League of Legends Balance Team Shifts Focus "Polish and Stability"

The next few League of Legends updates will focus more on balance and stability updates and less on big shake-up, according to an update from Riot Games.

Between jungle changes, the new Rift Scuttler that everyone's fighting over, and the latest wave of attack damage item changes that have ADCs and assassins figuring out all-new builds, the last few patches have been some doozies. That's to be expected to a degree since these updates came during the midseason time that's usually full of high-impact features, but spreading out the changes over several patches gave players something new to adapt to each time.

Now, Riot Games says that aside from the new fighter items that are coming before long, the balance team is moving towards more polishing changes until preseason hits. Lead gameplay designer Riot Meddler explained what Riot's plans are for future updates.

"Now that all the midseason changes, bar the couple of new fighter items, are out, we're going to focusing mainly on polish and stability until preseason," Riot Meddler said on the League of Legends boards. "We've made quite a lot of changes recently and want to pair that with a period of low systemic change. That will mean patches being more just balance adjustments, and less major overhauls of anything. That's something we aim for each year after midseason, as we hit the second half of the ranked season and the run up to Worlds. Looking at the amount of change we've made this year though, and the style in which it's come out, it feels extra important to do."

The Rioter also commented on the patch process mentioned above that spaced out the jungle and AD item changes over the course of a few updates. Calling the strategy "more disruptive than [they] anticipated," Riot Meddler said that the way updates release in the future is also being adjusted.

"We were hoping to minimize the shake up of any individual patch and keep things steadier since we'd have time to react to each set of changes separately. In retrospect though the outcome was more a period of constant readjustment than greater stability. We'll be aiming to cluster changes back in a single patch more in the future as a result."

Some of the systematic changes that'll be looked at include pulling back early snowballing potential and the upcoming patch that includes the fighter items and nerfs to healing and shielding items.