Riot claims that League of Legends' durability improvement "has landed relatively well," but it still intends to tweak Grievous Wounds in subsequent updates

League of Legends' durability update, one of the biggest patches in recent memory, was rolled out to the live servers by Riot Games a few weeks ago.

All roles in the game have had numerous power changes. However, after allowing the patch some time to take effect, the developers said that League of Legends fans seemed to like how things turned out.

Riot's lead designer Matt “Phroxzon” Leung-Harrison in the newest quick gameplay thoughts blog post mentioned:

"While we’re still in the process of balancing the Durability Update, we think it has landed relatively well. Players from all regions are enjoying more opportunities for skill expression and we're hearing feedback that combat is better paced and more understandable."

Also, speaking of games being slightly longer, it gives both teams more opportunities to engage in true late game team fights, making late game strategy and decision making more important, which was missing in shorter games.

Phroxzon stated that he and his team are pretty happy to make these concepts more relevant in League of Legends.

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Buffing all League of Legends champions' durability was the ideal solution for maintaining in-game balance

Durability of all champions were buffed-up (Image via Riot Games)

According to Riot, the combined damage output of systems like runes, equipment, and summoner spells was excessive but balanced when compared to other systems.

Buffing all champions' durability was the ideal solution to maintain that balance while also addressing damage problems because it allowed the team to target adjustments to particular systems rather than making general changes for all of them.

Phroxzon stated,

"While assessing damage in League, we took a hard look at in-game systems like runes, items, and summoner spells to figure out which systems were most impacted by damage creep. We came to the consensus that the damage output of these systems altogether was too high, but that they were balanced relative to one another. "

He continued,

"In order to preserve this relative balance we decided to buff champion durability since that'd let us make focused changes to these other systems rather than taking holistic passes across all of them."

Due to numerous improvements in durability for all in-game champions, many players have appreciated the slower, more strategic gameplay that has emerged over the course of the last few updates.

Instead of being able to instantaneously kill an enemy while still missing certain skill shots along the road, assassins and burst champions, for example, must land every ability and be in a powerful state in order to surely one-shot a target.

However, not everything is faultless. According to Riot Phroxzon, the team is still working to balance League at about a 40 percent heal reduction while also attempting to lessen the potency of healing.

"Having said that, we're still smoothing out a few sharp edges. Classes and items aren’t completely balanced yet, some champions still need more adjustments, and the state of healing is still out of balance in a 40% Grievous Wounds world."

Thus, Grievous Wounds should only be used when there are two or more healing champions available, rather than being a mandatory purchase in every League of Legends game.