14 DAY TRIAL // Riot Games has released a new patch for their highly competitive multiplayer online battle arena game League of Legends, introducing a massive list of changes to the title.
Patch 4.13 focuses on introducing more strategic diversity to the online play, preparing for the upcoming World Championships, with the changes grouped into categories, Fighters, Marksmen, Mages & Assassins and Supports.
In the fighter category, most changes are aimed at jungle play, with a few top lane tweaks. Patch 4.11 made some updates that allowed tanks to roll back into the jungle, but the competitive scene is still lacking the diversity that Riot sought to introduce.
This is mainly due to Elise, Evelynn and Lee Sin having an early-game dominance that is bullying out alternative choices, the company believes, so toning down the three should give other fighters a chance in the competitive scene.
Elise has gotten her E ability range nerfed, Evelynn now has less base damage on her Q, but scales better with items in order to make players choose whether to have her tanky or to focus on damage, and Lee Sin's shield has gotten its duration slashed in half, and his Cripple ability now no longer slows down enemy attacks.
Over in the Mages & Assassins section, the devs note that they saw a lot of opportunity for low-scope buffs that would help a lot of champions that were "almost there" in terms of power, which should now see more top-level play.
The Marskmen have also been considered, and some changes have been implemented in order to align the champions with Riot's attempt at introducing more diversity, and the devs have listed Kog'Maw, Tristana and Twitch as the dominant players in the category, and thus have made them trade some early game power for their solid late game scaling.
The Support section is dominated by some clear must-picks, much like the case of the junglers, with Braum, Thresh and Nami being the clear winners in competitive play. Riot has reduced the consistency of those champions, thus giving the other supports a better chance at seeing high-level play.
The biggest changes here have been made to Sona, which has had her abilities retailored in order to have her more rewarding and more fun, to give her abilities a more visible and tangible impact. Her auras are now smaller, but visible, so getting the most out of them requires positional awareness and can lead to her being more effective, at the cost of longer cooldowns.
In addition to the changes made to champions, there are also quite a few changes made to in-game items as well, in order for them to work better with the tweaked abilities. Furthermore, a number of improvements have been made to the Team Builder and to the Match History features, as well as some additional bug fixes and an overall shorter loading speed, especially noticeable for gamers with older machines.