Riot Games wants to slow down combat in ‘League Of Legends’

A developer at Riot Games has outlined how the studio plans to slow down combat in League Of Legends, something that has been the subject of community discussion for many years.

League Of Legends lead gameplay designer Bryan Salvatore (Dot Esports, via PC Gamer) has revealed plans to scale back the game’s fast-paced combat.

“We’ll be talking about upcoming changes intended to slow the pace of combat down within the next few weeks,” shared Salvatore, before going into more detail on what those changes will entail.

Rather than dialling back every champion’s damage output, Salvatore says Riot will be “likely targeting champion base durability, plus a variety of systems that we know will need adjustment.”

Salvatore also took a moment to explain Riot’s philosophy toward combat pacing in League Of Legends:

“We believe League of Legends is best when it is on average fast-paced and exciting, but yeah I think it would be fair to say it has overcorrected towards damage, which is hitting away at clarity (‘I can tell what just killed me’ / ‘I can tell what I should have done differently’) and skill expression (‘That assassin/mage hit their whole kit, so they earned the kill’).”

Going into more detail, Salvatore said that he still believes certain champions in League Of Legends should still boast a low time-to-kill under the right circumstances, but added that assassins should not be able to build tankier item sets and still kill other champions in a matter of seconds.

Looking ahead, Salvatore outlined what state he expects the game to be in following this update.

“There is definitely risk that burst champions get weaker, sustained combat champions (tanks, enchanters, ADCs, some mages, some fighters, etc) get stronger as the immediate aftermath of the changes – predicting the immediate balance in detail is basically impossible.”

“With that in mind, a lot of the validation we’ve done has been aimed at making sure we have clear alignment on when burst kills are ok and also on what we’ll do if certain classes are over- or underpowered. There’ll be balance instability, but I’m optimistic that we’ll land it effectively and pretty quickly. ”

Salvatore re-iterated that League Of Legends could see some “rougher balance for a bit” following the update, but fans will have to “wait and see and judge us by what actually happens.”

In other gaming news, a Russian Dota 2 esports team has been disqualified from an official tournament after drawing a pro-war ‘Z’ during a match against several Ukrainian players.