League of Legend’s class updates are being discontinued in favor of reworks

Riot’s Lead Producer of Champions, Reav3, released the champion roadmap for 2017 just a few days ago. In it, there are details of various upcoming reworks and a teaser for a soon-to-be released champion. However, easily the biggest news to come out of this post is the discontinuation of the major class updates during mid and pre-season.

The tank update last spring, the assassin update last winter and the mage update last year focused on making slight tweaks to a group of out-of-line champions. This solution essentially put band-aids over problems that required invasive surgery. Now, with 136 champions in the roster, the team has decided to devote less time to new champions and class updates, and more time to completely reworking old champions.

In the post, Reav3 announced their future plans.

Class updates also caused us to neglect champions that needed reworks but weren’t in a specific class, like Azir. After reflecting on this, we’ve decided to discontinue the large seasonal class updates and focus more on individual champions that need work. We will be releasing these individually rather than in grouped updates since there really isn’t a strong reason to package them without the systemic changes to go along with them.

What does this mean?

It means that we as a community will see more updates over the course of the year, rather than just one major dump of minor changes to three to five champions. More importantly, this gives Riot an opportunity to fix some of the truly old feeling characters in League of Legends.

We all have characters that we love and characters that we hate. This means we may have to say goodbye to some of the current iterations of these oldies sooner rather than later. But as the game grows, the older characters must grow with it.

The rest of Reav3’s post focuses on some of the reworks to come: Aatrox, Urgot and Evelynn.