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Hey guys. Continuing from my initial discussion of preseason itemization changes, which you can read here, I wanted to talk about new alternatives to items that are getting removed as part of the overall rework.

As you know we have a lot of old items that exist in a weird twilight space between useful and confusing, and it’s traditionally been very hard to find a place for these items to exist and be satisfying to use in the current environment. In a lot of cases, we’ve decide to remove items that were either identified as having pretty negative consequences for the game or warped freedom of itemization around themselves. While making these items better or more satisfying to use might have been an option, if the core purpose of the item seemed flawed it was targeted for removal.

I’ll walk through some of the more sweeping changes and try to explain our thoughts behind them as well as what replacements achieve a similar functionality.


Meki Pendant & Rejuvenation Bead – Removed

These items have been removed because they were mostly superfluous item paths that constrained early game purchases and mid-game upgrades. Everything that builds out of Meki Pendant and Rejuvenation Bead has been modified to build out of Regrowth Pendant and Faerie Charm.

Alternative: Regrowth Pendant and Faerie Charm

These items will sit at a much smaller price-point but build into many more items overall, allowing players to have much greater flexibility when building items out of regeneration items.


Madred’s Bloodrazor - Removed

Madred’s Bloodrazor has traditionally been a weak pick overall. On the surface, it appears to counter high health targets. However, its odd build path and the fact that it does magical damage make the Bloodrazor awkward in many situations. It doesn’t do as much damage as other alternatives to high hit point targets, nor is the build path something lenient enough to let you quickly build it to counter high health targets. As a jungle control item it is surpassed by Wriggle’s Lantern in many ways, especially for sustains, invades and jungle vision.

Alternative: Blade of the Ruined King

This item first debuted in Twisted Treeline, and was meant to be the ‘high health counter’ for ranged attackers. Against moderate DPS / high health targets, Blade of the Ruined King attacks these characters where it hurts the most – the fact that their DPS is consistent over time. By draining a percentage of their current health on every strike, Blade of the Ruined King seeks to burn down high health targets by both outlasting and kiting them.

Blade of the Ruined King also works well for on-hit ranged attackers, providing them a form of combat sustain that is independent of the amount of damage done by their main attack. On-hit Teemo or On-hit Kog’maws have traditionally fared poorly in being able to output sustained damage in a fight because life steal was so anti-synergistic with their builds. Blade of the Ruined King not only fits the % damage profile that Madred’s Bloodrazor once occupied but also supplies life steal for these character builds.


Force of Nature - Removed

Force of Nature has been the go-to high MR item for tanks who want to counter magic damage. The item, however, is kind of confusing. Is it a movement speed option for fighters and tanks? Or is it meant to be a regeneration item in sieges? Force of Nature’s odd stat combination made it particularly difficult to make it feel like a quality purchase. One of its attributes was probably redundant or unnecessary on your character.

Alternative: Spirit Visage

Spirit Visage is getting a slight touch up for the preseason. It will now build out of Negatron Cloak instead of Null Magic Mantle, and Spirit Visage’s passive is getting a bump in power. Additionally, there are a lot more Tier 2.5 items that offer Magic Resistance, allowing you to more easily spec into Magic Resistance without wasting slot efficiency.


Ionic Spark – Removed

Ionic Spark is a bit of a confusing item right now. Ionic Spark only fully synergizes with one or two champions (Shen, Gangplank), but it’s good to have an effective wave clearing option for characters that lack an innate ability to quickly deal with waves of minions. For a proc-build, Ionic Spark is awkward because it grants a very inconsistent proc that does some damage but is inferior to Wit’s End in a lot of cases.

Alternative: Statikk Shiv, Tiamat, Wit’s End

Tiamat has been vastly upgraded as a passive wave clearing item, while Wit’s End has always been the traditionally stronger option for Attack Speed / On-hit builds.


Elixir of Agility – Removed

Right now Elixir of Agility serves a single purpose in the game – to make the winning hyper-carry exponentially more powerful than the losing one. This has some general negative effects: Due to the multiplicative factor of attack speed and critical strike, the raw DPS increase is always better for the winner than the loser in this case. It also strongly pigeonholes viable end-game carry builds to take advantage of critical strike, as it is the cheapest and most powerful form of DPS boost.

