General Changes to Objectives for Mid-season

Hey everybody,

Hopefully you’ve had the chance to check out our Dragon and Mage changes for mid-season. We’ve got a bunch of other objective changes to Summoner’s Rift going in the patch, and I wanted to share those + context with ya’ll and take your questions and feedback!

Everything is subject to tuning and future iteration, of course.

Rift Herald We’re pushing to make Rift Herald a more unique and meaningful objective for those looking to dominate the top half of the map. This new Rift Herald should be a more contestable objective with a clearer purpose: long-term selfish power for one team member - especially a lone-wolf or split push character.

• Rift Herald now spawns at 6 minutes and never respawns
• Rift Herald’s stats significantly increased (should be much harder to solo)
• Doom’s Eve removed and replaced with a unique Superbuff:
• Lasts 20 minutes and persists through death
• While alone, you gain some damage reduced vs. champions and build Corruption stacks
• At 100 stacks, your next attack discharges all Corruption to deal bonus magic damage (works on almost anything, including minions and towers; damage is reduced for ranged attacks)
• Corruption stack rate and discharge damage scale with champion level

Hopefully this excites top laners, junglers, and some mids. We’re keeping an eye on it to ensure it’s powerful, but also contestable and not too game-ending.

Red and Blue Buffs

Late-game, Red and Blue buff have been somewhat ignorable these days. We’re buffing and compressing their power in the mid-late game to make them more appreciable objectives to leverage or steal, especially in games that are in a standstill and need things to fight over and create power windows.

• Red Buff
• Burn now applies a damage tick immediately on apply or reapply (stronger attack-speed scaling); damage-per-tick reduced to compensate
• Health regen now scales steeply with champ level but turns off when in combat with champions or epic monsters (currently triples at level 6 and again at level 11!)
• Blue Buff
• AP per level replaced with +15% total Ability Power (like Rabadon’s Deathcap effect)
• Mana regen based on max Mana doubled (flat regen unchanged)
• Buff Durations
• Red and Blue will last the same duration on your first clear, but all Red and Blue buffs after that will have a 90-second duration instead of 120

When you’re looking to make a play in mid-late game, buff camps should be juicier targets now, especially if you can steal them from the enemy’s side of the map!

Camp Respawn Timers

In order to facilitate more coordinated and contested objective play at all skill levels, we’re making a some UI changes. This also has the benefit of reducing timekeeping and chat-typing work.

• When a camp that has a timer (Red, Blue, Dragon, Baron, Rift Herald) has less than 60 seconds to spawn, its timer is revealed to both teams at that time (regardless of their vision of the camp), and an “about to spawn” icon appears in the minimap simultaneously (will replace regular camp icon if you still haven’t seen the cleared camp by the time its respawn has 60 seconds left)
• To clarify, if you never have vision of enemy jungle, you won't see any changes for the first 4 minutes after their camp dies. But at 60 seconds remaining to respawn, you will get new information over live.
• The respawn icon starts dull at 60 seconds to spawn and becomes bright at 20 seconds

We generally like seeing more fights around objectives, and promoting objective awareness like this can help a lot. After getting used to the new UI, rallying your team around a Dragon spawn or even a buff steal can often be done with a simple ping instead of having to type things out in chat.

Turrets

Turrets have several changes in store. Overall, we want them to be more defendable places to stand your ground, reduce their takedown reward compared to other objectives, clean up some of their mechanics, and rebudget their defenses so things other than marksmen basic attacks can contribute more to turret takedowns.

• Turret Damage Ramp
• Inner and Outer turrets more quickly ramp up their damage when attacking champions, and they maintain full damage when switching targets.
• Inner and Outer turrets only take 4 shots to ramp up to full damage (instead of 5).
• Turret Takedown Rewards
• Outer turret total gold reward reduced, though local gold reward is increased (local gold 220 -> 300, global gold 125 -> 100)
• Inner turret gold rewards reduced (local gold 250 -> 175, global gold 150 -> 125) and XP reward removed
• Inhibitor turret local gold reward increased (0 -> 50)
• AP Damage Conversion
• When your attacks trigger AP damage conversion (occurs when attacking a turret while your AP is more than double your bonus AD), the converted damage is now magic instead of physical
• Turret Stats
• Base Armor/MR increased (from 0 to 40), Base Health decreased (from 4000 to 3300)
• Turrets are now subject to penetration (generally tankier than Live unless you have about 20 penetration or have a true damage proc; overall a small nerf to marksmen damage, but a buff to some mages and assassins)
• Reinforced Armor converted from 200 Armor/MR to 66.67% damage reduction

Overall, diving and taking turrets should be less of a freebie than what we’ve seen recently.

Let’s hear your thoughts!