Wild Rift News September 9, 2022

Hi everyone! Welcome to our first edition of Wild Rift News, a monthly look at everything going on all across the wilder Rift.

PATCH 3.4 - POWER SPIKE

The big news this month is that it’s almost time for Patch 3.4! If you missed our Patch Preview, don’t worry we’ve got you covered with the usual recap as well as some other announcements and sneak peeks that weren’t in the preview!

If you watched it you might have seen a new face, Jared “DarkHorse4Lyfe” Berbach, the new Game Director on Wild Rift. You’ll be seeing him and some other devs more often in future update videos. And as Riot DarkHorse4Lyfe said, we didn’t lock Alan in a closet so we could hijack the Patch Previews. Don’t worry, Alan is still holding down the good ship Wild Rift, we don’t have him swabbing the decks or something like that.

During this patch we’ll also be celebrating our anniversary! Since we launched at various times across the world we know this might not be the exact anniversary date for your region, but we still wanted to come together this patch and celebrate you. Thank you for all your feedback, hype clips, fan art, and support. We can’t wait to celebrate many more years together!

But due to the shear amount of content, let's get to the point and see what's in store for 3.4!

CHAMPIONS

Running with scissors, an angsty teen, another xX2edgy4meXx boy who just can’t seem to find his shirt, and an experiment-gone-wrong (or right, depending on who you ask), we’re checking off the box in almost every edgy category for champions this patch. And if we somehow didn’t, don’t worry we still have something dark in store for later this year, remember Alan did say this is the year of the edgelords.

GAMEPLAY

Whether they're making the 5-man Solar Flare engage that turns the tides of a game, Flaying the fed enemy Zed off us, or giving us the Zoomies so we can get to the Red Buff before our Jungler, Supports always have our backs and save our butts. While we love that our Supports are there when we need them, we also want them to have more opportunities to make more game-winning and teamfight-altering plays. So this patch we’re introducing Support quests, some new items, and quality of life updates for them!

SUPPORT QUEST ITEMS

We’ll be introducing Spectral Sickle and Relic Shield this patch, which are new items for Supports to pick up at the start of the game. If you’ve played League PC these might look a bit familiar, but we’ve made some adjustments to make them more suited for Wild Rift!

Both items will grant you up to 3 charges that you can use to apply lane pressure and earn some extra gold, so you’ll be able to pick up some of your key items a little earlier.

Spectral Sickle provides adaptive damage so AD and AP champs can pick it up. When an ally’s nearby, any damaging abilities or attacks you cast on champions or turrets will consume a charge and grant gold. Once you earn enough gold it will transform into Harrowing Crescent.

Relic Shield is a bonus health item that consumes charges to execute minions below half health, granting gold to you and your nearby ally. Once you earn enough gold it will transform into Targon’s Buckler.

Once you earn enough gold from your transformed items, they will upgrade to their final form and grant you more access to Enchantments. So if you assist your team in teamfight, you may have the chance to get multiple casts of your active item off. Maybe that extra Redemption heal or Locket shield is just what your team needs to sway the fight in their favor.

We hope these new items feel good for Supports, and can’t wait to hear your feedback. Rather than our usual /dev articles, later this month we’ll instead be hearing from game designer Sean “Riot Zekramen” Mason in a Devs Spill the Beans video.

NEW ITEMS

This patch we’re also adding some new stock to our shop (the shopkeepers are there, even if you can’t see them… just trust us). To talk more about the meteors you can send pummeling down from the sky and onto the Rift as well as other items in this patch is one of our Systems and Balances designers:

Hey everyone, Nick “Endstep” Frijia here to give some quick context for our new 3.4 items. This patch we decided to take a broader look at a bunch of different systems and classes rather than focus on just one or two champion classes or roles as we typically do.

Cosmic Drive is a new mage item we’re bringing in to fill the missing niche of a big non-mana Ability Haste item. By itself, Cosmic Drive not only grants a lot of Haste and Ability Power, but also a small burst of Movement Speed when hitting enemy champions with spells. This movement speed also scales with Haste itself, so stacking more from other items will make you even faster.

