'League of Legends' Update Will Make Pings Show More Information

League of Legends' pings are getting updated in one of the next few patches so that more information will be shown when abilities are pinged.

Players can currently ping their abilities to quickly tell their teammates if an ability is ready or what the remaining cooldown is, and some abilities even offer more information already based on whether they have other variables like charges. There are still some instances where abilities don't show the full range of information they're capable of, but Patch 9.1 is expected to make pings more useful for those abilities.

League of Legends' design director Riot Meddler said on the game's boards that Riot Games is currently looking at several different ways to make the pings show more information from specific abilities. One of the first changes planned for Patch 9.1 is making it so that pinging global and semi-global abilities will tell teammates whether the user is in range of certain targets or not. Ultimates like the ones used by Caitlyn, Nocturne, and pantheon were three of the examples listed, so pinging those could soon point out in chat which enemies are in range.

PBE will have a mixture of 8.24b and 9.1 changes on it for a while

Quality of life changes planned for 9.1 for ability pinging, spell timers, some spell buffering//t.co/jT2ckqUK2j

— Andrei van Roon (@RiotMeddler) December 7, 2018

Another possible change deals partially with the ammo and charges mentioned previously but more broadly applies to any information that would be relevant to teammates. Some of Heimerdinger's and Soraka's abilities were listed as examples, both of which depend on other resources besides mana.

"Potentially extra useful info on other abilities, like ammo remaining on Heimer Q, whether Soraka is blocked from casting W due to lack of health (not just lack of mana) etc.," Riot Meddler said on the League of Legends boards.

Riot Games does have some other plans for pings, though not all of them are going to be released in Patch 9.1. Draven is one champion who might one day be able to share more information about his passive through pings, but Riot Meddler said that function works differently with passives as opposed to basic abilities.

"Probably won't include ability to ping passives like Draven's to show number of stacks in 9.1," Riot Meddler said. That's on our list of things to add, but likely requires some engineering work because of the way passives are set up differently to spells."

These ping improvements are planned for a release in Patch 9.1 but aren't guaranteed to be included in that update.