Yesterday I covered the various champion changes that came with the Cassiopeia patch, but it’s tough to talk about those champion changes without also discussing the items changes. Several of the champions that got nerfed also had their primary builds nerfed, which could all but remove them from the game. A lot of items had small changes, like the Infinity Edge nerf or the Elixir changes. As usual, I’ll just be covering the big stuff. Let’s have a look.
Innervating Locket is gone. Yes, completely removed. It was so damn good on the characters that used it most that it just couldn’t be balanced. If you’ve seen people run a Locket stack, you know what I’m talking about. Gragas, Udyr, Sona – all of them could exploit Locket for survivability. Riot said they wanted to remake it, but in the meantime, it would be out of the game. I’m not too sad about this one. It hurts my Udyr game a little, but I’m sure I can find other ways to make him work.
Last Whisper got changed to flat damage and armor penetration. No more attack speed. I think this is a really good change, though it’s a little ridiculous on Pantheon right now. As I mentioned in a post on armor pen a while back, Last Whisper is just too good. It improves your damage output immensely by not only modifying your regular attacks but also modifying the rate at which those attacks hit. I’m glad for the change.
Phantom Dancer has had its cost lowered and the dodge chance removed. I only mention it because I saw a post from either Zileas or another designer saying they don’t like dodge much. That’s a big statement, considering there’s a character primarily built around dodge. I couldn’t agree more, though. I’ve seen too many level two kills slip away because of a lucky dodge or, in the worst cases, two dodges in a row. At that level, you have like eight percent dodge at best. It’s a terrible stat, and definitely worth removing.
Wards got a pretty big nerf this go round, which could have some interesting effects on gameplay. The duration is down to three minutes for both varieties, a solid 33 percent nerf for sight wards. Health has also been reduced to one – yes, one – so that if you see a dropped ward it’s pretty much dead. I think it’s going to become tough to encourage people to buy them now. I played my first ranked games in more than a month this past week and in both games I saw little or no warding.
The other big news, of course, is no Sunfire stacking for tanks. The passive is unique, so you only get that damage once. It should diversify a lot of tank builds, but it also hit certain toons very hard. Obviously Garen got wrecked by it, but toons like Malphite and Shen will probably also miss the extra damage.
That’s it for items. You can see Riot has made some very significant changes to the way the game is being played. For some reasons my tags aren’t saving on my laptop but I should have that fixed momentarily. More thoughts on metagame changes, especially the XP gain and dragon changes, tomorrow night.