We’ve been wanting to bring in another item for AD assassins, so we’re also adding Serpent’s Fang this patch as an anti-shielding AD assassin item to replace Umbral Glaive. We’re bringing it over directly from League PC, so if you’ve ever played before this item will look familiar. It will work identically to how it does on PC, and is an effective way for melee champions to reduce current and future shields for a short duration after they attack an enemy champion.

Riftmaker is replacing the existing AP vamp item, Hextech Gunblade. Gunblade has proven to be problematic in a number of ways, so we’re bringing in Riftmaker as a dedicated sustained damage vamp item that offers not only healing in extended combat, but also ramping damage amplification that eventually becomes true damage.

As of late, Athene’s Unholy Grail has been a little problematic, because of its extremely narrow but very powerful output and its unusual arrangement of stats. Due to this, Imperial Mandate will be replacing it. Mandate will work similar to how it currently does on League PC, offering a payout in bonus damage and marking enemies when you slow or immobilize them. Allies will then be able to consume the marks for additional damage and movement speed.

Meteor Enchant is a new enchant very similar to Redeeming Enchant, but with only the damage aspect rather than the healing aspect. It can be used to zone enemies away from a specific area, or used as a combo tool alongside other zone control spells or crowd control effects to make the Meteor land for big damage on your enemies. Also it’s just really cool.

Protect Enchant is a new enchant designed to boost heals and shields—particularly for single target. It amplifies the power of your next heal or shield spell, and the magnitude of the power increase is massive for low-cooldown spells like Lulu’s Help, Pix! or Nami’s Ebb and Flow, but much more modest for long-cooldown spells like Janna’s Monsoon or Soraka’s Wish. We want to position Protect as a way for enchanters to be good at, well, protecting a singular target or maybe two targets, whereas other enchants like Locket or Redeeming Enchant should offer better team-wide power in most situations.

DUEL GAMEMODE

IT'S TIME TO D-D-D-D DUEL! From September 16 to September 29, you’ll be able to duke it out 1v1 on the Howling Abyss. This will be your chance to show off your sick Zed or Vayne mechanics without any pesky junglers or supports butting their heads in.

RANKED

How’s everyone’s ranked climbs going? We’re so close to grabbing Glorious Crimson Fiora, and we hope you’re all able to reach your goals before Season 6 comes to a close on October 12.

Around the start of Season 6 we released a new ranked queue, Legendary queue, and we’ve been keeping a close eye on it. Our goal was for this queue to be a highly competitive solo queue for players to climb and compete in. In order to keep the competitive integrity high, we’re going to be adding a new gate, which will be based on your Champion Mastery Score. It will limit you to picking only champs you have a high enough Mastery on. So if you want to first time a new champion or try out a new pick, you’ll need to get some experience on them in another queue first.

And you may have noticed earlier when we dropped S6 end time, that it's happening in the middle of a patch rather than towards the beginning. And while it is a little ways away, a new ranked season also means a new Glorious champion skin, and this one is worth getting axe-cited about. Taking over Ranked Season 7 is Glorious Crimson Draven!

CHAMPION SCORE

This patch we’ll be making some updates to and expanding on Champion Score! Right now you’re able to earn Mastery for each champion you play, but starting in Patch 3.4 you’ll also be able to earn Mastery for each role you play. There will be five different tiers (1-5), and each tier will change the color of the icon. This score will also be displayed on your profile page and if you hover over it on your profile, it will show your top three champions in that role. You’ll also be able to share your role score to your teammates in your lobbies!

EVENTS

One of our goals for this year was to try out some new ways for you to earn content during our events. And during the Supreme Cells event we’ll try a new type of event, that’ll sort of be like an idle game.

You’ll be able to pick a fighter and train him to participate in the tournament to help you earn rewards, even if you can’t queue up for games everyday. We hope this event gives you some more flexibility, but as always please continue to give us your feedback!

We also have some other fun events in this patch, and once we scale up we’ll reach our own Powerspike and well… we don’t want to give the surprise away, but what's a party without presents, right?

We’ll have more details on each of the events as they release, and you can read more about them here as they go live!

