League of Legends’ Arena returned with Patch 14.9, and Riot Games will make huge balancing changes in the next update, 14.10.
According to lead gameplay designer Matt “Riot Phroxzon” Leung-Harrison’s post on X (previously known as Twitter) from May 7, Patch 14.10 will make Prismatic Anvils more “in the players’ favor, but not overly so,” trim down Jhin’s missile speed, tweak the MMR system, and increase the time between revives. On top of that, Patch 14.10 will introduce a ton of balancing changes to champions, augments, and items to avoid the meta becoming stale.
Even though Riot Phroxzon listed better augment tailoring as minor change, I think this will have a substantial impact on gameplay. It will allow specific items and augments to appear more often if you meet some criteria. Essentially, you’ll have more control over your builds and won’t be as RNG-dependent as before.
Riot is also experimenting with blast cone changes on the Koi Pond map, but nothing is set in stone. Koi Pond should stay in, more or less, the same state while Arena is active (this time around).
In the end, Riot wants to ensure Arena has “has long term replayability” and that maps remain remain unique.
“There needs to be enough variance to ensure the mode has long term replayability, this includes making sure that maps play out differently from each other, emphasize different comp strengths and weaknesses, you can high roll and low roll items and augments and sometimes these are going to be frustrating when you low roll, in the same way that sometimes playing against Yasuo as Lux is frustrating,” the post reads.
Riot is aiming to keep the game mode dynamic, fresh, and exciting, but that comes at a cost of League feeling frustrating at times. All these changes coming in Patch 14.10 are a welcome sight and will make the game less RNG-dependent, which can only be a good thing.
