How can Teleport changes affect the course of the game?
Summoner spells in League of Legends are an extremely important element of the game. All fans surely know them well and Ignite or Flash more than once contributed to their spectacular escape or helped in getting a kill. Even though most of the Summoner spells are rarely reworked, there is one spell that is an exception to this rule.
Designers from Riot Games regularly experiment with Teleport – a spell that allows you to return to the line in a short time or move to the other side of the map when the team is getting ready to fight or needs help. You could learn about the changes that can currently be tested on the PBE servers in another article (Riot changes the teleport in LoL. Possibility of teleporting only to towers and upgrading it only after this minute).
Could the changes be ultimately good for the players?
What do players think about the changes?
The changes caused quite a stir in the community and divided players into two groups – the one that the new Teleport suits and the one that does not think fondly of it. The change will certainly have a significant impact on both ranked and pro games.
The teleport has always been a key element of the game, able to change the tide of combat, which often took place mainly on bot. Deep wards and botlane initiation often went hand in hand with this summoner spell, which allowed a top lane hero to join the fight.
League of Legends games are now relatively short – in the solo/duo queue at the Platinum level, the game can last about 30 minutes. In Diamond, it is less than 29 minutes, and in the Master tier, it is less than 28 minutes.
The new Teleport will have a longer cooldown until the turret armor falls, i.e. 14 minutes, and will not allow teleportation to minions or wards.
This means that it will no longer be possible to quickly return to the line in the first minutes of the game, and ganking the other side of the map will be much more difficult. A user with the nickname ChocoTeddini points to the advantages of the changes proposed by Riot.
Solokilling earlygame the enemy toplaner is currently, very often, not worth it, which is absurd. For those that don’t know why: the 0-1 toplaner respawns so fast and can TP to a minion, creating a freeze against the 1-0 toplaner that killed him who is probably too low HP to stay and contest the freeze. This means the 1-0 toplaner has to TP back to not lose a huge amount of cs/xp, and to make things worse, he’s now extremely vulnerable to a jungle gank, and has no TP to recover from said gank if it happens.
Double TP is very common and makes playing for botlane 2v2s as an aggressive support very risky, which encourages passive play, or roaming with the jungler to mid/top, which results in even lower agency for the ADC.
With the new TP, sololaners will have to gank bot manually and can TP to defend their tower after the gank is over. For those that complain about strategy loss, imo pathing towards bot takes planing and pathing skill, while pressing TP the second the enemy Thresh lands a hook just encourages Thresh to main Yuumi instead.
This change encourages toplane 1v1 earlygame, botlane 2v2 autonomy and slightly less support roams.
At the moment, it is difficult to judge how the changes will ultimately affect the gameplay, but most of the comments made by players have a solid foundation. Commenters are also happy that Teleport will no longer be a must-have for virtually every champion in the solo/duo queue.