League of Legends preseason 2015 bringing more item diversity

The key pillar in League of Legends 2015 preseason is strategic diversity, or "increasing the paths to victory your team can take." Part of this, is creating a diverse armory with items that have a "specific focus on macro-level value — pre-fight, or out of combat value — over micro-level contributions.

"Many items in League just add champion power with passive stats. This is important because it's one of the key ways teams have to leverage gold advantages. However, in addition to these kinds of items, we think there is room for more strategic items that allow you to support a particular strategy or counter an enemy strategy. By their very nature, these items won't be must-buys every game, but in certain situations they should be very useful," Riot explained on a very high level.

You may recall in a previous blog post Riot introduced Righteous Glory, an item whose active gives a large movement speed bonus to both its user and nearby allies when moving towards enemy units before emitting a shockwave that slow nearby enemy champions. This item was designed specifically to react to the specialized strategy of engaging on "a slippery" opposing team. "By granting high toward-enemy movement speed (think Vayne’s Night Hunter passive) to your team at the right time, you can quickly position for a fight. Add to that a powerful area-of-effect slow and your ability to force fights becomes formidable against all but the most evasive teams," Riot clarified, adding that they are also looking at existing items to see w hat they can improve. Ohmwrecker was one of the items mentioned.

In addition to tweaking items, Riot also has some changes for consumables. The 2015 preseason will see Elixir of Fortitude and Elixir of Brilliance have replaced by a set of "mid/late game" consumables that are more expensive than the Elixirs they're replacing, but are much more valuable to your team's strategy.

• Elixir of Ruin
  • Grants bonus health, bonus damage to towers, and the “Siege Commander” buff
  • Siege Commander: Nearby minions gain bonus damage to towers. Minions also gain movement speed based on your own movement speed.
• Elixir of Sorcery
  • Grants bonus ability power, mana regeneration, and the “Sorcery” buff
  • Sorcery: Damaging a champion or tower deals bonus true damage. This effect has a cooldown against champions but no cooldown against towers.
• Elixir of Iron
  • Grants increased size, slow resistances, tenacity, and the “Path of Iron” buff
  • Path of Iron: Moving leaves behind a path that boosts allied champion movement speed
• Elixir of Wrath
  • Grants bonus attack damage and the “Bloodlust” buff
  • Dealing physical damage to champions heals for a % of the damage dealt. Scoring a kill or assist extends the duration of this Elixir by 30 seconds.

Another goal Riot has is streamling reactive builds.

"When you’ve just been evaporated by LeBlanc or cut down by Riven you tend to want to adjust your build appropriately by buying Armor or Magic Resist as soon as possible. However, with the current state of items there’s often needless complexity in deciding what to pick up. Depending on the final item you’re going for, you should be building Cloth Armor instead of Chain Vest (Glacial Shroud vs. Warden’s Mail) or Negatron Cloak instead of Null Magic Mantle (Banshee’s Veil vs. Hexdrinker). Depending on how much gold you have on hand, this can force strange decisions around what is ultimately a reactive purchase," Riot explained.

"To smooth this out, we’re changing Chain Vest to build out of Cloth Armor and removed Negatron Cloak from the game (replacing it with Null Magic Mantles earlier in item build paths). This makes the “I need Armor NOW” case much cleaner, no matter what final item you’re aiming for with minimal loss of depth in the decision making."

The last notable change is to health and mana regeneration. With a goal of making regen "a more regulated stat," Riot is changing regen items from flat values to percentages of a champion's stats.

"The benefits of a design like this are twofold. By having regen scale throughout the game we can create items providing meaningful benefits early while still remaining relevant late. We also get the benefit of being able to tune regen more effectively champion-by-champion, meaning we can focus strong regen items onto champions where they can be powerful and healthy.," Riot said, admitting that this new system will "almost certainly be a bit wonky at first."

Hey, that's what preseason is for! Last week, Riot detailed a number of other changes in an overview of the 2015 preseason. Changes to the jungle were discussed earlier this week.