Mid-season update: Rift Herald reworked to a game-changing objective

It looks like the changes in the mid-season update will never end, and the one to the Rift Herald is drastic.

Riot was not content with simply changing a whole class of champions and the dragon system for the mid-season update. No, they had to do much more than that.

One of the most insane changes will be to the Rift Herald. It’s entrance into the game wasn’t that successful, and most players didn’t care about it at all. It has become more popular over the last month or so, but it still isn’t an objective worth fighting for.

That’s about to change.

Riot Gmang, League’s Senior Game Analyst, posted on the League of Legends boards that the Rift Herald has been completely reworked.

“It’s current buff, Doom’s Eve, has been replaced with a unique buff that lasts for 20 minutes and persists through death.”

Rift Herald will now spawn six minutes into the game, but it will never respawn once it has been killed. It will be much harder to kill, but its new buff should be worth the effort. It’s current buff, Doom’s Eve, has been replaced with a unique buff that lasts for 20 minutes and persists through death. When the person with the buff is alone, they gain damage reduction against champions and also build Corruption stacks. At 100 stacks, your next attack discharges all the stacks to deal bonus magic damage. The Corruption’s stack rate and damage scale with champion level.

What. The. Hell.

An objective that was once thought to be meaningless will now give off one of the strongest buffs the game has ever seen. Having a buff that lasts 20 minutes and persists through death is simply overpowered.

This is a buff geared towards split-pushers, and it will be massive on them. Imagine that you are playing against a Jax that has this buff. Jax will now be a split-pushing monster for the next 20 minutes, and there isn’t anything you can do to stop it. Kill him? Cool, here’s some gold, but he’s just going to respawn and go right back to work with the buff.

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The idea of a buff lasting 20 minutes is interesting, but dying should definitely remove it from the champion. There has to be some sort of risk involved, and guaranteeing the buff for an entire 20 minutes with no risk of losing it isn’t fair. As mentioned above, many split-pushers won’t care if you get a kill or two off of them when they have the buff because they will be able to use it when they are alive again. A kill or two is nice, but that Jax might be able to get a quick inhibitor tower if he is ruthless enough with the buff.

It’s hard to see this buff not getting nerfed in the future, because it simply looks too strong on paper. Who knows, maybe it will feel balanced once it is live on Summoner’s Rift for everyone to play with, but it seems like there’s a higher chance of it being overpowered.

People wanted Rift Herald to be worth fighting for. Well, you better fight for that damn thing.

Visit our Patch Updates section to stay up-to-date on all the mid-season changes.

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