Meddler discussing Locket changes pre-season - "We'll probably remove Locket, or at least it's aura, in the pre-season."

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Yep. We'll probably remove Locket, or at least it's aura, in the pre-season. It's made it pretty difficult to offer supports genuine item choices because of just how mandatory an option it's been, even with the nerfed aura.

A couple of things have stopped us from removing it earlier though. We talked about doing so back around 6.12, taking that much mid game MR away's potentially has some pretty big impact on the balance of entire classes though. That suggested that, unless it was an urgent change, pre-season would be a better time. The other issue was that while Locket creates some problems it does fill a valuable niche of tanky item that helps you protect your allies. As a result we didn't want to remove it without adding at least one replacement item that served that same function.

He continued:

The MR aura's the big problem for us. AOE shield as an active's got both better appreciability and more balance levers. We're hoping to still keep some form of that around, though details might vary (duration, range, number of targets, shield strength, type of damage etc).

Later in the thread he also mentioned Rylai's will likely get changes:

Rylai's is also on the list of items we'll be changing in pre-season. At present it's too universal a choice, whereas we'd prefer extra CC be something with more of a trade off to it. Not yet sure if that'll mean lowering it's damage (more of a tanky/utility thing), lowering it's health (making it a squishy kite option) or some alternate approach (making it only work with certain spell types or something like that).

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