Riot Games is continually trying to improve the player experience for the community. New features are added to League of Legends from time to time. Some changes come with special events and remain, while others fail and are quickly forgotten. In 2019, Riot once attempted to introduce a new summoner spell to LoL.
What qualifies as such changes?
- At first, Riot Games released a new champion every 2 weeks. However, the frequency has decreased, and they are considering stopping releases altogether.
- Game modes like Dominion, “3 vs 3”, and Aram are examples of changes in the game that have lasted for a longer time.
- From time to time, Riot Games revises items in the game, such as the Philosopher’s Stone, the Rod of Ages, and the Nature’s Fury, which was temporarily removed from the game.
- Game modes that were online only for a short time during events included Doom Bots of Doom, Urf, Legends of the Poro King, and the Bilgewater event.
Especially during the Bilgewater event, Riot made a significant blunder: they tried to introduce a new summoner spell. What makes this so special is explained here.
If you are excited about League of Legends Cinematics, we present our favorites:
Even the best ideas can be poorly implemented
What is the deal with the summoner spell? It is about the spell “Retreat”. This spell was added in version 9.7 in 2019. In the next patch, Riot Games removed the spell from the game.
It is a self-targeting spell that granted you a shield for 2.5 seconds, depending on the champion’s level. Once the time expired, all negative effects were removed from you, and you became invulnerable and untargetable while sprinting a short distance toward your base.
The spell appears to be very strong. Invulnerability and removal of crowd control plus a shield speak for themselves. Thus, abilities like Zed’s ultimate or Vladimir’s could be dodged and ignored. However, the community saw it differently.
What did the community say about it? There were always more convenient alternatives to the Retreat spell with the abilities “Flash” and “Mark/ Sprint”. Although the spell looked strong on paper, it was not very practical in the game, and despite the shield had little impact.
The enforced sprint toward the base was a significant issue. Once the spell was activated, there was no way for you to activate or cancel this spell earlier. This led to special plays being doomed to fail, completely ruining an exciting move.
Riot reacted very promptly to the feedback: After just two weeks, the spell was removed from the game. However, the community had already stopped using the spell well in advance.
Since then, there have been no attempts to add new summoner spells to the game. The current selection of spells seems sufficient to balance utility and fun. For this reason, no new tests for new spells have been conducted. The opinion of the LoL community reflects this as well.
Do you have spells or abilities that you would like to see again? Do you have ideas on how to bring something like that into the game, then let us know!
An additional exciting article about changes in LoL is: LoL posts huge changes for the most thankless role in the game, quickly deletes the post
