League of Legends Patch 7.22: 5 things to know for the preseason

It’s that time of year again! As season seven draws to a close, Riot announce all the changes that will be coming to League of Legends during the preseason, and this year’s might just be the biggest ever.

This year, we are getting a rework to one of the game’s most consistently frustrating, and difficult to balance systems, runes and masteries, which are getting combined into a brand new system. This led to a few small changes for almost every champion in the game. Meanwhile, the out of game things, like account level and IP are getting their first ever major update.

With this many changes coming down the pipeline, these patch notes are absolutely massive. So, to help you make sense of all the changes, we broke down the five things you need to know about the preseason patch.

If you want a full look at this year’s changes, check out our complete patch notes here.

1. The rune and mastery system has been completely reworked

It’s no secret that runes and masteries weren’t great. In fact, they may have been one of the biggest points of confusion for new players. Fortunately, thanks to this new system, there’s no more paid runes and everyone gets access to everything at account level 1. Since this is such a fundamental change to one of League of Legends biggest systems, we have gone in-depth and created guides with everything you need to know about the new runes, that you can check out, here.

2. Almost every champion in the game is getting a little stats tweak

Riot Games

Some champions relied on runes pretty heavily to keep them safe in lane or make sure they could clear their buffs in the jungle. As a result, just about every champion in the game is getting a few changes here and there to their base health or damage to help compensate for the stats they lost with the runes changes. These aren’t likely to be changes that effect you game to game, but be sure to check out the full patch notes to see what happened to your favorite champions.

3. No more account level cap

That’s right, now your account will be able to go past 30 and onto .. infinity? Each time you level up, you’ll get a capsule, that’s almost guaranteed to contain a champion shard. This should help give players an increased feeling of accomplishment, even if they don’t win every game.

4. IP is a thing of the past

Because games are going to always be moving players towards new account levels and new capsule unlocks, IP after every game is going away. In fact, IP as a whole is getting change into Blue Essence, the crafting currency. Blue Essence will be able to do everything it could in the crafting system, as well as everything IP could do, it’s just a way to clean things up a bit, and make the out of game rewards a little simpler to understand.

5. Don’t worry, we’re still getting new skins, even though it’s preseason

Riot Games

Not everything about League of Legends is changing though, this patch will still include some exciting new skins. Gold ranked players and above will get their Victorious Graves skin, while supports can enjoy two new Blitzcrank skins, Lancer Rogue and Lancer Paragon. Meanwhile, we are also getting Mecha Rengar, which lets everyone’s favorite knife cat turn into a car!