Morello outlines season three changes

Season two is nearing its end and so it's time for RIOT to tell us what's in store for the next year or so of League.

Morello took to the official RIOT forums today to discuss some of the big changes that are inbound for season three. Many of these, such as changes to the jungle, have been hinted at already, but today he went into a little more detail:

"Items: One of the biggest places we feel we can add some interesting strategic decisions to is the item system. Many of you have told us that you’d like to see more build variety, and more interesting gameplay on items. We couldn’t agree more!

You’ll see some rebalancing of the existing items, but there’s also a slew of brand new items to spark your imagination and reward your ingenuity.

Xypherous will be giving some juicy, juicy details on this, but here are a few things to expect:

Underserved classes (AD Casters, for example) will get more items targeted specifically at their role
Most of your old favorites will be sticking around – we want more options, but we don’t want the item shop to be totally alien
A few items that have been challenging to elegantly balance are being removed in favor of the new options
We’re taking a look at overall gold and stat balancing
Many old items have received new upgrade paths or additional upgrade paths
Supports are getting some items to help ease the ward burden in longer games

This is the biggest change and, frankly, it’s pretty damn exciting. We’re really interested to see what people discover, and we’re confident this will help add some diversity and interesting choice to how you’ll be building your champions in the future.

Jungle: Much like we did at the start of Season 2, we’ll be featuring jungle mechanics changes for this preseason as well.

We liked a lot of the flow and feel improvements to the jungle (opened up non-safe junglers, more ganks, etc.), but there’re some things we can still improve. We had two major goals here: to add to the number of viable junglers, and to change the gank flow to ensure that the jungler isn’t the only role that defines the flow of the game during the laning phase.

Statikk will be revealing more complete details on the changes, but we believe this will have some positive effects on the metagame and improve champion viability, even in lane. We’ve even included new jungle-specific items (now there’s more than just Madred’s!)

Masteries: Another big opportunity is masteries. While we want to add variety to your mastery choices, there are also few specific areas we want to improve:

Going deep in the Utility Tree is currently underwhelming
Early flat Magic Resistance and Armor prevent people from being killed even if they get really outplayed in lane
There aren’t enough “cool” masteries

To this effect, FeralPony’s been busy taking a jackhammer to our masteries to fix these problems – all the while looking for opportunities to add more interesting things to mastery builds. He’ll be on hand later in the week to talk about the changes in-depth, and to dig into a few specific examples.

Summoner Spells: Last, and definitely not least, we’re taking a look at our summoner spells. A couple sneak peeks:

We’ve raised the cooldowns of popular summoner spells (Flash, Ignite, etc.) in lieu of nerfing their power
We’ve added a certain shielding spell from Proving Grounds, and made it so Heal is actually a support skill
We’re generally buffing some of the weaker skills up!

It’s our hope that these changes will give you more options for customizing your spells to suit your own playstyle or the needs in a given matchup while keeping the cool gameplay of the existing favorites. While I’d love to take credit for actually buffing stuff, good guy Roku is heading this up, so I’ll save the grand reveal for him."

Of course, it's important to note that none of these changes are set in stone at this point.