My Honest Initial Thoughts of Preseason
Ah, the preseason. Always filled with big changes, for better or for worse. It's the time of year where League gets the most dynamic changes, and feedback here is crucial. So I'm going to be giving my honest thoughts on the current state of the game: what's good, what's bad, and what I think should change. Please note that this is intended to be a constructive post, so feel free to add your thoughts on things.
I'll start with the marksman changes. For the most part, I think that the marksman changes are really cool. Personally, I'm not a huge fan of the marksman playstyle, but I think Riot did a pretty good job on making each marksman more unique. There are now really good reasons to pick different ADCs depending on team comps. This adds a lot of diversity to champ select and games, which is great. I, like many other people, was getting bored of seeing Jinx and Vayne in almost every game. Now there are good reasons to pick other ADCs, and that is really good. However, MF and Graves seem to be a bit on the strong side currently, and should probably get toned down a bit.
As far as the item changes go, I think they are great. Gone are the days of Infinity Edge being the go-to first buy for most ADCs. There is actually a good reason to get other items. For example, Essence Reaver is finally a viable first item on some ADCs! There are actual, meaningful decisions to make when buying items now, which is great. This is just another awesome way to add diversity to the game. The jungle, however, I think had some pretty rough changes. For one, the basic jungle items are more expensive, possibly even too expensive. Machete got nerfed for most champions, making it difficult for some champions to clear despite the nerfs to jungle monsters. I think the cost of jungle items should be decreased slightly. 100 gold off of it would probably put them in a better spot early on.
Now it's time for one of the biggest parts of this year's preseason: mastery changes. There are some things I really like about the new masteries, and some things I really don't. The new masteries are a lot simpler, which is good and bad. Overall I'm not a huge fan of having to pick between two masteries at different points. It's a decent idea, but some of them are really useless on a lot of champions, yet you need to pick one in order to get deeper into the tree for another mastery. It just feels like I'm wasting one of my mastery points. Another thing is, I feel like the new masteries heavily favor AD champions. None of the keystones are really that great for mages compared to AD champions. They just don't have a lot to offer to mages, while AD champs can get huge benefits from them.
And let's be real for a second. I love playing Yasuo. I think he is an extremely fun champion, and he used to be my main. But Warlord's Bloodlust is pretty stupid in its current state. It has made Yasuo quite a bit too strong, I think. However, I think the way to go about this issue is not nerfing Yasuo himself. I think Warlord's Bloodlust needs to be changed. 15% is too much, and Yasuo is not even the only issue here. ADCs getting 15% lifesteal on crit is insane too, especially since lifesteal is a lot easier to come by now. I think Warlord's Bloodlust should either be reduced to about 10% or scale with level. I think that would be a way to balance it out a bit.
And now, my thoughts on the game overall. The game is so much faster now, and way, WAY more snowbally. Possibly even too snowbally. I will say that I actually like the faster paced games. So far they have been a lot more fun. However, like I said, it might be a bit too snowbally, so I think that should probably be changed a little. Marksman are really strong right now as well, which was to be expected. While for the most part, they seem to be in a decent spot, I think there could probably be some changes to tone down their power just a tiny bit. Mages, however, seem to be in a pretty bad spot right now. With the changes to early game items and AP items, on top of the masteries not benefitting them that much, mages seem to be pretty weak compared to other roles. I'll need a bit more time to play mages to say for sure, but I think that mages are definitely the weakest role at the moment.
Those are my thoughts on the game so far. Questions or comments? Feel free to leave them! Thanks for reading my thoughts on the preseason so far.