Alternative: None

We don’t want an item in the game whose sole purpose is to pigeonhole end-game carry builds and provide exponential damage increase to a single class. While there should be purchasable buffs that help close out the game, a 250 Gold item that typically only benefits a single player on the winning team seemed a bit superfluous.


Heart of Gold – Removed

Heart of Gold is a deeply conflicted item. Gold over Time items are designed to be a tradeoff of early game power versus reliable scaling further on in the game. However, Heart of Gold is a Health item, a statistic that is primarily dominant early game rather than late game. It helps create a lot to passivity, but worst of all it contributes to passive snowballing. While the intent of the item was to help out gold-starved characters that were traditionally weak, there are much better ways to solve this than an item that also makes their direct competitors stronger.

Alternative: The other Gold per 10 items

We don’t want to see an item in the game that lets you passively win your lane and close off options for your opponent. The other 3 Gold per 10 items have all been upgraded with either much more flexible build paths in terms of what they can build into or additional ways to generate real and imagined incomes. From Gold per 10 upgrades that let you keep the Gold per 10 when fully upgraded to alternate gold gain passives, the other 3 Gold per 10 items have become much more flexible in their final builds.

-Xypherous
http://euw.leagueofl...ad.php?t=915616

Just going to leave this here.. sneakily.. :3

Sightstone (650 Gold)
+125 Health
Unique Passive - Refresh (Ward) : Starts with 4 charges and refills each time you stop by your shop.
Unique Active - Ghost Ward: Consumes a charge to place an invisible ward that reveals the surrounding area for 3 minutes. You may have a maximum of 2 wards from this item at once.

Upgrades to...

*is dragged away by internal Riot teams*

(same threat, later post)

Hey guys,

I’m Xypherous, a Technical Designer here at Riot Games. I’ve been working a bit on the goals for itemization changes as we head into the preseason, focusing mostly on specialization, player self-expression, and adding new gameplay patterns in the game. We wanted to fix a lot of the existing problems that players have with items and try to add more depth in terms of itemization. Let me go over the major goals we have for the preseason item changes:

Clean up / Reworks

We have some items that need a lot of love and some items that simply don’t have a place in the current framework in the game. We either made these items relevant for a specific purpose or removed them if they were too problematic to balance. Some super-niche or narrow-scope items have been remade to work on a greater variety of champions.

Specialization

There aren’t enough items to allow each champion to really feel like they have their own unique build. We also want to add more items that allow you to specialize for the particular game that you’re in. We’re adding items to give players in each role alternate primary builds that fill out their teams better. If your carry needs to do more AoE damage, he has an option for that. If your primary AP caster needs additional CC capabilities, there’s an option for that, too.

We want players to have a degree of specialization in terms of playstyle, and to buy items that complement that playstyle rather than simply giving them the highest raw stats.

Gold and Statistics Pass

We’ve done a complete gold and statistics pass on the entire item shop. Many statistics have been reevaluated to better reflect how much gold they are worth at a particular stage of the game. Premiums have been adjusted across many items to reflect how difficult they are to build or how niche they are, rather than their raw statistical strength. Items that grant early Resistances / Attack Damage / Attack Speed have all been reevaluated in terms of strength.

Breadth and Depth

One of the most important things we tried to accomplish during the preseason was to ensure that your mid game items didn’t pigeonhole you into certain choices later in the game. We’ve also endeavored to give mid-tier items more late game options so that you don’t run into dead-ends as the game progresses. If you build Warden’s Mail in the mid game, you shouldn’t feel compelled to buy Randuin’s Omen every game. We wanted to make sure that at each stage of item progression gave you upgrade choices later on.

We know that some of your favorite items might be affected by the coming update. I’ll be discussing many specific examples in depth leading up to the patch. If you’d like more information on a specific change, reply to the thread and I’ll answer your question if I can.
http://euw.leagueofl...d.php?p=9279363

Hey there Summoners. After my first post about the upcoming preseason itemization changes, which you can find here, I’d like to talk about an item path that both demonstrates some of the updates we’re making to item tooltips and previews an upcoming item.

