Split 2 Gameplay Preview

Hey everyone, I’m Riot Auberaun, Product Lead of the Summoner’s Rift Team. We’re quickly coming up on Split 2 which will be arriving in patch 14.10 on May 15th! Since this is the first year League has done 3 Ranked splits, we wanted to share how we’re approaching splits on Summoner’s Rift and what you can expect to see when Split 2 goes live.

What Splits Mean for Gameplay

League of Legends is a game that asks you to adapt—we add new content and constantly retune existing champions and items while you innovate and discover new strategies that we never could’ve imagined. You might be challenged to adapt to a change in something you play, like your main being buffed or nerfed, or to things around you like map changes, a different champion in your role becoming more popular, or another class’s item changes. Overall, we believe that adaptation is a key skill to test for proving your mettle, with the best of the best being able to stay at the top of the game consistently—not just when their main is strong. League’s changing and evolving nature is an important factor that has helped keep the game thriving for almost 15 years and is a big reason why players keep coming back. We won’t always get things right on the first swing, but we’ll always keep swinging to make League the best game that it can be.

In the spirit of that, we want each new Ranked split to provide new, interesting gameplay that will give players the opportunity to prove their mastery of the game. We took a swing at this by skipping preseason and introducing evolutionary changes to the game in the same patch as the Ranked split start. And while we’ve had a concept of midseason before, with changes like the ADC item update last year and the durability update the year prior, we’re now committing that each Ranked split will come with an accompanying gameplay update. We believe that every Ranked split and season should feel different from the one before and provide new gameplay challenges for players to master. These will vary in scope of change from update-to-update, but our current plans are for a year of League gameplay changes to look something like this:

• Season Start: Large Gameplay Changes (similar to patch 14.1)
• Split 2: Medium-Sized Gameplay Changes (similar to patch 13.10)
• Split 3: Smaller Gameplay Changes (similar to patch 13.20)

We want mastering each split to feel like a worthwhile experience for players, and we believe that being more consistent about when we’re releasing bigger gameplay patches will help accomplish just that.

We’re excited for each split to become a more distinct part of each League player’s journey and how these changes will help shape the future of League. Speaking of which, check out the details below on what’s coming up in patch 14.10!

ADC Item Update

Hey all, I’m Simon “Riot Zhanos” LeBlanc Bastien here to talk about our upcoming plan for the ADC item system!

Why the ADC item system?

When we were removing the Mythic item system each class needed to have their items retuned in order to redistribute the power that was previously coming from Mythic items. However, at the time we weren’t quite ready to make the larger changes we knew that the ADC item system needed, so we made smaller changes to get the class into a decent spot for the beginning of the season instead. Unfortunately, this meant that the item system has been in a sub-optimal spot for a few patches which we’ve seen in player feedback—our surveys told us that ADC players (compared to all other champion roles/classes) were the least satisfied with their item systems.

Now we’ve had some time to see how de-Mythicing affected ADC’s and get a better understanding of where we missed the mark on ADC power spikes. So we took those learnings and went back to work on a better ADC item system which we’ll jump into the details of now!

The 14.10 ADC Item System Changes

Remember a world where there existed big AD stat sticks, and ADCs didn't get to have all of their desired stats on their first purchases? Back when power progression was more linear, each item felt equally as important, and item purchases felt powerful.

Well that's the world we’re looking to go back to! We’re not completely redoing too many systems, but expect to see a lot of different stats on familiar faces. One of the main changes you’ll see is that Legendary items that give critical strike chance will always give 25% instead of 20%. This will allow for more build flexibility and will also help crit-based builds come online quicker. In addition, items will now focus on only 2 of the 3 offensive scaling stats (attack damage, attack speed, and critical strike chance) which allows them to create bigger spikes every time a new Legendary item is finished.

Why We’re Doing It

One of our biggest goals with these changes is to create more distinct power spikes.

The Mythic and recent post-Mythic ADC system gave every stat you needed on a lot of items, giving a smooth power progression through the early and mid game for the role. This was powerful, but meant leads were less meaningful and item spikes felt uneven. By uneven we mean that on the first item purchase, items were too strong for us to be able to make the second purchase reasonably powerful. Simultaneously, the first item spike wasn’t strong enough for ADCs to be on par with other roles in terms of strength. Now that first item spikes will be slightly weaker, we can budget for the second item to feel more powerful, and for each consequent purchase to feel just as powerful. Our goal with these changes is for item combinations to feel like they truly enhance your champion in larger spikes rather than slowly building little bits of power up over time.

Let’s jump further into this issue by using the Phantom Dancer changes as an example. Current Phantom Dancer has its power spread out over four stats: attack damage, attack speed, critical strike chance, and movement speed. In addition to those, it also has a passive that helps it gain even more AS over the course of a fight, up to 65% total AS. In our new system, it instead gives an upfront 60% AS, no AD, and it no longer has a passive. This allows us to make it slightly cheaper and have even more movement speed, to really cement it as not only the best way to gain a ton of AS but also a great way to stay mobile, both in and out of fights.

Attack speed is a stat that has slowly become less valuable over the last few years for various reasons, like the fact that it was prevalent in a lot of systems outside of items (read: runes). One of our goals if for attack speed purchases to be more common due to how important they are to the classes that scale with it best.

Another stat that we’re looking at is movement speed. Historically, it was a stat that only ADCs and other squishies had access to outside of boots via Zeal items. Things have changed a lot since then, and nowadays almost every class has access to movement speed in one way or another. We think it's important how the ADC class’ survivability is tied to their movement and their way to not only fight at the edges of fights, but also evade incoming danger.

