“Fair to say it has overcorrected to damage” - League of Legends developers looking to introduce nerfs to all damage sources

In the coming months, League of Legends will be seeing a significant amount of balance changes as Riot Games will be looking to tone down damage numbers in the game. All sources of damage will be hit in future updates, even the primary ones, and the developers will look to tone down burst and allow the squishier champions to survive longer.

The main aim of the nerfs will be to make team fights lengthier and allow more room for teams to outplay enemies who are ahead and not just instantly get deleted by a single round of combos as soon as the fight begins.

During preseason 12 last year, Riot Games had talked in length about the sort of updates that they will be looking to bring to League of Legends, especially toning down the damage output from all sources in the game.

In a recent Reddit post, Riot Games designer RiotAxes reiterated some of the changes that the developers are looking into for the coming months.

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All damage sources will be receiving a nerf in League of Legends

In the Reddit thread, RiotAxes pointed out that for future updates in League of Legends, there will be greater emphasis on slowing down fights and will allow encounters to be a bit longer. Squirmishes in Season 11 and Season 12 often got over rather quickly with a burst champion coming in on-shotting the carry and going out.

This is what the developers would like to tone down in future updates:

“We believe League of Legends is best when it is on average be fast-paced and exciting, but yeah, I think it would be fair to say it has overcorrected towards damage, which is hitting away at clarity ("I can tell what just killed me" / "I can tell what I should have done differently") and skill expression ("That assassin/mage hit their whole kit, so they earned the kill").”

Later in the thread, RiotAxes even addressed some of the community's concerns about mage supports in the game.

There have been moments in solo-queue when mage support has been doing a lot more damage in the game than the primary carries, and the League of Legends community was quite curious to know if Riot will be looking to tone them down as well once the damage nerf hits.

Riot Axes replied by commenting that while picks like Lux, brand, and Zyra have been topping the damage charts in solo-queue:

“Allowing players to pick damage oriented supports and get enough gold to really scale with them was a major part of the changes that ultimately solved support autofill problems, and we'd be hesitant to go back on those; we'd prefer to tune durability around the reality that many teams swap a defensive character (support or tank) for a damage-dealing one and balance the two approaches against each other.”

With more seasons under its belt, League of Legends has progressively become a much faster-paced game than it was in the initial season. With so many damage sources in the game, late-game carries have often had a hard time holding their own in the MOBA, and this has allowed many champions to fall out of meta in both pro-play and standard matchmaking.

With the upcoming damage nerfs, the developers would like to introduce more competitive health in the game and make more champions viable in the ever-changing meta.

Riot Games is yet to provide any details on the exact nature of changes that they will be looking to bring in. However, they will provide additional information on it in the coming weeks.