After just a few years with League of Legends’ new Mythic items, Riot Games is going back to basics by retiring the system next year.
Lead designer Matt “Phroxzon” Leung-Harrison discussed the numerous reasons why the team opted to delete the Mythic item system and talk about the old item stacking in a new developer’s blog post published recently.
Riot is removing the Mythic items system
For example, Mythics was created to provide “kit warping effects that augmented champion fantasies for other classes.” However, they also made it harder to balance the game’s many champions, especially with subsequent releases.
“While we are able to balance champions around having Mythic outputs, it adds a bit too much design debt when it comes to designing new champions.”
Because practically every champion may be played and created in a variety of ways, the restricted quantity of Mythics makes it extremely difficult to please all of the various users and champion classes.
As a result, Mythics were compelled to carry a large number of stats in order to be valuable in numerous roles. Riot might design additional Mythic items to aid with this, but each item would add its own layer of complexity to gameplay.
Riot is also deleting Mythics because many champions and roles were obliged to purchase the same Mythic item, resulting in a lack of diversity in the game’s meta.
Going back to its root with item stacking
According to the dev post, the game is heading to “a world where most items will be stackable again.” This means you could buy many items with same passives, and all of them would stack and operate properly.
As a result, Riot is lowering the power level of items in general to prevent stacking from becoming overly powerful. However, Matt “Riot Phroxzon” Leung-Harrison, League lead designer stated that stacking as we know it isn’t returning, but a variation of it is.
“To add some clarity around stacking items, it was referring to things like IE and Tri-Force being previously un-stackable. This will now return to being a balance consideration when you can buy both. We don’t intend to return to people being able to stack 6 sunfire capes,”
Essentially, you’ll be able to buy items with the same unique passive, but you’ll be penalised since the benefits will be “less effective or disallowed,” as the lead League designer described it.