Due to numerous patches and balance changes, this year felt like a massive preseason for anyone playing League of Legends. The meta changed about every 2 weeks when Riot decided to make huge adjustments to the game. Unfortunately, the actual preseason is about to start later this year which means that even more changes are coming. Riot has just released a blog post with the changes that are planned.
There are two changes that they already want to implement in the game before the preseason even starts. Normally this would be shocking but since the entire season has been a preseason it doesn’t really matter. The first change is that they want to scale down the damage and burst that runes give you. Believe it or not, there are a lot of complaints that there is currently too much damage in League. People die without really getting time to respond, even early in the game, mostly due to oppressive runes. Riot is going to slightly adjust them to give people a bit of breathing room without making the game stale.
The other change is that Riot wants to bring back AD carries. After the AD carry purge commenced, Riot got their desired result of having more diversity in the game. This only came at the small cost of having no viable AD carries anymore which they now want to reverse, somewhat. They want to bring AD carries back to a more powerful spot while also maintaining the diversity that we now see in League. They by changing the build paths and numbers on AD items to give AD carries an earlier but weaker powerspike.
As for the preseason though, there are multiple changes planned. The first of which is to make comebacks more achievable. As of right now, losing a few kills and a drake early in the game often means your downfall. Riot wants to give players more goals to work towards when behind so the path to a comeback is slightly clearer and more achievable.
Furthermore, Riot wants the laning phase too last longer. This allows players to achieve a few more items before fights start breaking out, letting them get to the power their champion needs during these fights. As it stands right now, some games are decided before certain champions even get to do their job due to the fast laning phases.
Riot also wants to make games end faster when they are decided. This seems to be the complete opposite of the first change they want to achieve but I guess it has some merit. It’s no fun when you know you can’t win but the game still takes 15 minutes to end. You’re just wasting your time playing a game you know you already lost.
Lastly, they want to change up the runes a bit. They originally intended for this to create more difficult decisions when selecting runes, however, they found that instead it just limited the runes that players pick to a select few. Thus they are removing the stats so that players can just pick the runes that suit their champions and playstyles.
