A welcome change has been spotted in the League of Legends PBE that makes the Eye of the Herald item display the item’s remaining duration when pinged.
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With the patches that came not too long ago and made all items pingable in League, the possibilities for communication through active items, ammo charges, and other situational pings became wide open. Unfortunately, the Eye of the Herald item that you get from killing the Rift Herald displayed information that usually wasn’t the detail players were looking for. Pinging it notified your team that you had possession of the item, but it didn’t let them know how long it had left until it expired.
This has apparently been changed on the PBE now that players are noticing that pinging it will instead inform teammates of how many seconds it’ll stick around before returning to the Void. Evidence of this change was posted to Reddit, but you can hop onto the PBE yourself if you have an account and verify the news for yourself.
The change is a relatively small one compared to other features, but the difference between the previous version and the one that’s being tested could have a sizeable impact on team communication in the right situations. The Rift Herald doesn’t always get captured in every game, but when it does, utilizing it in a coordinated push is the difference between taking a turret or two and completely wasting the item. If you play without chatting and only use your pings to communicate, you’d be forced to spam the ping in hopes that others would pick up on your meaning, something that everyone luckily became accustomed to.
Suggestions from players to have the information of the Eye of the Herald item have cropped up occasionally from players offering feedback. The idea to make a ping reflect its duration has been discussed on Reddit and the League boards in the past, so the change can likely have part of its inspiration attributed to the player requests.
The change appears to be live now on the PBE, but look for it soon on the live servers assuming the slight change doesn’t break anything too badly.
