League of Legends

Hello there, Steemit community!

After the Worlds final match between the two powerhouse South Korean teams (Samsung Galaxy (SSG) vs South Korean Telecom 1 (SKT T1)) ended in an 3-0 upset, in favor of SSG, it dawned the new season of League of Legends - and with a new season, comes many new adaptations to the game. 

There were many small adjustments made to every champion, ranging from statistic changes to complete ability conversions, but I will focus on the major changes in the game. You can find the link to the patch notes here.

Rune Changes

Perhaps one of the biggest changes that affects game-play is the Rune overhaul. 

This is what the old rune page looked like. Since the game has launched, the rune page system has remained constant, with some minor adjustments. TL;DR, these runes had small stat boosts that would accompany a mastery page, which was composed of skills and small abilities (as well as some stat changes as well). The red runes were offensive stats (attack damage, Armour penetration, ETC.), yellow represented health/gold, blue was for magic damage/resistances or mana regen, and finally, the larger quintessences could be any of these stats, but were much larger boosts.

In this new season, there are some clear changes. The main one being that there are now 5 trees of skill to go down: Precision, Domination, Sorcery, Resolve and Inspiration. It is clear to me that the old rune and mastery page has almost fused together, to provide skills and stat boosts. Within these categories are 3 big skills to pick from (as shown below)

In this resolve tree, this person has picked "Grasp Of The Undying" as the major skill, which will help to deal damage to tanky champions. Underneath this, are the smaller roots of the tree. Here, the player has gone with predominantly more defensive and "tanky" skills to help their survivability.

On the right hand side, a secondary tree is chosen, which is Inspiration . The benefits are smaller from this particular tree, but add small benefits for the player. Currently, most people are still experimenting with what runes are best for each champion, but Riot have added some preset rune pages for you to try out.

If you would like a deeper insight to the benefit of each individual rune, click here.

Level up "beyond 30"

This is a Quality of life change where, before this change, players were limited to level 30 as their max level. Riot have decided to make this level limit infinite and the player is rewarded with loot every time they level up, making leveling up feel more worthwhile.

IP -> Blue essence changes

IP (influence points) were the currency that was earned from playing games and meant that you could purchase new champions, rune pages and (some) chroma packs. Blue essence was another individual currency that was introduced with the hextech looting update (March 2016) which was earned sometimes by opening hextech chests and could be used to also unlock champions (by enchanting champion shards). After the update, IP and blue essence have been merged, meaning that all items obtainable in the shop through IP have been converted to blue essence. However, there has been some controversy with Riot making it currently unable to earn blue essence in game!

Conclusion

Overall, in my opinion, I am very happy with the new changes as it encourages different playstyles and more of a personal touch with the new rune system and the level beyond 30 rewards players who come back, time and time again. One thing that I hope to change is this problem with no blue essence being earned from games as it makes it really had for players, especially newer ones, to progress and earn more champions.

Thank you so much for reading my first ever League of Legends post, I'm always grateful to all who take interest in my posts!

Riyad/Rags