Patches are about a dime a dozen for the highly popular League of Legends. The Volibear patch that dropped today marks some changes that are small signs of bigger things to come.
Riot Games has put out a preview video, which goes through the changes to the jungle of the Summoner’s Rift. A second video details the new champion, Volibear. As his name implies, he’s a bear… that wears armor… and has chain lightning! Surely such a combination is enough to whet some people’s interest.
Also in this patch alongside the normal character balancing are some new skins and two character remakes. Leading the new skin train is Silverfang Akali, or as I like to call her, Smoke Akali. Then there’s the M.Bison-esqe Imperial Lux, and two skins for Volibear. The first of the remade characters is Gangplank. His skill set will be the same, but his default model and animations are getting graphically remade to match the more recent aesthetics of the game.
The biggest sign of things to come in League, though, rests with the remake of the champion Sivir, who is getting an almost complete rework of her skill set. The most significant of these skill changes is the change to her passive. Originally, it made her dodge stat increase while she was moving. Now, attacking enemy champions will make her move faster for a short period of time.
It may seem like a small tweak, but it leads in to the recently discussed change of removing the dodge statistic from LoL completely. The tip of the spear was in the last patch that changed the mastery trees, where there were no masteries that affected dodge in the new trees. It’s hard to say how far away they are from fully implementing the stat change, but it seems like the next logical step would be to rework the champion Jax, whose skills and passive basically hinge on that single stat. Perhaps afterwards, Riot Games will see fit to finally issue the refund for dodge runes.
You can read the full listing of changes in the patch on the League of Legends website, and you can watch the patch preview video below.
