Riot’s dev team seems to be working on “fluctuating” the meta of the upcoming MSI 2022.
Throughout recent seasons, Riot has always had amazing movements right before an international tournament begins. Particularly, they give huge updates to some champions in order to create a brand new meta, which is believed to have made LoL much more interesting than any other MOBA games.
A thorough change in the meta obviously can have an impact on a lot of pro players. The ones who can’t adapt to that will easily receive an unforgettable defeat. With a team holding the domestic Champion title, leaving an international tournament at the group stage is no longer awkward. For instance, Funplus Phoenix at Worlds 2021, was surprisingly eliminated at the group stage despite having wonderful performances in LPL Summer 2021.
To “take after” this “tradition”, Riot is preparing a lot of updates for MSI 2022. The ones going live in patch 12.7 are showing us some indications about the meta in the upcoming international tournament.
First of all, several AD bruisers are going to be considerably buffed. Some of them are familiar names like Pantheon, Yone, or Yasuo. Especially, Wukong is being given the ability of crossing terrains with his W, which allows him to get into the jungle to create outstanding ganks.
Additionally, AP jungle champions are also coming back to the Rift. Karthus and Lillia alike are buffed in their damage on monsters, while Nidalee was previously buffed. This will enable mid-laners to comfortably pick AD brawlers instead of gluing to controlling mages.
As we can easily see, Riot is probably willing to accelerate the game speed. The return of early-game ADC like Lucian or Kalista is a definite prove for this hypothesis. It will make the game “hotter”, rather than waiting for items-needed champions, specifically Aphelios and Jinx, to carry the whole team.
After the declaration about patch 12.7 had been posted, some LoL fans said that Riot was “nerfing” T1 – the team with a perfect Champion title in LCK Spring 2022, when Jayce, Lee Sin, and Ryze were decided to be hammered.
However, these changes do not appear to make any trouble to T1. All of their players have an extremely large champion pool, especially Faker with 72 different picks in. If the next meta is the same as last year’s, Oner can use Diana or Nidalee, his “beloved” champions but were abandoned during the last Spring split. In addition, their youngest player – Zeus, can obviously carry the team in top-lane meta.
Besides, LCK is the pro league having the earliest end worldwide so that T1 has an enormous advantage is that they have a lot of time to carry out experiments in case the meta changes completely. Still, MSI 2022 is being held by South Korea, so they will save loads of time to practice and their health will also be ensured.