Riot discussed upcoming changes to three major item effects in today’s lengthy blog post, which breaks down the item system overhaul coming to League of Legends in the preseason.
Grievous Wounds, Cooldown Reduction, and Tenacity will be tweaked in the 2021 preseason, evolving with a meta that’s changed dramatically over the MOBA’s 10 seasons.
With healing becoming “more prevalent over the last few years,” according to Riot, it’s natural that its only counter would need to be adjusted. Grievous Wounds, which reduce healing received, are necessary in most games rather than simply becoming a “contextual choice.”
To fix that issue, Riot is planning on trimming unnecessary healing from some runes, items, and champ kits. And the devs want to give Grievous Wounds a “sharper effect” to counter heavy healing while giving up a bit of its “upfront power.”
CDR is being reworked and will be called “Ability Haste.” Rather than providing an exponential growth (50 percent CDR gives you 100 percent more casts), Ability Haste will stack linearly. So 10 Ability Haste gives you 10 percent more abilities cast, and so on. The stat will scale similarly to other stats, like armor, magic resist, and attack speed.
But the CDR rework isn’t meant to be a nerf, Riot says.
“You should have the potential to reach the same frequency of spell-slinging, but the way you get there will be more linear,” Riot said.
And Ability Haste is uncapped, removing the previous 40 percent cap from CDR’s exponential scaling.
Tenacity is also a necessary stat for combatting Crowd Control (CC). But Riot believes that a lot of its interactions are “confusing and unintuitive.” So Tenacity will reduce the duration of knockups but won’t affect displacement spells (knockback or pull) like Vi’s ultimate.
One of the biggest issues for ADCs right now is that they’re usually stuck to strict build paths. They have too many essential items that restrict their ability to make other purchases for unique situations.
In response, Riot will be creating more item choices that can provide marksmen with the baseline level of damage that the role requires, while also giving them the option to diversify their build based on their specific needs for every game, according to Riot’s blog post.
Another big complaint by ADCs is that the role is so team-reliant. Riot does think that this is a “healthy element” for the class since it promotes differentiating strategies and teamplay. The devs do, however, wish to provide tools to ADCs that can help them survive without a coordinated team. These items will come at a cost of their own DPS, though.
Due to the early nature of the item system overhaul, the changes are still in progress and liable to be adjusted before hitting the live servers.
