With Damwon Gaming crowned Season 10’s Champion, the next chapter in League of Legends is right around the corner. Every year brings a new change that completely innovates the classic set up of Summoner's Rift. Last year the biggest change we saw were the Dragon souls and the new buffs they give to your team as well as the changes to the map. This year Riot plans to innovate Items and rework their entire system around that. Items provide one of the toughest challenges yet because a change to a single item can be either a buff or nerf to several Champions, therefore changing the meta completely. Everyone builds items so this will affect the game drastically but the goal is to “improve or replace the areas that aren't fulfilling their potential” according to Riot. Along with the Item system overhaul, Riot also plans to change up ranked and how we climb the ladder.

Stats and Effects

Healing and Grievous Wounds: Riot plans to look over Runes, Champion kits, and items to tone down healing in hopes to lower the need for grievous wounds in builds. There are also plans to change the value of grievous wounds by increasing its power to reduce healing and lower the actual damage it gives.

Cooldown Reduction: Massive changes with this stat as it will now be called Ability Haste on items and will work differently from what we are use to. Cooldown Reduction became very difficult to balance because it has to be worked around every Champion and their abilities that have varying Cooldowns, something that a 40% cap cannot solve forever. The biggest value of Cooldown Reduction came from the 30-40% that you get later in the game and was pretty limited to certain Items and Runes giving that maximum effect, which very confusing to understand overall. What separates Cooldown Reduction and Ability Haste is the frequency you can use abilities. For example; having 50 Ability Haste allows you to cast 50% more spells within a given cooldown. If your ability has a 10 second Cooldown, having that 50 Ability Haste will allow you to cast that ability 1.5 more times over just using it once in the 10 second Cooldown. You also get more value earlier on and the new Items make it much more diverse and easy to utilize. This will make it a lot easier for Riot to balance Cooldowns for Champions and pin point any specific issues without any aftermath damage to another Champion or factor in the game.

Tenacity: Biggest change here is that Knockups durations will be affected by how much Tenacity. Knockbacks and Pulls will not be affected by this since their goals are movement over immobilization.

Champion Class Items

Each Champion has their own unique Item they build and Riot plans to spice up the value each Item has. Here is a simple breakdown on what changes will happen.

Jungle Items: These will now be starting Items that require no upgrades like in the previous season. Hailblade will upgrade your blue Smite and Emberknife will upgrade your red Smite after using the Summoner Spell 5 times, giving you a free Item slot Junglers didn’t have before the Preseason.

Marksmen Items: Diversity is the key word for this class. Opening up more strategy over “must-buy” items. Keeping Marksmen a strong late game carry is still the goal but they will shift early Item power to ensure that they can hold their ground in lane.

Mage Items: Opening up first item choices and new effects will help bring out the unique designs this class of Champion has.

AP Fighters and Assassins Items: They will receive their own set of core items since their skill set is so unique. These items will help the transition into either Tank or AP the later games go.

AD Fighters Items: Expand the style of tankiness they would like to go based on the game's needs. There will also be new core Items along with Black Cleaver and Trinity Force to help find new openings and advantages.

AD Assassin Items: Assassin before the preseason had a solid start with two to three possible item choices but lacked variety and a reliable late game option. Adding more item options that bring variety and late game power is what will bring out the most of an Assassin pick.

Tank Items: Tanks have left a massive impact in the preseason so far due to Riot making specialized items to deal with most every situation this role trifles with. Matching a split pusher, dealing with heavy engage, or peeling for a carry are all things that were considered when making Tank items. Riot has also boosted the Magic Resist items due to a lack of variety amongst them and gave options to ideal late game items. Turbo Chemtank and Sunfire Aegis have taken the preseason by storm as some very strong Mythic Items.

Enchanter Items: The intention for this class was to highlight other items aside from the basic Ardent Censer, Athene’s Unholy Grail combo. Enchanters no longer have to worry about having every item they buy have an active ability making the goal for one to two found in each build.

The Items that bring the most impact to these roles are the Mythic Items. You can only build one Mythic Item per game and are intended to be the keystone to your build. This means that it's ideal to build these as soon as possible in game and then build accordingly to the needs of the game. A full list of these Mythic Items can be found on the League of Legends website.

Ranked

Ranked is getting some changes that ideally should make climbing a more enjoyable experience for the players. It has been awhile since we’ve seen any major changes and this time Riot is really trying to appease all players from each rank. It’s all about quality and we are prepared to see changes that will hopefully give us a positive ranked experience.

Promo Series

Perhaps the biggest change will be the removal of divisional promotion series. The best of 3 system is gone and we will only have promotion series when jumping tiers. For example; so long as you get 100 LP in Silver 2 you get promoted to Silver 1 but you get 100 LP in Silver 1, you still enter into your best of 5 promotion series. This also can be seen as a double edged sword because if you hit 0 LP and lose a game, the demotion protection is gone. A very fluid system that should bring a new spice to how we climb the ranked ladders.

Matchmaking

A very frustrating aspect of ranked would be where, despite a Gold 3 rank for example, players would get matched up with other ranks much higher like Platinum or much lower like Silver. Riot is fixing the MMR so keep the rank and LP as close as possible to your own in hopes to even the skill. They also hope to resolve the extremely long queue times and overall shorten the times to under 5 second for 50% of players and nothing over 1:30 for .01% of players.

Apex Tiers (Master+)

Quality games for players ranked Masters and above are hard to come by so Riot is making two major changes for this scene. This first one is that they are removing duo queue for Master rank and above players to allow the individual talent to flourish over relying on the advantage of a duo. The next is that they will unlock Master, Grandmaster and Challenger at the beginning of the season. 200+ LP for Grandmaster and 500+ LP for Challenger. Autofill is also on the mind for Riot and they will be working on a permanent way to make it more enjoyable.

Season 11 is lined up to be the spiciest one we’ve seen yet. We’ve even seen a Tank Support on the way which will fit in great with the meta that has been lined up. Tanks and Assassins seem to be the move but that's all subject to change. Keep experimenting and playing hard to put yourself in the best position for when Season 11 begins! Good luck and see ya on the Rift!