Waveclear is getting some drastic changes in an upcoming patch

It’s no secret that the mid lane meta for most of League of Legends’ eighth season has been centered around clearing waves and leaving lane, but the game’s been dominated by roaming for almost 3 months now and Riot has decided it’s finally time to for a change.

In Patch 8.6 — or perhaps a little later — waveclear is going to get some serious changes that were detailed in a forum post by Riot Repertoir, the game’s lead live gameplay designer. According to the post, the changes are going to focus on making it a little more difficult to clear minion waves in order to help promote a more active and engaging laning experience. In other words, if players actually have to pay attention to their minions, maybe they’ll actually fight their lane opponent as well, instead of just running to a side lane.

In order to accomplish this, Repertoir says that Riot is looking at a few different solutions, but a significant change to the way minions scale is the company’s first target. Among these early changes will be tweaks to the amount of health that minions have early, as well as how much health they gain every three waves, which should help give them a significant buff without punishing most mid laners’ early game too much.

The other change players are likely to notice on the Public Test Environment soon is a shift in where minions’ gold come from. Another of Repertoir’s changes will move a bit more gold onto the melee minions, and significantly more onto cannon minions, while making casters just a little less valuable.

In all, these changes — whenever they go live — should give the game a much more deliberate pace that rewards skill in lane rather than roaming. While these changes might be going up on the PBE soon, Repertoir also notes that they are far from set in stone, and Riot is eager to hear feedback from players to determine what exactly the right direction for these minion changes are.