League of Legends Is Adding Input Buffing to Nearly Every Ability

Input buffering will soon become a part of almost every ability in League of Legends when Riot Games improves the mechanic in a future patch.

While input buffering happens behind the scenes and may not be something that players are always thinking about, it's pretty obvious when it's absent and something goes wrong. The mechanic lets players queue up their next ability while they're in the middle of an action so that it goes off as soon as possible afterwards. Pathing towards someone to use your ultimate and having the spell go off right after you Flash is an example of this, something that's a core part of certain champions' kits when it comes to pulling off flashy combos.

Riot Meddler gave a more precise example of input buffering in a Gameplay Thoughts post that involves a popular Lee Sin combo.

"Something we've been doing on some individual abilities for a while is making it so that, if their button is pressed just before it would be useable (e.g. while in the middle of another spell or just before it comes off CD), the command is saved and then executed shortly after," Riot Meddler said. "A particularly clear example of that is on Lee Sin W back in 7.11.Buffering like that makes executing combos and other cases of precise timing smoother on connections that aren't extremely low ping."

With Irelia's rework, Riot says that some new tools have been developed that increases the number of instances where input buffering can be applied. Riot Meddler added that this new tech that's been created means that Riot Games can start making input buffering a part of nearly every ability.

"While working on Irelia we developed some new tech that makes input buffering like that much easier to apply to other abilities. It's been working well on Irelia so we're looking to roll it out to almost all abilities in the game shortly. That change is currently in testing on the PBE and we're hoping to have it be part of 8.9."

PBE players can try out the change now since it's been added to the testing grounds, but everyone else will have to wait until the projected release of Patch 8.9 that'll come in the next few weeks. There was no mention of abilities that wouldn't be benefitting from the input buffering tech, but a list may be provided once the change is made.