The past few days have seen some big changes that are set to be implemented by Riot in the pre-season for League of Legends' Season 4. First we heard about Vision and ward tweaks and then about big shake ups for support players and the overall meta. Today Riot is talking more general game changes, including updates to gold rewards for kills and assists, experience gains, map spawn times, objective rewards and map layout changes.
So let's break down the Riot forum post and look at what this update will do to the game:
In terms of objectives, the following changes are being worked on:
- Dragon: Will scale its experience rewards throughout the game. This will allow late game comebacks from down level teams and make it more of a priority for winning teams to protect.
- Baron: Reward changed from team fight boost, to more of a siege bonus. Extra movement speed and damage to turrets expected.
- Turrets: Team gold rewards for turrets are set to be reduced, but the last-hitter on the destroyed turret will get more gold instead.
- Inhibitors: These no longer buff all minion lanes when downed, just the one it was in.
Other systems have been tweaked, including the bounty calculations. I'll let Riot break this one down:
“We're adding “assist streaks,” where players who have far more assists than kills will get bonus gold per additional assist. Additionally, we're changing the way death streaks are reset. Previously, they were based only on kills and assists, but we're looking into ways to tie in other forms of contribution. Finally, we're also looking at bounty rewards in general and how much of an impact they have in the early game versus the mid to late game.”
Changes there are more in the planning stages, but expect them to have a big affect on gameplay.
Some timers are also getting tweaked, with minions and jungle camp spawns expected to come in a bit quicker to help get the game going a bit faster. Perhaps the biggest change though, is in the repositioning of some brushes. The ones in particular are the L and C shapes ones, which Riot felt made it too easy to ambush jungle champions or gave too much of an advantage to teams that warded them well.
These changes are just the start though. There's a lot more incoming, so keep your eyes peeled.
KitGuru Says: These all sound pretty interesting, especially the tweaks to the jungle. Anything in there you guys particularly like or dislike?