It’s no secret that Riot Games likes to introduce chaos into the LoL World Championship with a meta shifting and tournament defining patch. The Juggernaut meta or the oppressive introduction of Mordekaiser have taken over the international competition in the past thanks to previous patches. The game’s lead designer Jeevun Sidhu laid out the reasoning behind previous and current Worlds patch changes on Twitter.
“Summoner’s Rift Team is trying some new tactic for the patches leading up to League’s World Championship,” Sidhu said in the tweet. “Spoilers: it’s 3 pages of Corki buffs.”
For this next upcoming Worlds, Jag and the team have introduced three new goals for the 2021 international tournament’s meta:
- Not breaking solo queue
- No changes that are likely to be changed back in the future
- Look for opportunities to make more options in the professional meta
Summoner's Rift Team's is trying some new tactics for the patches leading up to League's World Championship. Read up here!
spoilers: it's 3 pages of Corki buffs. pic.twitter.com/D18kKHE5Tz
— Jeevun Sidhu (@JeevunSidhu) August 26, 2021
LoL Worlds patch champion diversity
One of the tactics to achieves those goals, according to Jag, is diversifying pro champion viability. The team will look at champions with high pick and ban rates, around over 80%, and attempt to lower that number through changes. Conversely they are also trying to increase the presence of champions on the periphery, up to 15% pick and ban rate. Champion diversity also comes in the form of role flexibility, allowing one champion to move into mid or jungle like Rumble in the 2021 Mid-Season Invitational.
Small and big pushes
Jag further explained how they plan to get to those numbers. He examined the common suspects, like Lillia – or the infamous Corki changes, and how they beef them up in time for Worlds. In his specific example, Jag outlines a small buff to Lillia that the team has been tinkering with:
- Base attack speed and ratio: .625 to .640
- Base health regen: 1.5 to 1.1
- Percentage large monster healing: 18-94 to 24-101
Then there are the bigger pushes towards viability, like creating new elements – Darius in the Juggernaut meta and reworked Mordekaiser come to mind – that give pros a chance to pick the champion. A change that Jag teased the team was looking at was adding an execute onto Draven’s ultimate. This would give Whirling Death an execute equal to the amount of League of Draven stacks he may accrued over the game.
Lastly, these changes will not all come in one big patch. The Worlds meta will be workshopped over two different patches, Patch 11.18 and Patch 11.19. This allows Riot to go back and revert anything they deem to meta-breaking or powerful, hopefully.
