Introduction
For quite some time, League of Legends hasn’t felt all that entertaining and engaging. This is due to a lot of factors such as community, constant patches, and minor changes that don’t feel like a big deal to a regular player like myself, and possibly to you, my dear reader. It’s only natural that if someone enjoys the game recreationally, they may not understand some of the changes being made to champions hp, mana, or items. We usually know our build and stick to it.
Riot Games has finally tried listening to the community, for once. I mean that’s not something that they usually tend to do. They usually tend to go through with their plans regardless of what the general player may want and sometimes those changes end up having a large impact on the flow of the game as we know it. I mean yes, the champions are same, the Summoners Rift is mostly the same, but the game keeps evolving faster than some people can keep up with.
Before I start talking about the changes, I will talk about some of the problems. You see, something that really kills the joy and entertainment of League of Legends are the incredible differences between fed champions and those that are falling behind. How many times has it happened to you, you die a couple of times early and as soon as you get back to your lane your opponent just wipes the floor with you and deletes you in second? Yeah, me too. I mean, we all have been on both ends of that spectrum. The abuser and the victim, but speaking about me, more often than not, I have been the one that the enemy wipes the floor with. The burst that some champions get is mental. Now, listen to this. I am okay with that if the champion in question is a snowball champion like Le Blanc, Zed or Rengar. That is okay. Those champions have high damage output but they are extremely weak. When it comes to those champions, the player needs to have a lot of skill to pull off more than just one kill and die.
But, something has happened to me recently while playing LOL. I have been playing Le Blanc, and I had pretty decent game, nice KDA, nice farm and a pretty good vision score. On the enemy team there was a Zac, with all of the tanky items but one. He has built ‘’Demonic’s Embrace’’. With just one item. One Ap item, that Zac has deleted me every single time in less than two seconds. I really don’t have to explain anything anymore.
Riot has decided to slow down the game, less burst kills, longer teamfights and a lot more engaging game. Read everything below.
Changes
Durability
In patch 12.10, there will be some changes implemented to increase the durability of every champion on the roster and to reduce the overall amount of damage in League. This will be accomplished by increasing the following stats:
- Base Health
- Health per Level
- Armor per Level
- Magic Resist per Level
This increase in durability also necessitates some adjustments to the surrounding systems of the rift to make sure they are correctly tuned, relative to the increased durability. These include nerfs to sustain, and buffs to Baron, Turrets, and mana regeneration.
League of Legends developers say:
Why more durability?
‘’Devs and players agree—there is currently too much damage in League. While tons of damage can be fun and exciting, we believe that increasing champions’ defensive stats will be beneficial for letting players showcase their skill by giving them more opportunities for counterplay and to live out their high moments.
Before talking about the changes themselves, we want to reassure you that we aren’t trying to create a meta where there are no kills by 15 minutes into the game. There are actually quite a few things we like in the current state of League. Some pros of lower survivability include: A sizable amount of players enjoy high-kill games, it leads to more exciting pro metas, and it rewards good play with kills which is much more satisfying than just forcing someone to recall. That said, lower survivability also has downsides which outweigh these positives.
Lower survivability leads to game states where squishy carries and supports in particular struggle to have an impact in the game due to being one-shot with low counterplay in too many situations. When you’re dying so fast that it’s difficult to tell what killed you, game clarity takes a hit which leads to frustrating experiences.
On Live, combat can sometimes be overly rewarding when high threat champions only need to use a portion of their kit to secure a kill. Ideally, players should have to play around their champion’s key skill test to hit those satisfying combos (eg. Zed’s triple shuriken). Long term, we think poor skill tests make playing your favorite champions a lot less satisfying.
Another issue we’ve noticed with lower survivability is that it creates abrupt and confusing teamfights and skirmishes when champions die so quickly. Shorter teamfights are hard to follow, limit the opportunities players have to make smart decisions/showcase their skills, and ultimately aren’t living up to the epic clash of legends fantasy team fights should be delivering on. Since teamfights are one of the most enjoyable parts of League, we want to create more opportunities for players to engage in those high energy, game-changing 5v5’s.’’
Patch 12.10–What to Expect
‘’We still think that League is at its best with fast-paced, high intensity combat; but now that it’s gone too far in that direction we need to rein it back a bit. We don’t think any particular champions, items, or systems are out of line (even if they may have contributed to the root cause), which is why we’re increasing durability across the board, rather than removing or toning down specific offensive sources.’’
TLDR of what you can expect in your games with the Champion Durability Update:
- Players will feel that their champions are dealing and taking less damage
- Burst champions must commit more resources or be further ahead to get quick kills
- Bigger windows of opportunity for counterplay
- Skirmishes and teamfights will last longer
‘’Champion durability isn’t the only thing we’ll be adjusting. Increasing overall durability has a lot of knock-on effects. Notably, sustain becomes more powerful in preventing champions from reaching burst thresholds, so we are reducing sustain across the board. Other side-effects we’re looking at include map elements (Baron and Turrets) doing less damage, champions running out of mana more frequently, and scaling champions staying alive more often to reach their win conditions. We’ve proactively adjusted some of the more well-known variables over the past few patches and will continue to do so post-launch as they emerge.
One subset of champions that will certainly be affected are burst damage dealers (not necessarily just assassins). We believe that champions should still be able to be burst killed, especially when out of position or playing poorly. High burst champions doing reasonably well should still be able to 100-0 squishy champions with their full kit if they succeeded in passing their core skill test. If these champions are extremely ahead (multiple levels and/or thousands of gold), then we think it is reasonable for them to kill a champion with only part of their kit, only because they have passed their core skill test many times. For any given amount of lead, burst champs will have to press one or two more buttons than before in order to secure 100-0 kills. Our intent with this update isn’t to overnerf burst champions, so we’ll be keeping an eye on them to make sure they land in a healthy spot.’’
Conclusion
I don’t know about you, but I am pretty excited. I think these changes are something that needed to be done a long time ago. I really can’t put my finger on the exact time and date where everything started to go downhill for League of Legends but I know that I have stopped enjoying it as much after Season 3.
I hope these changes will be the right thing for League of Legends to return back to the better days and become the best game in the world again!
Tell me what you think about these changes, leave a comment and I will reply. Let’s discuss it!