Like many years past, a lot has changed in this year’s League of Legends Preseason! Every year, Riot will make significant changes during the preseason to try and fix major issues that sustained the previous year, and add new features to increase the quality-of-life in the game and client, and even add new features to the game to keep innovating and keep it fresh! As such, in this article we must overview the new items that have been added into the game, explain the reasoning for adding these items, and what that means for the Champions that these items are targeted at effecting (I’m looking at you, mages)!

Crown of the Shattered Queen

Overview

The Crown of the Shattered Queen is a newly added Mythic Item designed for mages. Like the other mage Mythic items, this item also provides ability power, mana, and ability haste! Since this item is more defensive like Everfrost (when compared with Luden’s Tempest and Liandry’s Anguish) it also provides the wielder with health! Also like Everfrost, this item costs less than 3000 gold unlike the more offensive options. The real difference in the Mythic passive and item passive for the Crown of the Shattered Queen. The Mythic Passive acts as a nice balance between Everfrost’s added ability power and the defensive need for higher movement speed! Furthermore, the item passive (composed of two parts) safeguards the user and reduces the incoming damage significantly for a short duration after the Champion takes damage. While safeguarded, the user also gains bonus ability power for the duration of the safeguarding!

Reasoning

Crown of the Shattered Queen is meant for mages that need to survive upfront burst damage and cannot easily build an early Zhonya’s Hourglass without being severely punished in scaling. This was a constant problem last season because assassins were incredibly prevalent. For a mage to survive in a lane against an assassin, they would essentially be forced to build a Stopwatch and eventually Zhonya’s Hourglass. Of course, Zhonya’s Hourglass is still an important item to exist, but it is quite easily countered and is the only option for mages in these situations.

Stopwatch could only be used once before it needed to be upgraded to the full Legendary Item Zhonya’s Hourglass for another 2000+ gold. This meant that mage players had to play extraordinarily safe in the early game to avoid blowing the Stopwatch early in the lane and immediately become vulnerable until they completed Zhonya’s Hourglass. The problem here is that mages are already inherently vulnerable in the early stages of the game because they need a lot of gold to grow to a desirable power level, which is not feasible in a timely manner when they need to pause their build path to upgrade to Zhonya’s Hourglass.

Of course, this issue was more apparent in lower skilled games because their mistakes are plentiful and often punished to some degree! However, this issue still existed across the regions and rungs of the ladder! The second problem with the Stopwatch/Zhonya’s Hourglass stasis mechanic is that it would make them untargetable and seemingly just delay the inevitable. Unless the stasis was timed well enough to essentially dodge a large burst of damage, the assassin would simply engage, the mage would use the stasis, and then the assassin would just wait until the stasis was gone to complete their combo and kill the mage.

This is exactly where the Crown of the Shattered Queen will be used! SInce the passive ability on this item reduces the incoming damage significantly for a short duration, it allows the assassin to still deal damage, negating the need for the mage to time their abilities and instead activates it automatically. Furthermore, the item’s second passive where the Champion gains ability power for a short duration even allows them to fight back when the assassin engages! This combination takes the interactions between assassins and mages from being heavily skewed in the assassin’s favour to now being quite evenly matched and more dependent on skill and outplaying the opponent. Finally, this item being a Mythic Item smooths out the curve of the traditional mage’s build path to make it more optimized for a competitive match.

The Champions Affected

The Crown of the Shattered Queen is incredibly useful on scaling squishy mage Champions like Viktor, Aurelion Sol, Anivia, and Kassadin. All these Champions share the same problem of being incredibly easy to kill throughout the game. Against an assassin, these Champions’ deaths are practically guaranteed in a 1-on-1 unless they summate an insanely large lead! The added benefit of these Champions specifically, is that they can manage to deal incredible amounts of burst if they survive long enough to get a rotation of abilities off!

By building this item, they will have nearly the same offensive prowess that they would have had last season, but can also more reliably follow roams to other lanes and fight in skirmishes! Players must remember that this item does not negate the damage but instead simply inhibits most of the damage. In situations against an assassin, use this time to deal as much damage as possible with skill shots because most assassins will be in melee range during this timeframe! This will also result in Champions being able to hold their heavy crowd-controlling abilities for when the safeguarding effect is wearing off to kite them out and reposition, or simply escape!

