League of Legends will be introducing more counterplay to burst damage in season 12

Riot Games will be looking to introduce a significant amount of changes to League of Legends in season 12 to counter burst damage in the game.

As time passed, the MOBA had started introducing characters in the game whose kit came with a lot of innate burst damage and can 100 to 0 the squishier champions from very early on in a match.

This is one of the reasons why picks like Viego, Gwen, and Vex got so much playtime in season 11. There wasn’t much counterplay to what these champions brought to the Rift.

Hence, to counter burst, the League of Legends developers will be adding significant tweaks to the game to help squishier champions come back in the meta.

In a recent developers blog, Riot Games opened up about some of their plans for the 2022 road map and what they have in store for players in the new season.

A counter to burst heavy champions was one of the major talking points in the blog, and it is something that the League of Legends developers will be looking to work with early on in the year.

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Burst damage might get a nerf in League of Legends season 12

In the developers blog, Riot Games states that they are,

“Analyzing how and when high bursts of damage happen and examining their effects on gameplay. We want to keep the game exciting with high stakes decision-making, but we also want to ensure that fights are reasonably understandable and counterplay is still possible. We're still very early in this investigation, but our current belief is that burst kills happen too quickly and too often.”

The blog went on to state some of the various ways that the League of Legends developers will be looking to introduce the burst counters in the game.

“One option we're considering is to reduce damage output under at least a few conditions, most likely in mid-late game against very low defense champions. That's not to say we're deleting assassins or anything—it's a touchy area, and that's why we're taking our time investigating the data. As a friendly reminder, we're not guaranteeing to ship anything in this space yet. Even if we do, the goal isn't to ensure you can never get one-shotted, force a “tank meta”, or any other hyperbolic ideas.”

While nerfing the overall burst damage output is one area that Riot Games is looking in, they are not yet certain which direction they will look to take for the tweak. However, they will provide more information on it when League of Legends season 12 hits.