Overview On The Current Item Shop on Season 11

Riot Games continues to develop League of Legends through the years in order to create a fresh experience every season that changes up the scene for both casual and professional players. This upcoming Season 11, Riot Games will be introducing a brand new item shop that will feature a change in item’s visuals, effects, and introduce new items to Summoner’s Rift. The current item shop will have more friendly features too, focusing on the ease of navigation and browsing. Take a look at what has changed with the shop!

What’s New With the Current Item Shop?

After Season 10’s changes in the Jungle, more specifically on the Dragon Soul, this season is looking towards revamping the item shop to introduce new mechanics and hopefully put a heavier emphasis on itemization this season. Aside from visuals, a lot of items have been reworked, removed, or added into the shop in an attempt to make itemization more diverse depending on the champion you’re using. This new itemization mechanic also gives more freedom on how you want to build items in the future.

1. Visual Rework

The first major change on the current item shop is the visual rework on some items. A lot of items looked too similar with each other which is why the Design Team of Riot Games decided to redesign a lot of the items we have been so used to seeing. In addition, even the Shop Menu received a major visual rework which might seem confusing at first, but the functionality that it offers makes it easier to choose between items which is useful if you are a beginner trying to learn the game.

2. Item Rarity System

The items in the shop has been separated into 4 rarities: basic, epic, legendary, and mythic. The main point of this system is that a champion may only have 1 Mythic item in his inventory at a time. Mythic items have extremely strong abilities that can heavily influence the game. Mythic Items also give bonus stats to your Legendary items.

• Mythic: Fully Built Items (Max. 1 in the Inventory)
• Legendary: Fully Built Item (Unlimited in Inventory)
• Epic: Upgraded Items (Used as Mythic or Legendary Ingredients)
• Basic: Starting Items and Base Materials (Used as Ingredient)

3. Smart Recommended System

The recommended items in the previous item shop were already pre-set and while it helped narrow down the best items for your champ, it didn’t really offer any specific information on what items are best in your current situation. The current item shop offers a “smart” recommended system that detects the enemy’s stats, your initial items, and other elements to recommend three items to you at a time. This helps beginners build smartly instead of just choosing random items from the recommended page.

4. New Items and Removed Items

There were a few items that were too similar with each other, causing debate on which item would you build regardless of the situation. These items have been removed, giving way to new items that are significantly different from existing items. There are also items that replicated important passives in order to make it more available for other items. In addition, new items has brought new identities to Battle Mages that allow them to fight in the frontline using AP and HP.

5. Item Stat Changes

There have been changes on how some of the item stats work. The game introduces Ability Haste and Omnivamp which are reworks of Cooldown Reduction and Life Steal/Spell Vamp respectively. These stats have reimagined the way to build items, taking the benefits that each stat had before but added a bit of a twist to make each of them unique.

• Ability Haste – Ability Haste has been derived from Cooldown Reduction. They have basically the same effects except Ability Haste does not have a 40% cap. Riot Games introduces a linear scaling model which means that items with more Ability Haste have relatively weaker offensive stats. So that even if you go beyond 40% Ability Haste, your skill’s abilities will become less powerful.
• Omnivamp – Omnivamp is basically a combination of Life Steal and Spell Vamp. This means that you now gain healing from all sources including Physical, Magic, and True damage sources. Although, Life Steal still exists in the Epic Item – Vampiric Scepter.

How Does This Affect The Game

Every time League of Legends receives a major patch, the meta completely shifts. While this pre-season is a testing grounds for the current item shop to determine which items are too strong or too weak, it’ll eventually lead to new sets of champions finally seeing competitive light and others being completely left behind. The games will be extremely interesting as you might not see the same sets of items being built over and over on the same champion unlike before.

This patch will mostly help beginners and those who are generally not well-versed in choosing which items to build situationally. The smart recommended system allows even the most hopeless of cases make semi-correct decisions as long as they follow the menu. Now you don’t have to worry about your teammates in Low ELO building random stuff that seem strong or building towards an item in the wrong order.

Discontent On The Current Item Shop

Even after announcements of other big patches like Runes Reforged and Rise of the Elements, a lot of people expressed their discontent where they opposed these new systems. Well, it didn’t really matter because Riot Games will surely push through with this idea unless at least 30% of the entire community threaten to boycott League of Legends because of these changes. Regardless of other people’s opinions, the new item shop looks like a promising change that’ll breathe some fresh air into the game.

League of Legends will always try to change the scene to keep being relevant and give their playbase something to look forward to each year. Playing the same game for more than a year without anything new being added can feel pretty bad. Even if a lot of people don’t agree with all these changes after it is introduced, they’ll eventually come around and like it after playing a few games.

What to Look Forward To

Now that we’re getting new toys in the recent rework, it’s time to relearn every part of the game. Your old champion pool might not be as up to the competition and that means that you’ll be forced to learn other champions to conform with the meta. On the other hand, you can now experiment on different builds to force your favorite champion to be relevant. There’s so many different builds that you can literally switch it up every game and no one will get angry at you for trying it.

There will also be an added layer of difficulty in the game that will make you think rationally about what you’ll need to build. Unlike in the previous item shop where you were limited to only building a linear build with the exception of one or two situational items. Time to try out all these new items and find out what items are the best for you!