The creators commented on the new dragons that were introduced for the 2022 season.
With the start of preseason 2022, Riot introduced a lot of news to the game. They wanted the next season to be special and to show that the developers still had many fresh ideas to diversify the game. In addition to changes to the balance of heroes or items and plans for more rework, the developers and designers came up with the idea of introducing completely new dragons to Summoner’s Rift – Chemtech and Hextech.
It quickly turned out that one of them is not much liked by players. The community has complained en masse about the new dragoon, claiming that it disrupts gameplay and is simply unnecessary. The win rate for this dragon was devastatingly high, and players began to discover strange new flaws that were related to the chemtech soul.
It got to the point where the LoL community started asking the developers to remove new dragons.
Chemtech and Hextech Dragon
The developers decided to comment on the new dragons. Just a couple of days ago, one of the Rioters announced that the Chemtech dragon may be removed (Riot is considering removing one of the dragons from LoL. New nerfs will be the most important). This news cheered a lot of players who sincerely hated the new dragoon.
Yesterday the topic of the dragon was raised again and this time Riot Phroxzon spoke about it.
Let’s start off with the new Elemental Rifts and Souls. We’re seeing positive sentiment and are generally happy with the Hextech Rift, but we hear your frustrations around the Chemtech Rift, which we knew would be contentious with its stealth mechanic. In testing, we found that it had great potential for fun and unique high moments like flanking from the fog as a team, but those also came with frustrating tradeoffs. In particular, it can be hard to contest your own jungle and adapt to new default warding positions on the edges of the Chemtech Fog zones. We’ve added some Scryer’s Blooms to defensive locations in the terrain to help address this in patch 12.1 and will keep an eye on how that pans out.
We’ve also observed high levels of frustration around the Chemtech Soul, which may also contribute to negative sentiment towards the terrain. We’re with you that trying to facecheck a team that has Chemtech Soul in the Chemtech Fog is difficult as you’re usually at both a combat strength & vision deficit. We also agree that the Chemtech Soul itself, regardless of the mechanics, is overpowered right now, so we’re tapping down on its numbers in 12.2. If we find that the high moments still don’t manifest after both of these changes, yet they continue to frustrate players, we’re very open to higher scope changes, including reworks.