"I can't believe that item made it through": League of Legends fans are quite unhappy with Heartsteel, the brand new mythic item

Heartsteel is a brand new mythic item that was added to League of Legends along with the pre-season 2023 update. It has turned out to be excessively over-tuned and fans are not happy about it.

This item is designed to be used on tanks. However, in its current state, it can be utilized by everyone, which in turn leads to an unpleasant experience amongst the majority of the player base.

ADCs quite often dismiss their regular builds and rush Heartsteel within matches to maximize their damage output. This has led to an outcry within the community as they want Riot Games to fix the new mythic item as soon as possible before the official release of Season 13 in January 2023.

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Heartsteel has been the go-to item in the ARAM game mode in League of Legends

Before proceeding further, League of Legends fans will be willing to find out on why Heartsteel is being considered broken. As it happens, this item provides 20 ability haste, 800 health, and 200% base health regeneration, which is quite massive.

Apart from that, its passive allows a champion to generate stacks when within 700 units of an enemy, each of which can generate up to a total of three times. Once these stacks have been gathered, the next basic attack by the champion will be empowered and hence deal 125 (+6% maximum health) bonus damage.

It will also grant permanent bonus health to the bearer equal to 12.5 (+0.6% maximum health) with a mere 30-seconds cooldown. In short, if a champion is consistently surrounded by three enemies, the former will be able to consistently proc the bonus damage.

Therefore, it is understandable why the item is considered excessively broken, especially in the All Random All Mid (ARAM) game mode of League of Legends, where the core rules of the game remain the same (breaking the nexus), although the entire match takes place within the mid lane.

In the ARAM game mode, players consistently fight and hence, are always surrounded by at least two or more enemies. Therefore, the damage output of every champion building this item enhances exponentially.

Hypermobile champions such as Lucian and Akali are the ones who benefit the most as they have the ability to dive behind enemy lines and then dash back to safety. As such, they can generate stacks from Heartsteel's passive at a rapid rate.

Once these stacks are combined with their base damage, it leads to a situation that the receiving side does not enjoy at all. The worst part of all this is that these hypermobile champions can keep doing this on a consistent basis throughout the game.

In any case, this is not the first instance where Riot Games has released an item that is broken. Items like Deathfire Grasp and Ranger's Trailblazer were so overpowered that they had to be permanently deleted for the sake of maintaining peace.

It is impossible to predict whether Heartsteel will follow the same route in League of Legends. However, this item will definitely need a lot of fine-tuning before League of Legends Season 13 officially begins in January 2023.