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League of Legends developer Riot Games is beefing up its entire roster of characters in an attempt “to reduce the overall amount of damage” in the game.
Earlier today, Riot unveiled the ‘Champion Durability Update’, which will arrive with League of Legends patch 12.10. In that update, all of the game’s 150+ champions will see improvements to the ways they deal with all types of damage. There’ll also be tweaks to some other sustain-based stats, and some map-based objectives.
Riot says it’s making the change because both its developers and League of Legends’ pro communities agree that “there is currently too much damage” in the game. That can lead to games where certain types of characters are simply deleted from the map with no counterplay, which is both frustrating for players, and hard to watch when it comes to the game’s competitive scene.
The crux of the change is that players should feel like they’re dealing and taking less damage, and that some characters will have to commit a little bit more to secure a kill. The payoff to that is that fights should last longer (unless one team is really far ahead of their opponents), which should help dial up the excitement during a drawn-out back-and-forth.
While Riot has been discussing a change to League of Legends’ damage expression, this change is quite abrupt, and not very common, even within multiplayer game environments. Likely the closest parallel to this change is the difference in time-to-kill that you might experience between different iterations in a shooter franchise, like the change from Titanfall 2 to Apex Legends’ shield-filled approach, but there are several extra factors to consider when it comes to a game as complex as League of Legends. With that in mind, Riot says it’ll have a close eye on the changes over the coming weeks.
As well as its MOBA, Riot’s also working on a League of Legends MMO, but even its lead developer doesn’t know if it’ll ever ship.
