Ah, light fighters. Packing damage and tankiness in equal measure, League of Legends champions like Lee Sin, Jarvan IV, and Olaf can whittle away at your health pool, while being deceptively hard to kill. However, developer Riot Games reckons the items which empower them are doing both of these things a bit too well – a sentiment we’re sure some within the community share – and is taking measures to rebalance their power.
On Monday, Riot’s ‘Phlox’ tweeted out that the changes would make the items “less health skewed”. These changes are intended to make champions like those mentioned above less tanky, with slight buffs to flat damage stats here and there to bolster their offensive capabilities.
“When a light fighter can act as a pseudo-frontliner and kill you they can be kinda messed up,” Phlox explains in yesterday’s follow-up tweets. “They’re low-risk, high-reward, [and are] able to kill you without risking death themselves.”
Phlox also hopes the other half of the broader Fighter class, Juggernauts, will hopefully feel more distinct from light fighters after the changes. Whereas light fighters should be less durable, with higher damage, the dev says champions like Aatrox, Darius, and Sett should feel like “slow meatballs of death.”
12.3 with content! -Pyke +Akshan +Brand
There'll be a QGT on this later in the week, but the short of the fighter changes is that we're aiming to shift light fighters toward lower-durability itemization. We'll be watching the fallout closely, it's 100% a disruptive change.
1/3 pic.twitter.com/IaPXkpW5Ks
— Phlox (@RiotPhlox) January 25, 2022
Riot is set to monitor the changes and make tweaks where necessary over the coming patches, so we’ll be keen to see how they not only shake up the League of Legends champion tier list, but the overarching meta as well.