What’s up guys it’s me Jeremy!
We had originally planned to do a video talking about the changes Riot had promised for the
cancelled Divers Rework, but since we’ve talked about a lot of those champions recently,
a lot of the information wasn’t as fresh as we’d like it to be.
Instead, we’ll be talking about cancelled releases as a whole—so any champions from
the Divers rework that we haven’t talked about, and any other big changes that Riot
had planned to make but ended up cancelling.
The first release we want to cover is a mini-rework that was scheduled for Aurelion Sol.
As you can probably tell from his low play-rate—particularly in lower ELOs—Aurelion Sol is a champion
that takes a fair bit of time to get used to.
Players tend to pick him up thanks to his awesome visuals and interesting gameplay,
but they also end up losing a lot of games because of his intimidating skill floor.
Riot had originally planned a mini-rework to address this, with the aim of making him
easier to learn to play, whilst also making his abilities a lot more satisfying to use.
The scope was apparently going to be similar to Shyvana’s mini-rework, but Riot eventually
decided that the direction the mini-rework was headed would end up disappointing expectations
whilst also making a lot of the current Aurelion Sol players unhappy.
As a result, they scrapped the update, but we expect they’ll be keeping an eye on Aurelion
Sol since he’s still in need of improvements that make him more accessible to newer players.
The next topic is the brand new starting items that Riot teased as part of the Runes Reforged
post.
Changing the Runes and Mastery system has pretty far reaching consequences, and one
of those is that you’re simply going to be receiving a lot less raw stats than you
would before the update.
One of Riot’s proposed solutions is to tweak
champion stats directly, but they also discussed adding new starting items since the current
lineup is pretty limited.
Doran’s Dagger is an example of this, featuring 12% attack speed along with some health, life
on-hit and bonus minion damage for only 450 gold.
This could be a pretty lucrative option for some champions that are losing attack speed
from their runes, but Riot Meddler confirmed that it’s actually been scrapped for now.
Apparently Riot spent a lot of time investigating the best way to address the stat shortage,
and decided that working overtime on runes and base state changes were going to be the
best short-term solutions.
He did go on to say that starting items are still something that they want to look at
in the future though, although it would likely be at least a year away.
So, hopefully Riot will make enough changes to champion base stats that we won’t really
need them for now.
Meddler made no promises that we will ever see new starting items, but he did mention
that there’s potential for them to use the starting item space to help break the meta
up a bit; for example offering things like a starting item for mages that allows them
to work in the bot lane as an alternative to playing
a marksman.
While answering questions about melee carries in the bot lane, Meddler mentioned that it’s
less likely for them to succeed because the marksman/support ranged combination makes
it really difficult for a melee carry to survive.
The only way for it to work would be to create a starting item that shrugs off poke damage,
but that would have severe consequences for the rest of the game.
As a result, Riot are spending time looking at mages in the bot lane again since they
are already work more effectively than melee carries.
This implies that Riot had actively tested out some kind of mage carry bot lane item
in the past, and although we haven’t seen it yet, we may see a new iteration sometime
in the close future.
However, since he already mentioned that Riot aren’t really going to think about new starting
items until next year at the earliest, that may mean that the mage carry item doesn’t
show up until then—even if testing went well and they were happy with the end result.
Next up we’ll focus on the aspects of the cancelled Divers rework that we never talked
about previously.
For those who don’t know, Divers were originally intended to be the next class update, following
after the tank update.
Despite having reasonable success with these bulk champion group reworks, Riot decided
the cons were outweighing the pros and decided to cancel the class updates, killing the Divers
Update in the process.
This has left quite a few champions without any confirmed timeline for improvements.
The first example of this is Pantheon.
Unfortunately, his issues are pretty substantial too; he’s got some of the most outdated
visuals in the game, and he’s pretty unpopular thanks to his feast or famine nature.
When Riot cancelled future class updates, they mentioned that they’ll aim to rework
champions one by one, and that probably means Pantheon is a good candidate for a full scale
rework.
Rather than settling for a few minor changes, they’ll be able to update his model, improve
his skins, and turn him into a well-rounded champion that connects more with his theme.
Jarvan is up next, another champion that has definitely been showing his age.
Meddler mentioned that Jarvan’s main issue is a lack of clearly defined strengths and
weaknesses, because without those it’s hard to find the right balance levers to tune him.
One of the biggest complaints about Jarvan that the community has is his Ultimate, Cataclysm,
which is supposedly able to create impassable terrain.
It’s been a long time joke of the League community since almost every champion with
any form of gap closer is able to escape Cataclysm, so hopefully this is something that Riot addresses
with their changes to his gameplay.
It’s also worth considering that Riot does view Jarvan as a Diver rather than a true
Tank, so they may choose to remove his Ultimate entirely in favor of something new.
Still, the Jarvan Mains of the world probably wouldn’t be particularly happy if they removed
Cataclysm, and unfortunately there’s no public information from Riot on the matter
so we have no idea what they intend to do currently.
Meddler also noted that they consider Jarvan to be in a better spot than a lot of other
champions in terms of visuals and gameplay, so since he’s a low priority for a VGU,
it’s more likely that we’ll see a Shyvana-scale mini rework for Jarvan in the future.
The last thing we want to cover is another part of the Divers Update that went up in
smoke with the cancellation—Diver item changes.
Since the design team would usually be thinking about the entire class during a class update,
it’s easy for them to come up with ways to introduce new items or change existing
ones to better suit Riot’s idea for the class.
Since the class updates have now been cancelled, that means the design team isn’t going to
spend that time thinking about items the same way again.
Instead, they’ll likely consider item changes on a case-by-case basis.
This may mean that we never see a big item class update again, such as what happened
with the lethality changes, but Riot may have their own plans for class item updates that
they just haven’t shared with us yet.
Since a class can only be as strong as the items created for it, we imagine they’ll
look to solve a lot of the Diver class’s issues with fixes to items, based on the research
already done while the Divers update was still being considered.