Page 74 of 318

The Utility tree was easily my most commonly used mastery tree prior to this patch. The skills were just too good to pass up. Extra cooldown on Flash, which I took on nearly every single character. Extra buff duration. Extra mana regen. More experience. Movespeed increase. Summoner Spell CD reduction. What more could you want? Well, how about something a little less AP centric and a little more focused on actual utility? That’s what we got with this patch.

The new Utility tree is designed for support characters, scouts, and any champion that relies on a lot of cooldown reduction. I haven’t seen the occasion to go for the bonus gold masteries, but I rarely play support. You’ll notice the experience gain has been moved up several tiers. As a result, jungling has been granted more XP, which has given junglers some very quick clear times.

Of the three new trees, Utility is probably the one I will use least. Don’t get me wrong, it has awesome skills, especially if you play support or a support jungler like Nunu. For those characters, I could honestly see dumping all 30 points into this tree. I know it’s a little strange, but the talents are so good. The one exception I might make is the 5 percent ward radius. I haven’t tried it in game, but 5 percent seems like a pretty weak boost.

Support players, how have you liked the Utility tree? Check back soon for the Defense update.

The offense tree was never really one of my favorites. There were some decent skills in there, but I felt like I had a lot of wasted points for most of the AD champions in the game. There were also some weird AP talents scattered among the higher levels of the offense tree, points that I pretty much never used. With yesterday’s patch that has changed and changed significantly. The new offense tree is designed for anyone who wants to pump out huge damage, regardless of the damage type they deal.

Each of the tiers of the Offense tree has options for both ability power and attack damage and the skills basically mirror one another. The 9-point talents grant penetration in the different damage types, which allows us to build 21 in another tree if necessary. Honestly, though, I think Offense will be my new tree of choice. The top talent grants some extra execute damage and there are little goodies along the way like extra damage to towers, bonus ability power, and extra crit damage. It’s an excellent tree for anyone who likes to blow up a target.

As a couple of you have mentioned, the Offense tree is much better optimized for jungling, which could present a couple problems. With junglers getting faster thanks to better mastery options, they may spend more time working on turrets which, with the Demolitionist mastery, could mean towers go down even earlier in the game. As I’ve said before, that’s not really good for gameplay.

Check back soon for the Defensive and Utility tree writeups.