Thread:Willbachbakal/@comment-1876049-20161019123736/@comment-1330314-20161019175005

I'm doing well! How've you been? It's been a long time.

Overall, I'm really liking this preseason. There's a ton of stuff that's coming up that the playerbase has been expecting for years (i.e. replays, the new client, etc.), and the gameplay updates are mostly great too.

I've playtested three of the main assassin reworks (everyone except Rengar, who's disabled at the moment), as well as Akali and Alistar's mini-reworks, and I really like all of them. The updated kits are really fun to use, and feel both powerful and richer in counterplay. Thoughts on each one of them:
 * Akali's new passive makes a fair difference in how she plays, and I feel makes her more interesting. Her E is still boring, and she still has issues, but overall it's a big improvement.
 * Alistar's changes look like he just got his passive and E swapped, but he actually plays really differently now. The new Trample really makes you want to stay near enemies after diving them, and stunning enemies with it is really satisfying, as is landing heals after full-team knockups. His overall damage feels terrible, though, which I guess is fine, considering he's not meant to be damage-heavy.
 * Kat's probably the "clunkiest" of the main reworks so far, but only because her rework really drastically changes the way she plays, so you faceplant if you try to play her the same way as live Kat. You basically need to lay a dagger down with W first before diving your opponent most of the time, but besides that she can deal incredible damage and has much better base mobility if you prepare accordingly, despite the loss of her ward jumping. She'll take some getting used to, but is a lot of fun.
 * LeBlanc's much less of a bully, but despite that it feels like she deals even more damage because of her new passive. Her new R is pretty complex, and has its own learning curve, but using her Mimic properly really feels like you're playing mindgames on your opponent.
 * Talon is probably my favorite of the main reworked assassins, mainly because of his parkour. The animation looks awesome and the gameplay is surprisingly new, even though it's also fairly untuitive. The rank 1 cooldown on his E is a bit high, so hopefully that'll get lowered. Other than that, his W feels even stronger and his new Q is interesting to use.

Besides that, the item changes seem pretty cool, though I haven't tried all of the new items in great depth. I'm not a fan of the Lethality stat, since the behind-the-scenes formula for the armor pen calculation means any number you get on an item feels arbitrary, and I'm not looking forward to the plants, but hopefully both of them will feel better over time once we all get used to them.