According to Riot August – Lead champion designer – is for players to pay more attention to these items.
Riot Games, as we all know, releases new League of Legends patches every two weeks. Riot made slight modifications to the effectiveness of champions, items, and other League of Legends aspects in those patches. All of these changes are targeted at making the game more balanced in the long run.
However, things are not always so easy since Riot may occasionally boost items that are already highly popular in the metagame. This confuses the LoL community because the action appears to contradict the aim of balancing the game. Riot August, League of Legends champion designer, explained that they occasionally have to do this to have players pay more attention to specific items to boost their buy rate.
“Question about items balance, it seems like it’s just a cycle of which item is best in role atm. From sunfire gore moonstone to recently like divine stride shureliyas is this healthy for the game?”
Fans asked during his stream
Riot August august explained: “If you recall, Thunderlord’s Decree was one of the most popular keystone masteries in League of Legends. Even though this keystone was not weak, no one utilized it when it was initially introduced. So we boosted this keystone, and the same thing happened with the items you described above; they weren’t awful, but there were very few people using them, so the team opted to buff these items even if it meant abandoning the ultimate aim of balance.”
Many people may complain that the current equipment lacks variety, but that is not the case. I think gamers sometimes don’t believe that other items are stronger than the items they normally use. That’s why we’re buffing already very powerful items so that players will notice and use them more. Of course, then we have to nerf those items to the equilibrium threshold.”
The Divine Sunderer is the most recent example of Riot Games’ modification. This item was previously powerful until being buffed in patch 11.12. However, Bruiser champion did not favor this item since the Stridebreaker or Goredrinker was all better options at the time.
With the release of Patch 11.12, Divine Sunderer immediately become the top pick item for not only Bruisers, but ADCs and range champions such as Ezreal, Senna and dominated that whole version without any compatible contestants. Even without the nerf in Patch 11.13, Divine Sunderer is still the second-most buy item in the game.
Although Riot Games has its own motivations for making such changes, the final consequence is that League of Legends is sometimes highly imbalanced. Cases like as the Death Dance in Season 10, Locket of the Iron Solari 2021 Pre-Season, or the most recent misuse of the Divine Sunderer are evident examples. Perhaps Riot should examine how to modify equipment in the future; buffs are good, but having too much power up at the same time is difficult to accept.