Riot just made dev: /DEV: 2024 ITEM CHANGES
Major take away from the post was
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“Item Power Budgets” to move power from Item to champions
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“Locked Slots” Where ap mages with mana have to build 1 mana item and due to now end game happen get locked into same 2nd and 3rd item due to “Pattern Binding”
These changes allow for great change to how “Pattern Binding” works but they just address issue about how there are more mana items in Mythic system and don’t provide solution for this.
The mythic system improved this in a few ways for mages by adding some competition among mana items, which meant that not every mage had to have the same first item.
Every mana mage has “Locked Slot” for mana item first. Each of those mana Mages have no choice and these changes has further reduced diversity.
We went from having 5 + 1 Major mana item starts to 3 + 1.
+1 being the tear route which being second item or 3rd for skipping mana item start.
| Item | Cost | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Liandry’s Anguish | 3200 | Great for burn/spam champion |
| Luden’s Tempest | 3200 | Great for burst champion |
| Crown of the Shattered Queen | 2800 | Great for early game battle mages / Countering assassins |
| Everfrost | 2800 | Great for cc focused champion |
| Rod of Ages | 2800 | Great for late game scaling battle mages |
| Archangel’s Staff | 3000 | (+1 Item to build 2nd/3rd) Great for delaying mana item for different mage item |
How did we go from above to this below only options
| Item | Cost | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Caster’s Companion | 3000 | Great burst champion |
| Malignance | 2800 | Great for ult focus champion if it works well for them |
| Rod of Ages | 2700 | Great for late game scaling battle mages |
| Archangel’s Staff (+1 Item to build 2nd/3rd) | 3000 | (+1 Item to build 2nd/3rd) Great for delaying mana item for different mage item |
I feel that these changes bring less option to “Locked Slot” and early game played out in champ select instead of on the rift.
Without mythics you can get Seraphs 1st again, which was possible before mythics already. It just made little sense with mythics existing.
We know that the removal of mythics and items reduces item diversity. The removal of mythics is there to reduce item power creep and to make your champ build items that fit them instead of chosing an item based on your enemy/situation.
Riot once wanted diversity but what they found was that diversity also means you have to make the item passives/actives strong enough to matter a lot, which is against the champs identity. We had the same with runes. When everyone went OP Conqueror everyone was a DPS bruiser with sustain.
Now they want to focus on champ identity again and get away from powerful items and runes, lowering diversity of these but helping out champ identity instead.