's abilities. This was impacting his competitive viability. The more we looked at Twitch's kit and where we wanted him to end up, the more we realized that making Ambush a short-term, tactical tool would enable us to realize his envisioned potential.

Twitch's new kit

Because Ambush's stealth now has a short duration, we have some breathing room to buff Twitch in other departments:

Expunge now scales well into late-game, which includes getting additional damage from your bonus Attack Damage. It also now scales off of both AP andAD.

Spray and Pray is no longer about melting entire teams via AoE – it's now more important as a tool for strategically stacking poisons.

We've remade Debilitating Poison into a new ability called Venom Cask, which now further contributes to his venom-stacking gameplay

His base stats are getting buffed.

Twitch is also getting some quality of life improvements, which include making his attack animation snappier.

Results

Twitch is going to be in a much better spot at all levels of competition with his new abilities and focus. His core gameplay is getting some much-needed love, and his new Ambush feels great.

Stay tuned for full details on Twitch's kit – he's going up on the PBE for final testing and QA in the next content patch, and we'll have some news on the front page detailing his full kit at that time.