The Nature of Changes in League of Legends: Why Season 5 has fewer changes

Things are always changing in the game of League of Legends, this has made it an ever changing game that tends to keep a lot of players interested for a longer period of time. The changes in League of Legends can be roughly broken down into two categories; seasonal changes and patch changes.

Patch changes are the more immediate changes to the game which usually address an immediate issue or implement an immediate change to something usually related to balancing the game. Season changes usually introduce something new or change something that had remained constant throughout the previous season.

Changes to Champions
Patch changes usually revolve around balance and the point of balance usually sought out by these changes are directed at making an ability or champion more in line with what the balance team expects. During many of the recent patch notes the balance team at Riot Games has vocalized how they felt about certain changes and why they were made. The most recent patch, 5.2, included some changes to Zed.

“In the 5.1 notes, we mentioned Zed as a good example of what we refer to as a "Healthy Assassin" - but that doesn't come without its own set of balancing woes. To help bring Zed in line with other champions while preserving his power as a competitive option, we've looked toward his strengths outside of pure assassination - in this case, attacking his ability to split-push by lowering his attack speed.

Zed's pattern of poking from a distance and waiting for the moment to strike is layered with counterplay and complexity. That is, up until his AD items remove the need for his spells, allowing just a few auto-attacks to seal your fate. With a base and scaling attack speed rivaling that of Xin Zhao and Tryndamere, Zed's auto-attacks were as much a menace to champions as they were to towers. He'll still be effective in a side-lane due to his strengths in 1-v-1 duels, but taking power here allows us to keep his damage output focused in landing spells and using combos effectively.”

This quote from the patch notes gives some insight into what Riot wants their champions to be and how they are further looking into changes to champions outside of the raw damage they deal. While this change was clearly made with the intention of weakening Zed’s strength, it did so in a way that would less directly affect his main focus of using Death Mark, casting his abilities, and killing high value targets.

Patch changes are often made with the ideal of giving the players “breathing room”. Breathing room usually comes in the form of weakening certain aspects of a champion, giving the opposing players counter-play, or narrowing down a champion’s strengths. It is often that the changes reflect what the balance team feels the champion should reflect through play style, when they hit their power spikes, and what their strengths are.

Changes to Runes
Other changes are to aspects of the game in which Riot feels needs to be more impactful or more variation. As the seasons progressed, League of Legends began to make other aspects of the game more impactful or fulfilling. For as long as some players can remember, everyone used armor seals in all their rune pages and there was not much incentive to do otherwise or to deviate from this set up. In recent seasons Riot has looked at the unwavering set up for many rune pages and made changes in favor of other runes, such as the changes to runes which gave attack speed or increasing the values of HP runes.

The addition of hybrid penetration marks compliments their design philosophy as it made the strengths of hybrid champions more blatant as well as offering more choices to champions who could utilize the benefits of hybrid penetration marks. 

Changes to Masteries
Much like runes, masteries used to have a few maximizing combinations which many players used early in the life of League of Legends. The masteries used to lacked depth of choice. In Seasons two and four came the introduction of different masteries, allowing players the ability to give their choices and playstyles more depth. This stratified the amount of choices a player could make as well as blurring the lines of what was most optimal mastery page for a role and instead made the mastery pages more about how your champion best utilizes the tree rather than choosing a one-size-fits-all rune page.

Changes to Items
Changes to items also reflect the theory that every aspect of League of Legends should give the players an impactful choice. Changes to Sword of the Divine were changed from making your auto attacks undodgeable, to giving the user insane attack speed and a 100% chance to critically strike with their next three auto attacks. These efforts were made  to increase the items relevancy in the newer patches where the items had lost relevancy. 

An old item named Cloak and Dagger gave the user tenacity, critical chance, and attack speed. While we can make the conclusion that this item eventually became Zephyr, Cloak and Dagger came off as a confusing item as it gave less tenacity than Mercury Treads back in season one. This would cause players to make the conclusion that Cloak and Dagger was simply an inferior item, costing more than Mercury Treads while providing inefficient stats.

