League of Legends: New Masteries

Monday brought some major changes to League of Legends. They completely revamped all three of the mastery trees and also massively tweaked the power level of most of the summoner spells. They also added a new champion and did a bunch of minor power level tweaks to existing champions. You now ban 6 champions in a draft instead of 4. In short, a lot of things have suddenly changed.

The biggest change by far is the new mastery trees. I feel like I've lived through this process a couple of times in the past with World of Warcraft. Some of the old masteries were _really_ bad and you only took them if you needed to get deeper in the tree or if you didn't really consider what it actually did. (One in particular was a 1% increase to your health and mana regen. Annie, for example, has .55 health regen per 5 seconds, so an extra 1% meant you regen one whole health every 15 minutes.) There were masteries that buffed specific summoner spells, often deep in a tree, so if you wanted to buff a specific spell you often had no real choice as far as what tree you wanted to be. Support characters who wanted to buff clairvoyance, for example, had to go full utility. The old damage tree had a lot of masteries which buffed physical attacks and not very many that buffed magic attacks so if you were a damage dealing caster you tended to avoid putting more than 9 points into the damage tree which just seemed odd.

All those problems were fixed in the revamp. Now it seems like almost every mastery has a legitimate impact on something. The new health regen mastery? A flat 1 health per 5 seconds. 180 times as good as the old mastery? Yeah, something was wrong before. They took all of the old summoner skill masteries, stuck them together, and put them at the bottom of the tree. The utility mastery now buffs teleport, clarity, flash, promote, and clairvoyance. For one point. At the first tier of the tree. So you can feel free to go into whatever tree you want and still get the buffs for your two chosen summoner spells. They added a bunch of caster masteries to the damage tree.

There are still some stinkers. They actually still have a percentage regen boost still, though it is up to 3% per point instead of 3% for 3 points. Still seems sketchy. You can snag an extra 40 experience per enemy champion kill/assist, or an extra 24 gold per enemy champion kill/assist. These seem really underwhelming. One enemy dork unit is worth 59 experience and 25 gold base (both go up as time progresses) so those masteries basically make killing a hero worse than killing a creep... But on the plus side none of these masteries are in 'must take' positions. (The old regen boost mastery was on the first tier of the tree and many heroes had to put points into it for lack of other options. 1 health every 15 minutes is better than nothing at all...)

There are also some interesting new masteries. You can do 10 extra damage to towers and you can reduce nearby tower armor by 10. These both seem like they could make games end faster by allowing for quicker pushing. There's one that increases the sight range of your wards which seems pretty sweet if you're actually good and using wards.

Overall it feels like the power level was really ratcheted up across the board. I played 5 games last night with the new stuff and it really felt like stuff was just dying faster. Except for the game where I put all my points into defense where it seemed like I was invincible. I was up over 4k health when I used to barely break 2k. I'm interested to watch some pro level games with the new stuff to see how things play out amongst people who are really good at the game.