League of Legends Previews Post-Midseason Support Changes

Riot Games is planning work for League of Legends supports that’ll affect the champions’ items [...]

Janna
(Photo: Riot Games)

Riot Games is planning work for League of Legends supports that'll affect the champions' items and stats after the midseason patches are released.

These changes won't come for a while now with Riot Meddler estimating that supports will see the effects of the patch sometime after Patches 8.11 and 8.12 are released, but Riot wanted to preview the changes now before it gets to that point.

"After the midseason changes (8.11) and some followup (8.12 at least) some of the things we'll be looking at are various things about the support position," Riot Meddler said. "Not sure exactly what will ship or when yet, but did want to run you folks through a list of things we'll likely be looking at and why."

Supports are known for their ability to keep allies alive with healing and shielding powers, so it's no wonder that both of those stats are some of the first that Riot plans to look at. Riot Meddler commented on the then-and-now situation of supports having much more gold now to spend on these stats and said that Riot will be looking into whether these stats should cost more.

"[Heal/Shield Stat] was introduced back when supports got less gold. Also contributes a lot of power through multiplication of base stats, rather than as a separate ratio like AP, making it hard to tune it properly for a variety of different cases. Will be considering things like whether it's undercosted, whether it should be a stat that can be tuned on an ability by ability basis, which items should offer it etc."

Janna and Lulu were two supports specifically mentioned in the post when referring to the two champs' defensive abilities. Both champions have ample ways to make sure a lane is terribly uneventful for enemy laners, and Riot is planning on exploring some ways to add some risk or skill elements to these powers.

"A lot of the time defensive tools, particularly those on Lulu and Janna, are significantly more reliable/forgiving than offensive tools used against their team. We'll be looking at whether more risk/skill expression should be added to particular effects as a result. That could mean things like shorter shield durations or other timing demands (e.g. like Redemption), adding more contextual demands to some abilities (e.g. % missing effects or bonuses just after an ally has been damaged) or other approaches."

The post touches on other areas as well such as the range of champions that get to be supports gold, and XP, all of those discussions seen here.

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