Lots of interesting stuff going on the League of Legends scene recently! The preliminary patch for Season 4 is on the test servers currently, bringing with it a slew of new changes that will have huge effects on game flow. Supports and junglers, historically low income roles, are getting huge changes to insure they have a similar economy to solo laners and AD carries. This may well lead to the rise of carry style junglers and new support options. Existing supports are gaining more scaling--Leona's Eclipse (W) armor and MR scaling with AP, for instance. Supports, already a powerful force in the early and mid game, may have even more influence than they do now.
In an effort to spread out the burden for vision control, Riot is also implementing some changes to how wards work. If I've read correctly, regular sight wards will still function as normal, but each player is only able to place three wards at a time--which virtually necessitates that every role buy wards. The support will no longer be relegated to the maligned role of ward slave in lower-tier ranked games or else map control will suffer greatly. Similarly, vision wards (which reveal invisible units) are being restricted to one on the map at a time and are becoming visible. They will take five hits to kill; I imagine they'll become miniature objectives just a notch below blue and red buff.
Junglers that prefer to farm into the late game will now have itemization options that help them achieve that goal. Although the numbers may be tweaked before the preseason patch hits live, Wriggle's Lantern (which now provides attack speed) grants a 40% increase of gold obtained from neutral monsters. My initial impression on this is that it seems quite high, especially for junglers like Udyr, Shyvana, and Master Yi, but only time will tell. Junglers will also have the benefit of an additional jungle camp, a large ranged minion called a Wight. Faster junglers will have more opportunities to farm and less downtime than before.
Aside from these fundamental gameplay changes, several improvements to the in-game interface are being made. I'm excited to see everything they've come up with and if they have anything else to reveal in the coming weeks. The game is certainly in a state of flux right now, but the competitive scene, at least in NA and EU, is also undergoing a lot of changes.
It was announced yesterday that Bjergsen, celebrated former mid-laner of Ninjas in Pyjamas, is taking the place of Reginald on Team Solo Mid. Regi is stepping down to coach instead. Although rumors of this switch have been circulating for some time, it still comes as quite a surprise. It is the latest in a line of European to North American transfers, after Edward moved to Curse last LCS split and Brokenshard transferred to the amateur team To Be Determined quite recently. Bjergsen is an extremely skilled player with a lot of potential. Regardless of his former team's inconsistent performances, he tended to play excellently.
Team Coast has been terrorizing the amateur scene lately as they prepare themselves for attempting to requalify for the LCS. Although their undefeated streak was recently broken (by Quantic if I recall correctly), they have consistently been putting forth excellent performances. For reasons that are unclear, their long time AD carry player DontMashMe recently stepped down. Coast has been trying out several replacements for the position, but most of the scene expects Chaox (formerly of TSM) to be their primary choice.
Just about every LCS team in North America is going through some kind of roster change. Dignitas is still looking for a new top laner to replace KiWiKiD, while Counter Logic Gaming has reintroduced Aphromoo to their roster to replace Chauster in the support role and the relatively unknown TrickZ to replace bigfatlp on jungle. Velocity eSports, the last place team from the most recent split of the NA LCS, has been performing poorly in the offseason and has experimented with a variety of roster changes, with Fragnat1c currently playing mid lane after a failed experiment with frommaplestreet on the role.
Unsurprisingly, Cloud 9 has decided to stick with their successful roster. They had something like a 25-3 record in the NA LCS but choked when playing internationally. I'll be interested in seeing how they perform at IEM, where they'll be representing NA with the new CLG lineup. Vulcun took a solid third place in the NA LCS and is also not making any roster changes, although they did decide to change their name to XD.GG, a questionable move to be certain.
As for the European scene, there are various rumors circulating about the potential of a "super team" consisting of various strong players not currently attached to teams of whose status is uncertain. The future of Evil Geniuses, the performance of which was suspect in last split of the EU LCS, has not been decided. Their star player Froggen may well be attached to the new super team but nothing has been confirmed. Ninjas in Pyjamas and SK have completely overhauled rosters and Lemondogs seems to have been dissolved--as three of its members are now on NiP.
With all of these changes occurring in the game itself and in the competitive scene, I'm really excited to see how the general playerbase and the professional players adapt. Season 3 ends on the 11th but that only means the offseason begins. We'll just have to see how it goes.
No comments:
Post a Comment