In the cases where you don't care about crit, we still have a few changes coming! For the on-hit builds, we’ve re-tuned some already existing items to make them fit better within that space so even on-hit users have something to get excited about. Items like Blade of the Ruined King, Kraken Slayer and Terminus all have changes to their stat lines and recipes that you’ll be able to see in the patch 14.10 notes.

Removals

As part of this update, we’re parting ways with Kircheis Shard and Stormrazor. What this means is that we’re moving the energized system to a Legendary-item-only feature. Voltaic Cyclosword and Rapid Firecannon have had their builds path updated to compensate, but still provide their energized effect. Stormrazor is leaving the system once again since the hit and run nature of the item never really found a home on many users. Instead, you might be looking forward to getting a hold of our new component, Scout’s Slingshot, to hail magic pebbles at the opponent, or Wraithhunter’s Arrows to help your critical strikes make your enemies bleed out. So even if you were a fan of one of these items our goal is for all users to have a place in the new ADC system.

Runes

Hey all, rune enthusiast Alex “scaz” Z here to talk about some of the big changes coming to the rune system this midseason.

Our biggest goal going into 14.10 was to identify the runes in our current system that weren’t quite hitting the mark in terms of player satisfaction or proved to be detrimental to game health. So to start off, let's look at some of the runes being removed in Split 2.

Removals

When evaluating a rune one of the major things we focus on is its game health impact. In cases like Predator, it created gameplay patterns like Singed mid running to various lanes off cooldown. Because of those unhealthy gameplay patterns we’ve kept the rune in an extremely weak state for a long time which isn’t fun for anyone, so we felt now is the best time to finally remove it from the system. Since it’s been deliberately weak for quite some time now, the vast majority of former users have moved on to other runes, so we don’t expect this removal to drastically affect anyone.

On the other side of the spectrum, Lethal Tempo is a keystone that sees a ton of play across the board today, across multiple lanes and classes. Over time we’ve grown more aware of the way Lethal Tempo disrupts the item system space by allowing champions to shortcut attack speed purchases. Not only should this help delay how early they come online, but it’ll also make the decision to buy attack speed more meaningful and interesting which is one of our goals with the ADC system changes. As a bonus, this helps a ton with Yasuo/Yone as well. Now they can’t right click you and win—now they’ll have to rely more on smart skill usage to succeed.

We’ve been planning around a world without Lethal Tempo with its users in mind, so we’re also adjusting the remaining runes to help those displaced users. We’re expecting a decent chunk of them to land between the new Press the Attack, Fleet Footwork, Conqueror, and Hail of Blades. That said, we’ll be closely monitoring any users that are left out of these systems and help them where needed.

Reworks

Hailing from the Resolve Tree, our first candidate for a rework is Font of Life! Font of Life in its current state is a very narrow rune that has both activation restrictions (slow or immobilize), payoff restrictions (an ally uses basic attacks on the marked target), and just didn’t feel satisfying to players (having a heal over time instead of an immediate one).

Here is the new version of Font of Life:

• Impairing the movement of an enemy champion restores Health to you and the lowest health nearby allied champion.

Our goal with these changes was to broaden the potential use cases and make the rune more reliable for its users in a way that feels more satisfying (for example, the heal is now immediate and no longer a HOT). Since the heal is applied to both you and a nearby ally, the rune is felt most in a duo lane and on a support champion. The primary user base should remain the same, but it has the additional property of being potentially picked up by a solo laner that can slow or immobilize opponents if they wanted a combat rune from that row to help bolster their laning phase.

Now that’s not all the reworks we have in store, but I can’t fit everything into one blog so let’s move on to some replacements!

Replacements

With Lethal Tempo exiting the Precision Keystone space, we wanted to make Press the Attack fit more with the other Precision Keystones as a hybrid burst and follow up damage amplification rune much like it already is, but slightly changed to better catch some of those looking for a place to go with Lethal Tempo being gone. The current Press the Attack is currently in an odd spot between rewarding both burst damage and sustained combat, but with these changes we wanted to focus the Rune more on sustained combat.

Here is the new version of Press the Attack:

• Hitting an enemy champion 3 consecutive times deals bonus damage and amplifies your damage until you leave combat.

Press the Attack still retains basically everything you loved about the original rune, you hit a target three times and you get a burst of damage. But now, in a 1v1 situation, your followup damage against that target will still be amplified. But since this amplification is now a selfish buff rather than a single target debuff, this rune will be better for champions fighting team fights front to back or frequently swapping targets. The main goal here was to refocus this away from being a team oriented debuff to a particular target and more towards being a self empowerment when a condition is fulfilled.

Next up for replacements is the sustain rune from the Precision page, Overheal! Overheal is a rune that can be quite problematic when it’s too powerful, but when it isn’t strong it tends to be completely overlooked as an option. This makes it a not-so-great rune which is why we’ll be removing it this split, and replacing it with Absorb Life. Absorb Life is the new sustain option that aims to give precision tree users the ability to heal up off of lane minions and jungle camps in the mid to late game, with some lane sustain as a bonus.

Here is Absorb Life:

• Killing a target heals you for a small amount.

We intentionally created this as a scaling sustain option since we didn’t want an overwhelming amount of healing early to wash lanes leading to stale standoffs. With that being said, the healing gained will still be meaningful in lane, and the ability to reset your health somewhat after brawls and poke battles over objectives is where this rune really shines.

And that about wraps up our two biggest changes coming with split 2! We hope you’re looking forward to testing them out, and make sure to check out the patch 14.10 notes for all the details. See you on the Rift and good luck in your Split 2 climbs!