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2020 sees the rise of the elements in League of Legends as the primary magic of life changes the very rift itself. We spoke to Brandon "Mash" Phan and Leo "Babip" Romer about what they think.
League of Legends turned 10 and announced a wide array of changes for the game. Chief among them — the changes which drew the most gasps at the viewing event I attended — were the ways Riot is changing the map for Season 10.
The biggest change is to the Elemental Drakes, as they change the landscape of Summoner's Rift and give teams elemental buffs and powerful Dragon Souls. As Babip pointed out, Drakes were already pretty important.
"The current meta is already about taking dragons and early team fighting around [the dragon pit]," Babip explained. "With the new map enacting changes to the dragon you will probably see that even more so. I think the water dragon is interesting specifically for some champions such as Nidalee, Rengar because more brush is just overall very good for those types of champions."
If the Ocean Drake is the third to spawn, existing brush expands and fresh brush will grow around the map — it's a ganker's dream scenario. It also provides plenty of health regeneration opportunities. You can see the other buffs in the official patch notes.
"I think having raw power from [the Infernal Drake] is just the obvious choice for a buff," Mash said of the Drakes. "As for the souls, the cloud dragon one is a team-wide Spear of Sojin, so it can turn fights heavily or increase your DPS heavily (Ezreal, for example, comes to mind along with Jax/Renekton wanting that Spear of Sojin dragon buff implemented since it's being removed as an item). The drop everything dragon will definitely be Elder, because having that execution buff when you drop someone below a certain hp percentage is pretty OP."
The Drakes getting buffed further steers the advantage away from top lane, an issue Riot clearly saw coming. Mash thinks what Riot has done is big enough to matter.
"Overall there will be less emphasize on controlling botside, since Herald spawns earlier," Mash explained. "For the alcoves, it will bring a different want of playing the side lanes out and even cheeky level one strategies. I'm not sure what the values are for the season 10 dragons, but having one Herald just swings a match up in any lane, especially if you manage to get all the plates or even first tower. Also, now you can get two [Rift Heraldsa]. So you can snowball top, then bleed it to mid or bot lane."
The alcoves are a huge deal — hidey-holes for gankers that will cause a great deal of added paranoia to every matchup.
You now have to care about the threat of someone ganking or shadowing through the alcove," Mash detailed. "You should be more thoughtful of maintaining control of the alcove now. The alcoves are similar to the Twisted Treeline map (3v3) and it makes laning a lot more different now. For bot lane controlling two bushes was simple, now you have to account for another one and the mini cave. Top lane is a whole different situation. Junglers will have a lot of creative gank pathing with the alcoves being implemented into the game."
"The sidelane alcoves not only add more opportunity to outplay your opponent 1v1 but also, unfortunately, allow the jungler a new way to gank sidelanes," added Babip.
The Jungle itself is changing too with new pathing and XP tuning, giving players a significant amount of choice as they decide what will best help their team. Babip's work in the Jungle helped send Mammoth to Worlds this year, and it seems like the changes will let him flex his creativity.
"Change for the most part is good for the game, it allows players to innovate new strategies or champion picks," Babip explained. "I would just hope they do not dumb down the game and keep certain aspects of the game that require a lot of practice — for example timing camps and counter-jungling."
We'll have to wait and see how it plays out on the top end, because those numbers are yet to be crunched.
There are oodles of changes coming in the Preseason as Riot wildly changes things up in celebration of their 10th birthday. And while they were announcing things for their 10th anniversary, they finally justified that plural s in Riot games. As a goof, we asked Mash and Babip what game they'd switch to if they were forced to make a change.
"Most likely the FPS or RPG game, I'm not much of a card game player," Babip said. The FPS is operating under the working title of "Project A", and it looks pretty slick — it's promising some big things. The RPG is the extremely mysterious Project F — and we know very little about it at this time.
"I do enjoy playing TFT after I've played numerous hours of the rift," Mash said. "The shooting game looks pretty sick, but I am really bad at FPS."
TFT is, of course, Team Fight Tactics, Riot's version of an Auto-Battler, the genre which has dominated in 2019. TFT is heading to mobile phones in early 2020, a move that will surely make it even more wildly popular.
It's been an awesome 10 years for League of Legends, and it's clear that Riot is keen to make sure the next 10 are awesome too — starting right from 2020. And for Babip and Mash, I'm sure 2020 will be an epic year as well.
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