/dev: Updating Champion Mastery

Hey everyone! I’m Evan “Riot Revenancer” Humphreys, the lead systems designer for Motivations. In the dev video we released today, I shared that this year we’ll be updating League’s champion mastery system. This blog is here to give a deeper explanation.

Our Goals

Champions are the core of League, and everyone has their favorites—and Mastery helps to reflect that passion back into the game. It’s also the way many players express skill growth, especially for those who don’t play Ranked.

Today’s Mastery system has a few improvements we identified to help make it a deeply satisfying and long-lasting part of the game. Levels are capped, so many players are already maxed on their favorite champions (yes, we’ve seen all the posts about adding level 8) and mastery score is cool but lacks the impact of more levels. Also champions and the game are balanced constantly but mastery does not change—there’s no way to show off as a master of a particular window in time (like crushing it with your enchanter during a tank support meta).

So we knew we wanted to make some changes. With a beloved system like this, we also knew it was important to set out some guiding principles to drive our redesign:

• Mastery is for all players, regardless of mode or rank.
• Mastery reflects real accomplishment, not just grind.
• Players are always pursuing greater mastery—and the system should reflect that.

That’s a lot of philosophy... on to the actual changes themselves.

Leveling Changes

The first and most important change is that we are uncapping mastery levels, meaning you’ll now be able to keep leveling forever. We like how the current leveling system rewards a combination of experience and accomplishments, so we’re keeping that dynamic but making some tweaks. You’ll now always need some amount of mastery score, and a new mechanic replacing the current system of S-grade tokens we’re currently calling “Marks of Mastery”.

Marks of Mastery are meant to represent specific achievements on a champion. Initially, they’ll be earned by demonstrating your ability each split and achieving high grades on the champion in question (which is virtually the same as it is on live now), but eventually we hope to extend the mechanic to reward Marks for all sorts of champion-specific accomplishments.

How it works:

• Earn mastery score by playing games as usual (more for higher grades).
• Earn Marks of Mastery via a new reward track for each champ that resets every split.
• Level up when you have enough mastery score (experience with the champ) and Marks of Mastery (accomplishments).

For those of you with tons of mastery score, don’t worry. We won’t be resetting progress, and when the system launches you’ll get bonus Marks based on your extra score for a big one-time infusion of levels to represent your history of dedication to your champions.

New Mastery Crests

New levels means new versions of the crests and emotes! And since we were adding new ones, we took this opportunity to revisit the somewhat-dated mastery crests already in the game. The new crests take inspiration from Mount Targon—we felt that the struggle of climbing the mountain was similar to the pursuit of mastery and wanted to reflect that in the new designs. In addition to new looks for levels 1-7 we’ve added new crests for levels 8-10, and an infinitely scaling representation of your level beyond that.

Split Mastery

Earlier I mentioned “a reward track that resets each split” and you may be wondering what that means. When we started reworking mastery, we knew we wanted to make a couple changes to how you all think about progression. First, an infinite system can sometimes feel like a grind, so we wanted to create something that celebrates shorter-term achievements—something that lets you prove your mastery over a champion in a particular season or split.

Secondly, we wanted to shift how we hand out the rewards for mastery. Earning Hextech chests via S grades in today’s system can be random and difficult to predict. We’ve worked these rewards into the per-split progression as well—this means that we could both make it easier to deliberately get chests as well as increase the maximum number of chests you can earn.

How it works:

• Each split, every champion will have a 4-milestone reward track.
• To complete each milestone, you’ll need to play and earn increasingly impressive mastery grades—each milestone requires one or more high grades to complete.
• Completing a milestone gives you Marks of Mastery and other rewards.
  • After completing your 4 milestones, there’s a more-difficult repeating bonus milestone for our one-tricks and over-achievers.
• Completing the final milestone (#4) will unlock the champion’s title (such as Aatrox’s title “The Darkin Blade”) for use as your own title for the remainder of the split!

*Our goal is to give players an increase to the average number of chests they can earn per year, while not encouraging those who would look to exploit the system outside of regular means of play.

Mastery Sets

On top of the individual champion’s reward tracks, we also want to reward those of you who like to go broad and demonstrate mastery over a lot of different champions. For that purpose, we’re also creating what we call a “Mastery Set” for every player each split.

Each set will consist of a list of champions, that are a combination of your favorites and ones we think you might like, as well as a few curated by us. Completing milestones on any of the champions in the set’s reward tracks will contribute progress toward rewards from the set. Do enough milestones across these champions and you’ll earn extra rewards including a new super-charged mastery chest.

Final Thoughts

We know mastery is near and dear to many of your hearts, and we want to get this update right. So let us know what you think about these changes, and we’ll be back to update you as we get closer to release towards the start of the summer!