The Rioter on Ivern’s upcoming changes. What did the developers want to achieve?
Riot regularly works on characters that do not necessarily find their way to the meta. Ivern has had its ups and downs, but he is currently not at the top of the tier list, despite a relatively satisfactory win rate. The champion wins just over 51% of games, but appears in only 0.67% of them.
The developers of League of Legends have decided that this is the time to make major changes to Ivern, releasing his fixes to the test servers. What does one developer write about his update?
Ivern update
Posts about the updated Ivern’s skill set have appeared online. Among other things, one developer wrote about it and wanted to share a little more information.
I didn’t really communicate early about this, so I wanted to share a little context:
I started working on some Ivern changes a little while ago with two explicit goals – to make Ivern feel better about supporting ranged champions (and possibly be able to lane as a support ench)
The second goal being to improve satisfaction around Daisy (and possibly completely go away from the pet control model, which we didn’t fully end up doing).
Due to the fact that Ivern is now also supposed to handle the role of a support, the designer explained how the team wanted to make the character handle this by supporting allies fighting from a distance.
- W Passive now applies to his allies if he’s near.
- E refreshes shielding if it doesn’t hit an enemy.
- W Brush disappear if Ivern’s team loses vision inside of them.
W damage should just be a straight buff (we also changed the visualization of the damage with missiles that should add satisfaction), W brush changes hopefully make placing brush easier (and ivern’s team less frustrated about brush they lose control over)
The E change is weirdly the one I like the most – there’s some fun play added around the spell now where you might actually try NOT to hit an enemy to get the shield back, but also need to weigh whether getting the slow and damage is worth it.
The developer also clarified that the team does not plan to focus on making Ivern a support, but only wants to give him an additional opportunity to play another position.
We will never change Ivern to prioritize support instead of jungle, but I wanted to broaden Ivern’s capabilities a bit to make him generally more useful in more situations.
According to Rioter’s words, all the changes introduced in this update are not intended to be nerfs. If it turns out that he will perform worse, he will be further buffed, although the designer does not think that it will be necessary – the entire skill set has been substantially buffed.