Baron and Rift Herald could be getting some major changes in patch 8.9

Season 8 hasn’t exactly been great for neutral objectives in League of Legends. Baron buff has been a little too easy to grab and a bit too powerful all season, while Rift Herald has rarely been as valuable as simply taking your opponents’ towers yourself. Thankfully, Riot is looking into a few solutions to these problems that lead gameplay designer Andrei “Meddler” van Roon outlined in his Quick Gameplay Thoughts for April 27.

The biggest change van Roon mentions is coming to Baron — not the buff the monster grants, but how hard that buff is to get. According to van Roon, taking Baron is going to turn into something that requires a healthy team, rather than just one outstanding tank. The base damage that LoL’s biggest neutral objective deals will go down, while the AOE damage will be doubled. Meanwhile, Baron is also getting a huge health buff to help stay up longer and make it a little harder for teams to gain such an imposing advantage as Baron buff at just 20 minutes into a game.

The smaller of the neutral objective changes will come to Rift Herald, in an attempt to make the Herald a little more valuable overall. While the Herald will still be smashing itself into towers in hopes of taking them down, this act of aggression will now only cost the Herald 150 health, rather than the 25 percent that it cost her before. Not only that, but the Rift Herald will also be doing more damage to the towers she hits as well. But all this comes at a bit of a price for everyone’s favorite mutated Rift Scuttler. Instead of hits to her eye doing 20 percent of her max health, those attacks now do 40 percent. This means that if a team is really focusing, they should be able to take the Rift Herald down.

As usual, these changes aren’t set in stone and are still likely to change a bit before next week’s patch. But, if all goes as planned, you can expect to see these new and improved neutral objectives on the Rift when patch 8.9 is released onto the live servers.