Patch day passes without champion release
I’m happy to report that I wasn’t eaten by bears over the weekend. I did come back to a decent amount of work, though, and there is the usual catching up to do across various gaming forums and RSS feeds. I finally had a chance to check out today’s patch this afternoon and was a little surprised when there was no new champion.
I know the teaser post was made late in the week, and I’m guessing with the office move Riot didn’t have time to fully balance out a champion. With that in mind, I’m really glad we didn’t see a new champion today. In fact, it has made me wish champion releases were just a little further apart. I’ve mentioned that before, but it’s been a while since Riot has actually missed a release date, giving me some time to reflect on the difference.
It’s a nice breather to be able to focus on the other champion changes in today’s patch, even if those changes were pretty light. Annie got some minor buffs, as did Kog’Maw, and Vayne saw a few minor nerfs, but Alistar saw some pretty serious damage nerfs that could dramatically affect the way players build him. Irelia also got some significant changes – mostly to her ult – which I’m interested to test out a bit.
I am a little curious when we’ll see Orianna. I would love to see her put off another two weeks; I can’t imagine it makes financial sense to release her even mid-cycle and then give us another champ a week later. If anything, I suppose I could see pushing her back a week and then pushing the development cycle out a week from here forward.
What do you think? Is this a nice respite from the stream of champion releases or do you prefer to have someone new in champion select every two weeks?