Preseason 2023 Preview

With the end of the year rapidly approaching, Riot has announced their plans for Preseason 2023. Though the changes are primarily focused on making the jungle more accessible to players, there are other updates for the entire map. Here are some of the biggest changes hitting the Rift in preseason.

Pokemon x League of Legends

At the beginning of games, junglers can purchase eggs that will become empowered over the course of the game. These eggs will eventually hatch to grant various buffs to the jungler, such as increased movement speed, a shield, or slows and bonus damage on attacks.

Considering these pets provide clear buffs to junglers, it will be interesting to see how Riot balances the jungle based on the strength of these pets. Will the current roster of junglers have some of their base stats nerfed, so that the pet bonuses don't make junglers overpowered?

Making The Jungle Accessible

It's undeniable that jungling is the most difficult role to get into; you aren't playing in a lane, have a ton of options on how you move around the map, and your opponent is often hidden on the map. One of the primary objectives for Preseason is to make the jungle more accesible for new and autofilled players.

Therefore, a recommended clear path will be provided for every champion based on the paths used by the high elo playerbase. In addition, jungle camps will now have leash range indicators to convey how far they can be taken before they reset. The distance camps can be pulled will also be decreased.

Chemtech Drakes Return

After being universally hated by players and pros alike, the Chemtech Drake was removed earlier this year. It has been completely overhauled, and will (thankfully) be returning in a much healthier state.

Each drake now grants a small amount of tenacity and heal/shield strength, and the soul grants bonus damage when you're low health. The Chemtech Rift will now mutate the jungle plants to upgrade their effects:

• Blast Cone's blast radius will be doubled
• Honeyfruits will no longer slow champions when consumed and will grant a small shield
• Scryer's Bloom will grant vision around the plant and shoot a cone opposite of the direction it was hit, granting movement speed towards revealed enemy champions and reducing wards revealed to 1 health

These upgraded jungle plants will provide players with a ton of outplay potential, particularly with the vision control from the Scryer's Bloom. If used effectively, you can spot out a ton more enemies and completely nullify their vision.

Vision

Lastly, one of the most controversial preseason updates is a change to vision. If you ping an enemy ward that you see them place within the last 10 seconds, a perfectly accurate ward timer will appear until the ward is destroyed.

This is a huge change to the vision game, as it will provide teams with a ton of information about the enemy's vision control. Now you can know exactly where enemies placed vision and its duration, informing your team when it's safe to play around that area.

It will now be more important than ever to use the correct 'enemy ward' ping in order to proc this timer, and players will be rewarded for using it effectively. However, is it providing too much information from something that's so easy to do?

Vision control is one of the most intricate yet important aspects of League, and making it easier is undoubtedly reducing the game's skill ceiling. This skill ceiling is the reason why League is such a compelling experience, and reducing it can be very harmful to the overall state of the game.

Summary

There are more preseason changes – including new Mythics and an expanded ping wheel – so be sure to check out Riot's blog for more information.

Although these changes are making the game more accesible to a wider playerbase, will it come at the cost of making the game too easy?