SmashGizmo Chats About Olaf Changes

After promising Olaf buffs quite some time ago SmashGizmo's been asleep at the wheel, leaving Olaf fans wondering what's next in store for the champion. However, with some poking and prodding, he's finally ready to provide us with an update! Check out the details below!

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We're still working on him. I apologize for the lack of posts but last week was a bit slow on Olaf work due to suring up more immediate Live Design changes and keeping up with this thread eats up a ton of my time when I try to do so, so I tend to come and go as my schedule permits.

That being said, let's look at what I'm looking at testing for Olaf. I'll just try to bold out the things that have changed recently.

Olaf Changes, V1.1

Undertow

• Slow no longer decays
• Now has a minimum throw distance of 400 units
  
• Axes now stick in walls and structures if they would land inside impassable terrain

Basically as I said last time, tuned the min distance down a bit, now the necessary movement to pick up an Axe is under 100 units.

Current status of wall sticking is that it has been mostly removed, but I have put checks in place to see if an Axe would land in impassible terrain and if it would, it instead backtracks and finds the last wall it passed through and sticks there. Essentially trying to get the best of both worlds, enabling 0 distance Axes for junglers, preventing you from throwing unretrievable Axes, and still retaining the scouting power of Axes.

Vicious Strikes

• Mana cost reduced to 25 from 40/45/50/55/60
  
• Base damage increased to 20/35/50/65/80 from 7/14/21/28/35
• HP -> damage ratio removed
• Lifesteal reduced to 8/10.5/13/15.5/18% from 9/12/15/18/21%
• Spellvamp removed
• Now provides 1% enhanced healing from all sources for every 2% health Olaf is missing during the duration

Spellvamp still seems to be adding really esoteric and misleading power onto this ability so I'm trying an iteration with the spellvamp removed. While I get that players feel clever for smiting with Vicious Strikes up to get bonus healing, I think that adds unnecessary burden of knowledge on Olaf's opponents and gives us the ability to more directly buff his jungle if it feel underpowered. Not to mention the spellvamp off smite was getting kinda silly with the new amped healing mechanic (~300+ burst healing out of nowhere late game). 

I also feel like this was leading players to improperly use W before Q in chasing scenarios, though whether that was the spellvamp or just the AD remains to be seen with this iteration. I'm fine with W -> Q being situationally useful, but with a tightly windowed lifesteal/berzerker steroid, I don't like players feeling compelled to spend 40+% of the duration catching up to their long range Axe.

The HP scaling was limiting Olaf's build paths and causing his power to spike at level 13 rather than transition smoothly to 18, so I've removed it in favor of larger base damage numbers. I'm guessing these are too high right now, but I'd rather test them at too high to make sure they feel good and work than to discard the idea do to undertuned numbers.

Lifesteal scaled slightly down due to early feedback that his sustain was feeling pretty silly in conjunction with the new healing mechanic.

Ragnarok

• Mana Cost removed
• Cooldown changed to 120/100/80 from 100
• Active duration changed to 5 from 6
• New Passive Added: Olaf gains 10/25/40 Armor and Magic Resist passively
  
• Active Changed: Olaf removes all disables from himself and becomes immune to them for the next 5 seconds. During this time, he loses the passive portion of this skill and gains 15/2025% lifesteal (PLACEHOLDER MECHANIC).

Still pretty unhappy with this skill.

Double passive bonus was going by unnoticed, which points to attack speed being pretty useless on this ult. I'm not really happy with just throwing more lifesteal on here, but I'll openly admit that I'm having trouble finding a healthy mechanic to put on the active portion of this skill. Right now, in lieu of a stronger idea, I've put on lifesteal mostly to drive home that focusing Olaf as a team during his ult is strong, but trying to duel him is a bad idea, and partially to proof of concept Olaf's lifesteal tank pattern by boosting his LS number to a somewhat obnoxious level to see how it feels to play as and against. Again, I can't stress this enough, this mechanic is intended as a placeholder while I work on finding the right mechanics that preserve the intended play of Olaf and counterplay versus Olaf.

Also, I get that people are scared of changes, I really do, but I want you guys to remember that this is an iterative process and you're getting very early eyes on my work here. Changes will come and go and get tweaked until I have confidence in them. I assure you that Olaf will not be seeing a net nerf with the final changes that hit live.

But at the same time, I want to point out that individual aspects of Olaf's kit will be getting trimmed to focus the character. Right now, Olaf's power is very diffuse and I'm trying to tighten that power up into the things that actually make Olaf awesome. And when it comes to Ragnarok in particular, I'm trying to figure out exactly how to make being completely immune to CC feel good for both Olaf and his victim at the same time, as I don't think we have ever really figured that out.

Source

What do you think about the proposed changes? Comment below!