Mythic items were added to LoL in 2021 but Riot says they didn't work out the way they were intended.
Riot Games has announced that Mythic items will be removed from League of Legends in January 2024, and while removing a key game mechanic doesn’t always go over well with a community, in this particular case the player seem pretty happy about it.
Mythic items were introduced to League of Legends in 2021 as powerful “cornerstones in your builds with big effects that define your playstyle from game to game.” Players could only carry a single Mythic item at a time, and unlike Legendaries in LoL, they included special passive effects.
But many players weren’t happy with the way that Mythics constrained builds and playstyles, and earlier this year Riot said that it agreed with many of those complaints: “We aren’t happy with the current state of Mythic items, we were wrong about some of our initial goals, and our philosophies around items have evolved as a result.”
At the time, Riot said it was “assessing all options” on how to move ahead with Mythic items, and apparently one of those options was ditching them entirely, because that’s what’s going to happen in January 2024.
“Trying to serve the needs of a bunch of different champions in a class with a few Mythic items has proven to be really challenging,” game director Pu Liu explained in a recent dev update. “And while it works pretty well for about half the roster, the other half is left with items that don’t feel really right for them, or have their creativity stifled.”
There are currently more than 160 characters in League of Legends, for the record, so “half the roster” is a significant number—and also makes it easier to appreciate the challenge Riot faces in getting these items right for everyone. But while the Mythic tier is being cut, some current Mythic items will be sticking around: Liu said Mythics “that players really like” will be kept and adjusted to be “exciting options rather than prescriptive centerpieces.”
In response to the news, some players have said that they don’t think the change will have much material impact on the game, but the general consensus seems to be that it’s a good, and overdue, change. “Ever since they were released I thought it was pretty stupid to limit the character’s build thanks to Mythics being so powerful and over-the-top that you HAD to buy them,” redditor wagueropires wrote. “They were saying that it would bring ‘build versatility’ or something like that back in the day and I couldn’t disagree more. It made the issue worse. I couldn’t be happier.”
“The game became playing the champ who can best abuse an item and the meta followed the item,” Warcraftisgood replied. “If your champ didn’t get a good Mythic (ex Yasuo after Shieldbow was removed from Mythic) they just sucked. I’m positive towards this change overall.”
Another player, _Aki_, credited Riot for taking the correct action in what you might say was something of a backhanded compliment: “This will go down as the first time in history Riot did not double down on a dumb as f— decision and instead admitted a mistake.”
MYTHICS GONE FINALLY pic.twitter.com/QuZ172JuPIAugust 28, 2023
“Glad Mythics existed and also glad they are now going, should help a lot of left behind champions catch up, but it was a fun time and overall an interesting time period for the game,” HappyChimeNoises wrote in a nicely nuanced post on Twitter. “Lots of fun builds from it.”
“Mythic removal and Nexus Blitz returning are huge W changes,” GarretDonath tweeted. “The only sad part was that it took 3 years of asking for those.”
A specific date for when Mythic items will be removed from League of Legends hasn’t been announced, but Liu said a full reveal on item changes and other preseason information is “coming soon.”
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