The 2023 League of Legends season has been an interesting ride for both veterans and those venturing to Summoner’s Rift for the first time, and Riot Games is hoping to clear up some of the ongoing discourse regarding frustrating aspects of the game—as well as its future plans.
In a new developer blog today, Riot Phroxzon, game designer on the Summoner’s Rift team for League, admitted that he and the team are not entirely satisfied with the state of champion durability nor the healthiness of a handful of the game’s roles. While these are areas of the game that are being prioritized for fixing over the next several months, Phroxzon noted that there aren’t any concrete solutions for these issues in a game that is updated on a biweekly basis.
“Since League gets constantly updated, nothing is ever truly permanent,” Phroxzon said. “In addition to the main focus of balancing the game, we also need to take champion fantasy into consideration.”
In terms of durability, a major point of contention among League fans since the implementation of the infamous “durability patch” last year, the developer team pinpoints the recent midseason item changes as a major factor in why champions seem to be dealing and taking more damage than before. Recent changes, such as Patch 13.15’s changes to champions that used to enjoy Immortal Shieldbow as their Mythic item, act as a way the team has been trying to “restore [durability] over time.” The team’s priority at this moment is to particularly target the durability of champions with innately lower defenses over the next several patches, specifically in terms of non-damage stats.
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Another area Phroxzon acknowledges as needing continued attention is the health of certain roles within the game, particularly top and ADC. While top laners have become more impactful over the past several patches thanks to balance changes, even the smallest changes to a top laner’s stats or abilities can completely remove them from viability. For the near future, the dev team is hoping to diminish the deficit top laners accrue simply for wanting to help other lanes around the map, allowing them to venture away from the “top lane island” moniker that has stuck with the role over the past several months.
The bot lane as a whole, though powerful tools in winning games, has been overshadowed immensely by the sheer influence that junglers continue to have on games. Though Phroxzon and the team are willing to reduce the power of ADCs once more to not make it such an important piece of snowballing early leads, he noted that a huge aspect of this that the team is contemplating is how this would affect the playability of the role—leaving the team at a crossroads in terms of finding the best way to traverse this issue to not create unhealthy metas.
“We don’t want to [lower the power level of bot lane] at the expense of players’ satisfaction of the role,” Phroxzon said, highlighting the carry fantasies most ADC players have. “Having said that, a lot of bot lane is outplaying gnats, which we know is not how bot laners want their agency expressed.”
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Ultimately, the most pressing issue impacting role balance is how changing one will affect another, something that remains an ongoing battle with a game that receives consistent updates. Toward the beginning of the preseason, Phroxzon suggested that he and the team would shift their attention to this issue by first looking at how certain roles perform in higher Elos—particularly in their snowball potential—though they remain uncertain as to how this will impact not just those roles, but others.
League Patch 13.17 is expected to be released on Aug. 30 and will act as an attempt to address some of the issues outlined in this developer update. But players can expect an ebb and flow of balance changes targeting specific areas of the game to continue through the end of the year and beyond.
