Riot Outlines Balance Strategy For League of Legends Throughout 2023

Fahim Shahriar
By Fahim Shahriar
3 Min Read
Image Credit: Riot Games

Riot recently shared its balance strategy for the rest of the year.

The balance of the game has been a major source of dispute among the League of Legends community ever since they released the Preseason 2023 patch. The Preseason 2023 patch was one of the most underwhelming patches in recent memory. It brought many new items, balance changes, and new Jungle pets, but it wasn’t really impactful. As a result, Riot published Patch 13.1B, which included more changes.

Also, in the middle of May, Riot released the Mid-Season patch, which was one of the most significant patches of the year. It included even more improvements, such as new Assassin and Marksmen items, turret changes, and so on. The patch also addressed many of the issues that arose during the Preseason and enhanced several game elements.

Even with these improvements, some fundamental problems still remained in the game. Riot has recently addressed these issues and shared its balance strategy for the rest of the year.

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Riot’s Balance Strategy for 2023

Riot has not always been open about its balancing method. They often publish their balancing plans a week or two before they are deployed to live servers. Now it seems Riot has changed its approach and released its balance strategy for the latter half of the year.

Recently the lead designer for League of Legends, Matt “Riot Phroxzon” Leung-Harrison, shared Riot balancing plans for the year. According to him, Riot wants to focus on four major changes. These changes are,

  • Continue buffing weak Top Laners.
  • Nerf strong champion in other roles.
  • Continue nerfing Jungle
  • Take a look at early snowballing.

The first changes are self-explanatory; Riot will be buffing weak top laners. For a long time, the top lane meta, particularly the Professional Play meta, has been relatively stagnant. As a result, Riot will enhance the weaker champions in order to keep them in line with the meta champions.

In addition, Riot will be nerfing the stronger champion of other roles. Instead of buffing the weaker champion, Riot is looking to nerf the stronger champions of other roles. Part of it is because ADC and Jungle have too much of an influence in games, and Riot wants to tackle that issue.

They are also nerfing the Jungle role, particularly its early game influence. This goes hand in hand with the 4th point, as early game snowballing starts from a jungler’s influence. Junglers have had too much influence, and recent changes have shown what Riot intends to do.

In hindsight, it seems Riot intends to follow that plan, and we will have to see how that goes.

By Fahim Shahriar League of Legends Writer
Shahriar is a League of Legends writer at GameRiv. He enjoys playing Video Games, watching Anime, and browsing the internet for outdated memes.