It took less than a week for Riot to see that the minion changes do not directly accomplish the goals of ending games more quickly. I don’t want to bag on them too much – there’s no way they can match the thousands and thousands of player hours logged on patch day in playtesting – but still, this should have been pretty obvious. It’s good to know that there is already some brainstorming going on for a fix. Morello dropped by the forums today to lay some knowledge on us.
Basically, minions are too strong, too early, allowing strong pushers like Master Yi, Sivir, or TF to painfully exploit exposed lanes. Granted, the reduced respawn timers actually help with that (even if they’re otherwise bad for the game), but with a well-timed teleport, it’s possible to rock your way down the lane in a very short period of time.
The next patch will move the additional cannon minions to the 40-45 minute range, up from 20, and reducing the cannon minion resistances a bit. While I think the changes will likely be good, I really don’t want this to turn into a trial and error situation. While I think it’s cool that Riot is trying different things to manage pacing, I can’t help but wonder if minions are really the solution. What about the fact that average champion durability on release has gone way up in the past several months? If it takes too long to kill champions at towers, the game becomes more and more defensive as the tower advantage is what really decides the outcome of a fight.
The fact that Riot is turning to minions makes me wonder what the development team thinks about the current field of champions. Do they like where the metagame is at? For now, all signs point to yes. Personally, I think the tanky meta has more than run its course, but maybe that’s just me.
