League of Legends preseason ahead of season 12 is finally here, with Patch 11.23 arriving shortly. The new patch will bring new dragons, items, and runes for players to experiment with and hopefully enjoy. From teleportation gates to returning from death, these new changes will introduce some wild new mechanics to League of Legends. This preseason has had fans especially excited after a relatively tame set of changes made in the prior year.
The biggest change of the new preseason is the addition of the two new elemental drakes. Linking to Arcane, these dragons channel the signature technologies of Piltover and Zaun, respectively. The new Hextech drake gives attack speed and ability haste, creates teleportation gates at set points in the map, and can give players a chain-lightning attack that resembles Statikk Shiv’s old ability.
There’s a whole bunch of new items being added, from an anti-assassin item for mages to a tank item that builds out of Tear of the Goddess. Riot is also reworking 10 mage items, 10 tank items, and four lethality items. The full list of new items includes Crown of the Shattered Queen, Evenshroud, Axiom Arc, Shadowflame, and Winter’s Approach, which transforms into Fimbulwinter. Riot even brought in Tyler “Tyler1” Steinkamp to narrate the announcement video.
The fancy new rune being added is First Strike, and is meant to imitate Kleptomancy, a previous rune since removed from the game. First Strike rewards players for being the ones to initiate trades by converting some of the damage they inflict into gold. This rune could help lane bullies with consistent harass to better grow gold leads in lane from individual trades, and Gangplank mains everywhere are certainly excited to see just how quickly they can gather doubloons as a result.
Riot is also introducing objective bounties, another comeback system that encourages teams to fight around neutral monsters and punishes teams for ignoring them. As a team falls behind, neutral objectives can acquire a gold bounty that gives the losing team a boost in cash if they claim the objective. The valid objectives for bounties include Rift Herald, the Elemental Dragons, and the outer towers in all three lanes.
The full list of changes can be seen in the patch 11.23 notes.
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