The third Ranked split of 2024 is nearly upon us. But before you hop into your first Ranked game of the split, here’s a rundown of some of the changes coming alongside Split 3!
Champion Emphasis, Combat Pacing, and Snowballing
Let’s start with the biggest change you’ll notice going into this split: the global item nerfs. Simply put, we’re removing 5-15% stat efficiency from almost every Legendary item in the game. Those changes get us several important benefits: slowing down combat pacing, reducing snowballing, and making champions themselves take up a larger portion of the power budget.
Most players queue up for a game of League because they want to play a champion. We don’t see anyone load into game and get excited to play Infinity Edge—they want to play Jinx or Yasuo. With this in mind you can think of this change as a Durability Update 2.0 in the sense that we want more time for players to play out their champion’s gameplay fantasy and to put more emphasis on champions than items. Now let’s dive a bit deeper into how we got here.
Players have significantly improved at League over the past 15 years and, generally speaking, really like it when they’re able to use those skills to beat their opponents. We’re pretty big fans of skill mattering, too! That said, we should explain why nerfing almost every item in the game is related to that.
League had found itself in a state where the amount of power champions earned from items rapidly outpaced other sources like experience or team-wide objectives like Dragon. While we hadn’t directly increased the amount of gold in the game that much over the years (in fact, we’ve taken it away from things like Dragons), you all got a lot better at things like last hitting minions and also staying alive in order to last hit those minions.
If you want to feel really skilled, look at old Worlds matches and compare your farm to the world’s best from 13 years ago. In the final game of the 2012 World Finals, the ADCs had 133 and 165 minion kills at 20 minutes. They were both on one completed Legendary and weren’t remotely close to their second. Nowadays that’s below average for Platinum players, let alone the world’s best.
But why is this a problem? Well, accelerating gold incomes makes combat faster because, for most champions, items provide a lot more damage than they provide durability. One of the most interesting results from the Durability Update was that players reported significant improvements in matchmaking quality. Which was extremely impressive because we didn’t even touch matchmaking! We just slowed down combat enough that actions were more readable and your full set of skills mattered more than your reflexes. So in the interest of making combat more readable, lowering the amount of snowballing in the game, and overall making the game more fun to play (we hope), we’ve taken 5-15% of stat efficiency off of almost every Legendary item in the game.
The recurring goal for these changes was to slow down the pace of fights. Champions should move more slowly to reward proper positioning, have more downtime between actions so each one matters more, and only have access to significant burst damage if their champion is built around bursting their opponents.
Let’s broadly break down the changes by class:
For AP champions, we made burst mage itemization have less ability haste while keeping high AP and magic penetration. Meanwhile, other mages will still have ability haste options whether they’re mana or non-mana users across squishy or beefier archetypes. We also generally lowered the amount of magic resist on non-tank items to make squishy champions have a harder time surviving AP burst thresholds.
For fighters, we pushed for larger differences among skirmisher, diver, and juggernaut items. We targeted around 20% power budget into defense for skirmisher items and closer to 50% for juggernauts, with most items falling in between those marks. To hit those goals, we raised the health on several diver and juggernaut items to make sure they stood out as clearly beefier than other classes in the game.
Skirmishers and casters also got Serylda’s Grudge back while Black Cleaver was shifted to be more appealing to divers. We also changed tank items to have more resistances, which should make them more appealing for fighters who find themselves needing to front-line. Lastly, we nerfed sources of movement speed on most other classes, meaning fighters are more likely to have the mobility edge in combat.
There’s not as much to say about ADCs, since they mostly have damage and more damage, but we’ve generally lowered the amount of level scaling in their items since they already multiply each other with gold better than other item systems. They are one of the only ranged classes with consistent access to movement speed, but that’s been lowered as well.
Tank items are the least-changed class of items and have been pushed more toward their resistances. The first effect this will have is to let tanks feel like they can hold up to their lane opponents for longer as their items will perform their roles much better. The second effect is that this will make them more appealing to many melee classes who get health in several of their core items.
AD assassins are receiving item changes pretty similar to those of AP burst mages: AD and lethality values haven’t changed much, but ability haste and item active scaling was nerfed to make assassins rely more on their individual spell casts and finding that first correct target.
Enchanters generally got their items simplified, stripping out mechanics that added power but weren’t the primary draw of the item. They’ve lost the ability to give allies bonus move speed outside of Shurelya’s and generally lost AP, making them a bit worse offensively while having relatively less impact on their supportive aspects.
Overall, these changes are intended to reduce the amount of movement speed and ability haste in the game, reduce burst access for non-burst classes, lower overall damage, and increase the amount of durability items give relative to their other stats.
With less efficient items a champion’s individual strengths should really shine in a way that they haven’t in a while. The game should also be less snowbally, as gold tends to snowball much more than experience does. Our hope is that going forward, combat is more skill expressive and that fights are more readable with slightly slower champions, fewer spell casts, and more willingness to be a tank, or at least become tankier.
The Return of Lethal Tempo
Next up we have a much requested change: the return of Lethal Tempo! Originally, Lethal Tempo proved to be quite problematic because of how it let players skip itemizing attack speed. And while this change was net positive for the item system, we heard a lot of player feedback that champions who favored Lethal Tempo felt like they didn’t have a great alternative rune to take.
Now that we’ve had time to adjust itemization without the shadow of Lethal Tempo looming over all attack speed items, we’re re-adding a modified version that maintains the spirit of the rune. It should still support heavy Attack Speed users, but without also pushing out Attack Speed itemization.
It still gives stacking Attack Speed when attacking enemy champions, but now that Attack Speed no longer scales up with your level. Instead, once you reach max stacks, your attacks will deal bonus damage on-hit, which scales with both your level and your bonus Attack Speed. We expect many of the previous users to also appreciate this version of Lethal Tempo, but be less bound to it in a way that warped their play and itemization.
