After making sweeping changes to both the top and jungle positions in League of Legends, Riot Games’ lead gameplay designer Mark “Scruffy” Yetter said today that the company plans to help out bottom lane players by placing a bit of power back into the role.
“Bottom carry power has decreased slightly this season, so we wanted to put a small amount of power back into the role,” Scruffy said in the Quick Gameplay Thoughts post. “We are exploring a few options, and we may not put power directly back into XP.”
Scruffy also said the developers are going to look into nerfing the mid lane a bit. Even though the role should be one of the strongest roles in the game, he said there might be a little too much carrying power available.
The only balancing act Riot needs to pull off is applying enough nerfs to pull down mid lane numbers a bit, while also making sure that the role is still one of the more influential positions in League. The developers also don’t want to inadvertently affect the top lane, so they’re thinking of making some changes to champion mechanics and not just tuning numbers down.
Recently, Riot has focused its attention on the top lane after a chorus of players complained about the role’s impact on the rest of their matches. They ended up adjusting multiple items for top laners, increasing how much gold turret plates give, and lowering the amount of damage ranged champions do to towers.
These changes ended up increasing the number of towers, kills, and damage top laners racked up throughout their games. In theory, the upcoming changes to the ADC role could also help bottom lane players carry some of their matches more easily.
While targeted ADC buffs are welcome, there are multiple carries being played in other roles and buffs to them could ruin the experience for others. Riot Games should look carefully into what type of buffs they’ll give out since every small ADC buff can completely ruin the game based on past experience.
Supports are also a huge pain currently due to how much agency they have on carrying the game. A buff to ADCs shouldn’t be an overall buff to the bottom lane since supports will begin dominating the game again.
While Riot Games has shown great decisions in the past sometimes, it is unclear if they’ll follow the same trend or revert to their old ways.