SKINS

Personally, our favorite part of a Patch Preview is the skin montage, we love looking at the pretty pixels. This patch we’re in our training arc era, and have some ghoulish and groovy new threads:

Releasing during Patch 3.4

• Space Groove Gwen
• Crystal Rose Yone*

Releasing during Patch 3.4a

• Supreme Cells Kennen*
• Supreme Cells Sett*
• Supreme Cells Zed*

Releasing during Patch 3.4b

• Bewitching Vex*
• Bewitching Miss Fortune
• Bewitching Morgana

Releasing during Patch 3.4c

• Old God Warwick

* First to Wild Rift skins

QUALITY OF LIFE UPDATES

We have an array of mini updates this patch to make your overall in-game experience better! We’ll be listing them all out in the patch notes, but we wanted to share a few with you all here:

• When you assist your teammates in getting a kill it will also show up.
• Cleaned up a variety of text strings so you’ll no longer be able to say, you can purchase your Infinity Edge that’s available to purchase.
• We heard your feedback and have changed the ARAM titles that we launched in 3.3:
  • ARAM Brawler
  • ARAM Warrior
  • ARAM Elite
  • ARAM Royalty
  • ARAM Legend
• Before the next season of guilds, we’re making some important updates you can read about here.

WILD PASS CHANGES

When 3.4 launches, a new Wild Pass will be launching as well, but with some pretty big updates this time. The “Bonus Rewards” section is now the “Wild Pass Emporium,” and rather than your pass progressing linearly from Levels 51 through 75, it will now be an exchange where you can claim rewards in any order you’d like. Along with the Emporium, we’ll be introducing Wild Pass Skin Augments! If you claim enough rewards in the Emporium, you’ll be granted the Augmented skin for that pass.

Along with these updates, we’ll also be adding in two new ways to earn experience. You’ll have a set of simple, repeatable missions for playing matches to give you a constant stream of Wild Pass Experience. These missions will have a cap and reset each week, and should give you steady momentum from simply logging in and playing games.

For Elite Pass purchasers, you’ll receive new Seasonal Missions so you can obtain all the rewards you want in the new Emporium! When purchasing the Elite Pass, you’ll receive a new Random Skin chest at level 1, but instead of getting any random skin, you can now narrow down the choices to just one lane role—Solo lane, mid lane, jungle, duo lane, or support!

With a new Wild Pass comes a new skin for you to earn as well as an Augmented version! Flying in this time will be Superhero Jayce and Augmented Superhero Jayce! We can’t wait for the patch to drop so we can fight our own crime in Baron Lane. But before that we wanted to share some of the concept art from the devs who worked on this skin, as well as an up close look at this hero’s hammer before he makes his debut appearance in this Wild Pass!

WILD FOR WILDLINGS

Something we’ve been wanting to do for a while is shine a light on all the amazing members of our community. We love hearing your feedback when a new patch drops, seeing your pretty fan art when a new skin is added into the game for your main, and your clips (that getting Lulu Penta clip still lives rent free in our heads to this day). So in our Wild Rift News updates we’ll have a section dedicated to you!

STREAMERS

With the Patch Notes for 3.4 right around the corner, and our Patch Notes for major updates being a bit lengthy, we wanted to share and spotlight some creators who do some great Path Notes rundowns. Once the notes drop, be sure to check them out and see what they’re most excited for!

UBAMAN

SCELY

HELLSDEVIL

FAN ART/TWEETS

Last patch we swore the oath of the First Star and dove into the world of our favorite magical girls, the Star Guardians! While we loved watching their stories unfold, seeing all your pretty art was truly our favorite part:

PAINTOVERS

We create various paintovers for all our champions, and in the past, we’ve shared them on socials, but we’ve been wanting to do that more consistently. So, during each edition of Wild Rift News we’ll be releasing a series of paintovers for you to use to your heart's desire! We have a lot of these to share, so please bear with us but we promise we’ll get through them all.

Your pretty Star Guardian art inspired us and so for our first set we wanted to share some Star Guardians! And also this random poro, because, why not! Also he’s so stinkin' cute and happy, we just want to give him a little poro snacky.

Whether you’re looking to slice the competition in half or groove out in your ghoulish attire, we hope you’re just as excited for Patch 3.4 as we are… or don’t be… whatever. Please keep sending us your feedback and hype clips, and we’ll see ya on the Rift!