The pre-season for season 4 of League of Legends is almost upon us, and shall be bringing with it a whole raft of changes and alterations to the worlds most popular MOBA title. So, what main features will be changing in the coming months?
Preseason goals:
- Introduce more gameplay and strategy when it comes to map vision and wards.
- Ensure all roles and positions can experience power-growth and progression in ways that promote skill
- Improve game pacing and reduce team snowballing
How will these alterations take place?
- A revamped ward system, supplemented by, ‘trinkets’. Wards are to be less of a gold race and turned more towards tactical strategic placement.
- New jungle elements, items for carry-style junglers with better rewards and gold supplements. New monster camps and diversification of roles within the jungle.
- Support Champions to be given far more gold income with new items coming in to allow for this. Support champions will now scale off utility instead of damage to carve out a more unique role.
- Change to game flow which shall reduce team snowballing potential through tower rewards, kill streaks, assist streams and pumped up dragon and brush mechanics.
- Balancing the masteries and a increased variety in rune selection.
Riot Games hope these features will forever change the strategy of the title.
“Tens of millions of players with thousands of extra gold, items and options in their pockets will uncover tens of millions of combinations and strats that the Live Design team couldn’t dream of (even after months of constant testing!), and we’re really excited to see what you’ll think up.
As an addendum, we do want to pick and choose our battles with these kinds of changes, and the systems we chose to overhaul are the ones that we felt needed the most love while requiring a season break to do right. There are other outstanding projects remaining, so this is by no means an exhaustive list of things we’d like to tinker with, but this post covers the ones we’ve targeted for this update.
Anyway, we’ll be taking a couple months here to make rapid iterations to our new systems while fine-tuning these updates, so expect this to be a test of your evolutionary league skills. Balance will typically be a bit chaotic in the short-term but, with extensive changes like these, it’s important that we get the right levers in place to get to a balanced state in the mid-to-long term.”
All information about the specific tweaks and changes can be found here. Are you excited for the pre-season? Let us know what you think in the comments below.