Evenshroud

Overview

Evenshroud is the other newly added Mythic Item this season! Compared to the alternatives for Supports, this item also provides bonus health, armor, magic resistance, and ability haste! The main difference is in the item’s low cost in the mid 2000s, and the item’s passive and Mythic passive! Evenshroud’s Mythic passive adds bonus magic resistance and armor for every Legendary Item built. The item’s passive causes all enemies within the user’s radius to take bonus damage from all incoming sources for a few seconds after applying an immobilizing effect or being hit by one.

Reasoning

This item is clearly designed for Supports with heavy crowd-controlling abilities. Last season the Support Mythic items were not optimized for the different types of Supports that exist. By adding this item where immobilizing Champions or being immobilized, makes the target and any nearby enemies take significantly increased damage for a few seconds the customization for Support build paths is much clearer. The benefit of this item is that you get the benefit both when engaging fights for the team, but also when tanking the enemy’s engagement tools for our teammates! Having both options as a part of this item means that it will be worth purchasing when ahead or behind and will simultaneously reward players for playing properly!

The Champions Affected

The best Champions for Evenshroud are heavy crowd-controlling Supports. If these Supports are involved with the initial play to engage the fight, there is a good chance that they will help their team out significantly. Of course, with the Repent passive on the item affecting nearby enemies, the item is still more impactful when engaging as there will likely be more enemies around them when activated, it still makes for a great option for minimizing the impact of being engaged on!

The best Champions with this item are Leona, Maokai, Nautilus, and Rell. All four of these Champions share the same engagement mechanics of diving into the middle of the enemy team to immobilize an enemy in some way. By doing so, they will capitalize on the repent mechanic affecting more enemies than other Champions like Blitzcrank who cannot as easily provide the same benefit!

Axiom Arc

Overview

Axiom Arc is a new Legendary item made for attack-damaged assassins! When comparing Axiom Arc with the other Legendary AD assassin items, Axiom Arc clearly prioritizes the need for ability haste and the dependence some assassins have on their ultimate ability. The gold needed to build this item is roughly the same as the other AD assassin items as well. The unique passive is what makes the big difference! When scoring a takedown against an enemy Champion within a few seconds of damaging them, a significant portion of the wielder’s ultimate cooldown is refunded!

Reasoning

Axiom Arc was added to create a more rewarding playstyle for assassins who take the risk of pursuing a threat and fully committing to that enemy. It gives these Assassins more ability haste and makes it less punishing to pursue a kill via full combos. Additionally, the “Flux” passive on the ability refunds a significant percentage of the assassin’s ultimate ability’s cooldown making it potentially available more than once in a single fight if it’s a bloody one! While this does sound incredibly powerful (and it is), all it really does is add some insurance to the risk factor of the assassin playstyle. With assassin’s primary use being ‘all-inning’ an enemy carry and then trying to get out afterwards, if they do get the kill, they can still be useful afterwards if they don’t die in the process.

The Champions Affected

Axiom Arc is an amazing item that helps make the montage plays possible in the new season! There are many attack damage-based assassins in League of Legends and they will all see benefits with this item. Most notably, Champions that are likely most aided with this purchase are Qiyana, Talon, Zed, and Nocturne! Considering Nocturne first, his Paranoia is usually used early on in a fight as a type of engagement or to set a pick that starts off the fight. With it being put on cooldown towards the beginning of the fight, it’s more likely that Nocturne will see it up again after three kills and some time passing between the kills. Qiyana is another great example of this because her ultimate can easily be used to initiate a fight and get a quick kill on a squishier target. Using her ultimate early in the fight can also result in a surprise engagement onto multiple targets to lead to her ultimate even coming up again by the end of the fight!

Shadowflame

Overview

Shadowflame is the only Legendary item added for ability power-based Champions in the new season. It’s comparable to Horizon Focus for the stats that it provides the user in health and ability power for the same cost in gold. However, it does not provide any ability haste, and instead has a passive that resembles Serpent’s Fang. When dealing magic damage to Champions, ignore some percentage of their magic resistance based on their current health that is maximized when the Champion is shielded or has been in the last few seconds.

Reasoning

Shadowflame provides ability-powered Champions the same benefit that Serpent’s Fang provides to attack damage-powered Champions. By adding this item for magic damage dealing Champions, Riot has helped them deal with the same tanky and heavy shielding enemies that were miserable to deal with as a mage in the last season. With this addition, mages are much more capable of dealing with the bulkiest enemies that they can come across which helps marksmen with the pressure of dealing with tanks in the mid-to-late stages of the game! Essentially, the addition of this item will help mages (especially battle mages), have some urgency against the heavy tank and shielding teams!

