Riot Games has just patched League of Legends to 5.3, but there’s still no solution to the Deathfire Grasp item issue. They need an ”extra cycle to build confidence.” They’ve also ”delayed a few dudes” they had promised.
The studio is gearing up patch 5.4 for the changes, so 5.3 is more ‘laying the groundwork’ for the next update. Deathfire Grasp was removed because of balance concerns, but they ”haven’t seen a real impact”.
”…back in the foreword of patch 5.2 we mentioned that 5.2 and 5.3 were going to be our Deathfire Grasp-removal patches, but now that we’ve been hard at work, we realized we could use an extra cycle to build confidence,” posted Riot. That means no new +120 AP item yet to replace Deathfire Grasp.
”As an aside, we’ve been keeping a close eye on all champions who were affected by the passing of Deathfire Grasp and haven’t seen a real impact on performance. We’re not saying this to justify the removal of an item that many felt were important in their builds (in other words, we’re not dismissing your feedback!), but it’s an interesting tangent we wanted to explore.”
From a ”broad statistical perspective” the removal hasn’t done much, but acknowledges ”this is probably different at high levels of play”.
Continued: ”One thing we do agree with is that there needs to be another +120 ability power item for endgame mages, and we’re investigating that space as we speak.”
Check out the latest blog on patch 5.3 for League of Legends.