New items were added into the game to give players a larger variety of choices as well as making up for the shortcomings of already existing items such as Haunting Guise, Hexdrinker, and Aegis of the Legion, items of which had appearances in professional play but were often criticized for their lack of presence later into the game. While these items were good on their own they would eventually be parts of other items which allowed them to progress in gold value throughout the game.

Removal of Items
While champions and items can both be remade, items are more often completely removed from the game than champions (think Jax). Notable items include Heart of Gold, Elixir of Agility, and most recently Deathfire Grasp. The patch in which both Heart of Gold and Elixir of Agility were removed Riot had this to say about the items:

"...Many of these items were either less powerful than alternatives, too powerful to be elegantly balanced, or purchased only as part of a later game upgrade. Instead of drastically changing these old standbys, we opted to remove them to open alternative builds."

While Deathfire Grasp was removed due to the fact that it made burst patterns more unpredictable and made certain champions more frustrating to play against (think Leblanc).

Changes to the Jungle
Some people have seen this with the arrival of every new season. “We want to make the jungle role more impactful.” This statement broadly embodies the mentality behind each seasons jungle changes, from the double gold generation item meta of junglers in season two, to the variety of jungle items available in season five, not to mention the enhanced smite spell. Quite possibly the role that continues to change the most every season, the junglers have seen a multitude of changes with each new year. This is attributed to the fact that Riot is not satisfied with the role the jungler plays with each of the previous seasons. Junglers have been played in many different ways but each time Riot makes changes to the jungle, it is a telltale sign that junglers either have too much sway in the game or not enough.

Older item images courtesy of League of Legends wiki

Changes to the Support Role
Speaking of impact on the game, in the old days supports felt like the martyr of the team, often forsaking gold for the benefit of the carry, using what little gold they had buying boat loads of wards, and were often picked to fill the role of protecting the carries or for their sheer utility. The support role has since been stratified in many ways, supports have meaningful ways of generating gold outside of conventional farming in lane, and we have even seen mages and tanks fill the role of supports due to their damage coupled with utility (think Annie and Leona). Riot was clearly unsatisfied about what it meant to be a support and the constricting criteria for a champion of the support role after the meta of supports had been established earlier on.

Older item images courtesy of League of Legends wiki

Scope of Changes in season 5
If you are like me, you may have expected a novels worth of patch notes when the preseason five changes were announced. From previous years I came to expect many things to change for they certainly had in the past. The jungle would change, that was almost for certain, masteries would change, runes would change, new items would be added, older items would be removed, and Riot only knows what else. If the patch history of League of Legends has taught us anything about changes going into a new season, it was that the new season would be quite different from the last.

Yet this season it was nearly quite the contrary. While the jungle was certainly changed, the patch did not include too many item removals, very few new items, no rune changes, no mastery changes, and no changes directly targeting a lane. From the history of changes throughout the League of Legends seasons, we can conclude that they were made to increase the depth, impact, influence, and ideal for each facet of the game. 

1. Champion changes were made to highlight certain strengths of a champion or to decrease the outright power of a champion,

2. runes and masteries were changed to give players a variety of meaningful choices to better fit the strengths of each champion,

3. items were changed to add clarity as well as increase item variety,

4. and jungle and support changes were made to increase the influence and champion pool of each role.

What this says about Season 5
After the long history of changes in the past, we can attribute that Riot is generally satisfied with the balance of the game as well as the variety every aspect of the game offers. There are many champions that can fill the role of a support or jungler, two roles which were constricted in terms of champions who could fulfill the role. This has lead to many older champions making appearances in certain roles (think jungle Pantheon), making a name for themselves and breaking into the category of 'viable champions' by popular or professional opinion.

After such a long history of changes, both big and small, Riot has brought League of Legends to the forefront of their design and balance philosophy. Riot’s changes to the game have allowed for the continual progression of what it means to play a role in Summoner’s Rift and beyond. The fact that Season five contained marginal changes to the game in contrast to other seasons, means that season five is a turning point in the history of patches for League of Legends.