League of Legends Is Making It Harder to Clear Minion Waves

A new blog post has gone up from Riot Games regarding League of Legends and the changes in difficulty in relation to minion waves. For those players getting down on some PBE action, many have noticed that the way minions work is a little bit different. The latest post explains exactly why and what the motive is.

According to Riot, here's the 'basic idea' behind the changes:

"The changes are primarily aimed at making it more difficult to easily clear minion waves. I think that some version of that is good primarily because it means you'll have to spend more time in your lane actively managing the wave, resulting in increased time for you and your opponent to interact with each other. The more opportunities you have to interact with your opponent, the more you can demonstrate your own skill over them, and League could use a more opportunities to demonstrate skill over your opponent that don't necessarily manifest as "push and roam" strategies or other map-influencing strategies. This aims to improve the ability for players to beat their opponent in lane. There will certainly be balance outliers created on the top end as a result of this work, and they will need to be addressed if we move forward."

There are quite a few alterations that they recognize won't be a hit with everyone, they even mentioned as such in their open letter:

"There are additional changes to minion gold value that concentrate it into cannons without meaningfully altering the amount of gold gained from minions (especially pre 20 minutes). This is another tactic to create regular conflict between lane opponents.

Straight up, I do NOT expect these changes to be immediately popular. Still, I could see doing them if I thought they increased the quality of the game over the long term especially. Both those things said, I'm not necessarily convinced this is the perfect list to get the best results. It's on the PBE regardless so that there can be conversation around it before things are finalized."

For the full breakdown of the changes players can expect:

"Upgrades" occur every 3 waves, so using the melee minion example below, they go from gaining 18 Health (plus 0.3 per upgrade) every 3 waves to ganing 21 Health every 3 waves.

• Melee Minions
  • Base HP :: 473 >>> 480
  • HP Growth :: 18 +0.3/upgrade >>> 21
  • Gold Value :: 20 >>> 21
  • Gold Value Growth :: 0.125 >>> 0
• Caster Minions
  • Base HP :: 296 >>> 320
  • HP Growth :: 6 >>> 14
  • Gold Value :: 17 >>> 14
  • Gold Value Growth :: 0.125 >>> 0
• Cannon Minions
  • Base HP :: 828 >>> 900
  • HP Growth :: 23 +0.3/upgrade >>> 50
  • Gold Value :: 45 >>> 60
  • Gold Value Growth :: 0.35 >>> 3