14 DAY TRIAL // Developer Riot Games has released patch 4.12 for its wildly popular multiplayer online battle arena game League of Legends, adding some tweaks and features, such as Jungle Timers and the revamped tutorial mode, featuring intro bots.
Riot is making sure that everything is in working order and neatly balanced before the debut of the League of Legends World Championships, slightly adjusting the roster of available champions in order to provide the perfect experience and to eliminate the minute discrepancies which skew the champion selection process one way or another.
"Our focus is on the competitive scene and the things we can do to ensure the landscape is diverse and healthy," Riot Player Relations Manager Chris Tom says.
Balancing such a large number of champions takes quite a bit of competence and luck, as the usual way that competitive games are played sees the best ones (which really have only slight advantages over the others, but at a high competitive level it shows) being overused, while the majority of the available ones get neglected.
Riot's hope is that through progressive patches, it will be able to nerf the overplayed champions and improve the ones who are picked the least, in order to provide a more diverse array of competitive encounters.
"Our main philosophy is to look for strengths to highlight while also emphasizing weaknesses. This ensures a champ can hold onto their strategic value while still having meaningful tradeoffs. You'll also hear me repeat this many times. Too bad," Tom explains.
Patch 4.12 delivers a finishing touch to Ahri and Alistar. Alistar needs to still be a viable support champion, and at the same time he needs to stay away from his former glory as "king of the jungle." Consequently, his mana costs have been lowered, his ultimate bumped up, but his jungling ability has been kept in check.
"We want to give Ali the things he needs to succeed but, like we did with Maokai, we also want to make sure he's in a healthy position to do so. There's a little concern that having 70 percent damage reduction at level 1 Unbreakable Will might make Alistar a little too good at tower diving (even as a support), but we'll see how these changes affect him first," Tom writes.
The other champion to get a bit of buff is Ahri, whose Q ability got an increase in damage and an decrease in mana cost, in order to better her ability to push lanes and maintain pressure.
"Ahri's a cool fox gal that we'd like to see more of, but she's currently sitting just below the top-tier mid picks. That said, we don't think she needs too many buffs to keep up, so we focused on her ability to push the wave more efficiently so she can find more opportunities to roam," explains Tom.
The new Jungle Timers remove the need for players to memorize spawn times while jungling, allowing them to access a timer through the scoreboard screen that provides the exact times when the next Elder Lizard, Ancient Golem, Dragon or Baron will spawn.
Of course, players have to witness the poor jungle critters dying in order to get the respawn timers enables, in order to keep things balanced.
The new introductory mode is designed to offer players a more organic start when first picking up League of Legends, enabling them to play cooperative matches against AI-controlled bots, with various tutorial style features and goals to guide their path to greatness.