The Champions Affected

To help deal with tanks, mages can build Shadowflame to melt through their shields with ease and stop feeling like they are just trading Mana with shielding supports! The best Champions to purchase this item on are battle mages and even more so against heavy shielding opponents. Usually, these Champions do not have enough damage to burst an enemy in one rotation when they are shielded. Afterwards, they also struggle to finish them off because the enemy will be shielded again by the time the mage’s abilities are back up.

These Champions include Viktor, Annie, Orianna, and Rumble! Starting with Annie, unless she got a massive lead from her lane, she tended to previously scale in a way that had enough damage to one shot one-to-two carry Champions (when grouped) with a full combo. Sadly, this was easily avoided with simple shielding from Champions like Janna, or items like Immortal Shieldbow! So, simply a Mythic Item purchase that scaled well for marksmen would cause severe problems for these mages whenever it’s passive was available. Therefore, whenever these Champions were able to use their ultimate abilities to attempt to burst down these marksmen, they usually had their Immortal Shieldbow passive back up, negating their prowess. As such, the option to build a Shadowflame in response to items like Immortal Shieldbow make the dynamic more consistent with what’s intended between mages and marksmen, and on the other end, mages and tanky Champions that were shielded or had their own shields as a part of their kit.

The same concept applies for the burst that can be seen from a full combo from Viktor and Orianna, however, they require much more skill to land all of the damage because they involve skillshots and higher cooldowns than Annie. Rumble, on the other hand, struggled with dealing with tanks because of his melee status. Traditionally, he builds a lot of magic penetration that would help against these tanks, but the shielding effects will take a bulk of the damage Rumble will attempt to deal with his Flamespitter.

Winter’s Approach/Fimbulwinter

Overview

Winter’s Approach provides the user with ability haste, health, and mana at a cost in the mid 2000s. Since Winter’s Approach is a Legendary item that builds out of a Tear of the Goddess, the build path helps fill some gaps in what is sometimes needed to help many skewed tank-vs-bruiser matchups. The unique passive of Winter’s Approach is a similar Mana stacking mechanic used in Manamune and Archangel’s Staff until it transforms into Fimbulwinter. As Fimbulwinter, the user gains even more mana and gains a new item passive. Fimbulwinter’s item passive causes immobilizing or slowing (as a melee) enemy champions to consume a percentage of current mana to grant a proportional temporary shield. The shield’s strength increases when more enemies are within a fixed radius and will only activate above a certain percentage of the user’s maximum mana!

Reasoning

Winter’s Approach and Fimbulwinter are the last new Legendary Items added to League of Legends this Preseason. This item was created for tanky Champions that have Mana problems in the early game. Winter’s Approach will help bridge the gap between the strength of these weaker, Mana-dependent Champions and Manaless or bruiser-like Champions in lane. The item will aid in getting these tanky Champions through the laning phase and help make them useful in the later stages of the game when they need to be in the frontlines tanking damage despite having little-to-no resources compared to their lane matchups.

The Champions Affected

Winter’s Approach/Fimbulwinter is incredibly powerful for Mana-hungry tank Champions that would otherwise have no hope of making it out of laning phase against bruisers. This item provides the resources needed to survive the early game while also having a nice build path that scales well into their late game strengths of being heavy crowd-controlling tanks in the middle of the action! The best Champions to build this item are Poppy, Maokai, Malphite, and Ornn!

These Champions are highlighted as the most significantly impacted because they have a chance to stand up for themselves in lane, however it requires them to use nearly all of their mana in trading and managing the wave. Not only does this leave little-to-no mana to use setting up or following up on a gank, but by starting the build path with the Tear of the Goddess, these Champions will actually be rewarded for these behaviours and be able to budget their mana in a healthier manner throughout the laning phase. Malphite is the easiest example because he is often seen spamming his Seismic Shard to trade, and the rest of his mana was used on Thunderclap or Ground Slam to manage the wave or last hit. Oftentimes this would leave Malphite with no mana to use Unstoppable Force when he levelled up unless he recalled soon before leveling!

Conclusion

Overall, the season’s added items will surely add to the complexity and increase the quality-of-life in the game. These items all create more options for players to choose from to either make classes more viable in the meta or provide certain Champions ways of adapting to unique situations that were otherwise overwhelming! These items will create a more balanced environment for a greater percentage of Champions to thrive throughout the year and hopefully mean all the one-tricks out there feel they can still play their favourite Champions!