League of Legends Dev Tracker

This is only the broad strokes, there are lots of little nuances to each item.

Eg - on hit builds cross into both marksmen and fighter item pool.

Also there is ability haste to be found in each class.

We reference item classes a few times so I'll clarify what we're planning for preseason.

-Marksmen (crit/as/ad)
-Mage (ap/mana)
-AP fighter/assassin (ap/hp)
-Fighter (ad/hp)
-Assassin (ad/lethality)
-Support (hp/heal)
-Tank (hp/resist)

(note not perfectly optimized, boris always wins)

We will look at item stats for lower ELOs to be sure that nothing is off there, but we will primarily balance based on high ELO data.

Item choice is one of the mastery points of the game, so we want to base our decisions on the data set that is close to optimized.

Most champs will have a core item in their build (like triforce for irelia or GP) but if an item becomes core for the entire fighter class (or any class) it's just OP.

Because items can be bought by all players, stats like winrate are much less definitive of power.

Most of the clear signals for OP or UP will be usage rates by high level players.

The new item balance framework in an image:

With an item system overhaul coming it’s a good time to upgrade our approach to balancing items too!

-Ensuring all items are viable to create the rich strategic choices
-Finding and preventing single OP items from stifling other builds

The full details:

Big item changes are coming in Preseason 2021, but we want to talk about our item balance framework now. Learn how we plan to:

🎣 Gather balance data
🤓 Qualify when an item is OP/UP
⚔️ Think about champs/classes vs. item health

Read more 👉

I'm Mark Yetter
"Riot Scruffy"
Gameplay Design Lead for League of Legends

I manage design for:
New champs
Champ updates
Balance
Items
Runes
SR Map
Preseason
Matchmaking
Ranked
Player Behavior

Most of my posts are updates on these, feel free to hit me with questions or feedback

Things i dont work on directly but I'm happy to pass on feedback: Skins, TFT, The Client, missions, event pass, and anything else non League.

👿👿👿

🟣 🟣 🟣

We’re not hard locking items to a class. We are tailoring their stats and uniques so that they are very preferable to that class.