Patch 6.4 for League of Legends provides a holistic reduction to movement speed

I don’t know why, but I’m a sucker for improved movement speed. When it comes to choosing loot in Diablo III for example, I often forego damage or resistance just so I can run around a teeny bit quicker.

I have the same approach when it comes to MOBAs. I love to stack items that let me zoom around faster, and there’s no better game to do that than in League of Legends. Unfortunately though, Riot now feel that players are stacking up movement speed just a little too quickly, and as a result, have addressed the problem with patch 6.4. It’s not a huge nerf mind you, but it’s something!

That’s not all that’s changed however. Riot like to mix things up with each update, and as expected, have dabbled with quite a few things in patch 6.4. Here’s an overview:

“You might notice some champions like Ryze and Kog’Maw receiving buffs or nerfs despite having just gotten the opposite the patch before. What gives? Why not just revert the changes?

If our goal was only to make champions stronger or weaker, reverts (or partial reverts, like Zed’s changes in 6.3) are a reasonable approach. However, when we take on balance work for a champion, the changes that make it to the patch notes often have more than one goal in mind. For example, if our goal was ‘make X champion stronger and healthier’ but the character became stronger and more frustrating, we’d prefer to solve the newly-created frustration than simply reverting everything. For us, game balance is an ongoing journey – meaning that at any given moment, you may be seeing a snapshot of an ongoing, iterative investigation.

So what snapshots do we have today? We’ve got heaps of changes to individual marksmen, some nerfs to top-tier pro play outliers, and a holistic reduction of movement speed. Zooming around the rift is cool and all, but the abundance of bonus movement speed is skewing the early game into a sonic-speed arms-race of who can stack it more, faster. We’ll continue to monitor the game’s mobility creep over the next few patches, but this is our first push toward solving what could become a larger problem.”

As always, if reading ain’t your thing, you can catch all the important stuff in just 5 minutes thanks to Blakinola. Here’s his latest TL;DR video…

Dammit Riot, my movement speed! How can I go on with 5 less on Boots of Swiftness? BRB CRYING.

Last Updated: February 25, 2016