League of Legends 2024 season details: Galeforce removal, Mythic items reworked
2023-09-15 12:26:00Riot Games has revealed the reasons behind removing Mythic items from League of Legends. To solve the problems, the authors would need to add a dozen more Mythic items. At the same time, such artefacts impose restrictions on the new champion design. Balance designer Matt "Phroxzon" Leung-Harrison explained why the items were unbalanced and how they plan to continue.
While the Mythic item system works reasonably well for some classes like assassins, for other classes with more divergent needs, it’s been difficult to satisfy all of the users across each of the subclasses.
While theoretically, we could solve the Mythic needs of these champions by creating ~10 Mythics split across each of the subclasses of fighter, every item we add to the Mythic pool adds an additional item’s worth of complexity to the game. There is a maximum number of items that League can have before it gets too complicated, and for every Mythic item that we add, an item slot is taken up, and there is one less in the Legendary item pool.
In the new season, Galeforce will definitely disappear from the game, and other Mythics will lose some of their power, downgraded to Legendary items.
Having only one Mythic item has had a notable benefit for game balancing. This is because we can make items strong and satisfying without fear of them being stacked, but after seeing this in practice, we don’t think this benefit alone justifies all the costs that we’re paying for when it comes to game complexity and satisfying all champions with Mythic items. As a result, we intend to reduce the power of items that were previously Mythic when converting them to Legendary, rather than bring the power of Legendaries up to where Mythics are today. This means that some of the more kit-warping items like Galeforce will be removed, but some legacy exceptions like Zhonya’s Hourglass that were present in the old item system will stay.
As we move to a world where most items will be stackable again, we will need to reduce the power level of items generally, so that stacking them doesn’t become too powerful.
Riot Games announced the removal of Mythic items at the end of August. The developers said the items were only good for half of the game's champions. New items will appear on the test server on November 20, 2023. Their release will take place in January 2024.