One of our primary goals in League of Legends is to facilitate “clarity of design,” ensuring that things work exactly how you expect them to work – and then some. With the preseason update, we’ve gone back and retuned a lot of our existing items to fit under this new paradigm and to basically re-tool some of our lesser used items into items that can fit into a wider variety of player builds. Let’s go into today’s preview item and its upgrades:

Quote: Tear of the Goddess

• +250 Mana
  
• +7 Mana Regen per 5 seconds
  
• UNIQUE Passive – Mana Charge: Each time you spend Mana, your maximum Mana increases by 4 (3 second cooldown).
  
• Bonus Mana: 0/750

It’s pretty much the Tear of the Goddess you’ve all known and loved for quite some time. You cast spells, you gain maximum mana. It does give a bit less total mana than it did before, but it’s also cheaper at a new cost of 700 Gold.


The passive is mostly the same, with one key difference: Tear of the Goddess used to trigger on spellcasts; now it triggers when you spend Mana, including through the use of channeled effects. While these two effects are one and the same for most characters, any character that has a channeled effect that costs mana will now be able to use Tears to greater effect. Characters like Anivia and Karthus who were already excellent with Tear of the Goddess now have additional ways to trigger it, while some characters like Singed and Ashe will have a newfound ability to trigger Tear of the Goddess from their toggled abilities, opening up new item paths for those characters.

You may have noticed the new words ‘Mana Charge’ – this is part of our new item tooltip terminology. Unique Passives that are shared across items now have a unique name and indicator to call them out. Unique Passives with the same name don’t stack. This mechanic is something you’re already familiar with on existing items; we’ve merely called it out explicitly with new terminology in an effort to clarify our item tooltips.

Quote: Archangel’s Staff

• +250 Mana
  
• +60 Ability Power
  
• +10 Mana Regen per 5 seconds
  
• UNIQUE Passive – Insight: +(3% of Maximum Mana) Ability Power
  
• UNIQUE Passive – Mana Charge: Each time you spend Mana, you gain 5 maximum Mana (3 second cooldown).
  
• Bonus Mana: 0/750
  
• Transforms into Seraph’s Embrace at 750 Bonus Mana

Archangel’s staff has been similarly changed in line with the new wording and functionality, and has undergone similar cost / mana and trigger recalculations so it will fit better into our new item pricing paradigm.


Archangel’s staff also has the Mana Charge passive to indicate that this passive doesn’t stack if you build a new Tear of the Goddess. However, with the Staff you gain Five mana whenever you spend mana, rather than Four mana. Upgrading to Archangel’s staff will thus increase your rate of gain on the Mana Charge.

You may also have noticed that there’s one curious line at the end of the tooltip.

If you think about it there’s no real reason why gold has to be the only way to upgrade an item. In the case of Archangel’s Staff we wanted to create an upgrade that flowed naturally from the usage and theme of the item. But if you already have 1000 Mana and 10 Mana Regen per 5, what possible upgrade could you want from Archangel’s Staff? Just what are you going to do with all that mana anyway when you’ve charged this item for 25 minutes of the game?

Quote: Seraph’s Embrace

• (Upgraded from Archangel’s Staff when fully charged)
  
• +1000 Mana
  
• +60 Ability Power
  
• +10 Mana Regen per 5 seconds
  
• UNIQUE Passive – Insight: +(3% of Maximum Mana) Ability Power
  
• UNIQUE Active: Drains 25% of your current mana to shield yourself for an equal amount for 2.5 seconds - 120 second cooldown.

-Xypherous

http://euw.leagueofl...ad.php?t=914539


Just going to leave this here... and let you wonder where it might go...

Unique Toggle: Your basic attacks and single target spells drain an additional X% of your current mana and deal twice that amount in bonus magic damage over 2 seconds.

Edit: Also, don't worry about Nidalee. Just an oversight on the preview. Tears will still proc off everything it has ever proc'ed before (including Pounce) but in addition, it will now proc off things channeled/toggled effects that drain Mana.

(sam threat, later post)