My main post for days 44 & 45 was really long as it was so I decided to just make this its own post.

There are approximately a zillion item changes (including new items), but I barely knew what the items did in the first place, so I’m just going to continue to stick to recommended items and revise my item sets when I have the chance.

That’s right, item sets are apparently coming back sooner than we thought! Riot said around patch 7.10, which is the next one, so in theory this should be out within the next month at least. Very exciting stuff.

“Support quests” have been added, which are basically item updates to 3 common starting items for supports. So far, I’ve tried out the Ancient Coin line, which is the item I take for Soraka.

Personally I think it’s a great idea. It is a bit confusing at first but it’s not that bad and there’s no way to screw it up – at worst you would just not do something that could have potentially helped you.

If you accumulate 650 gold from the Ancient Coin item’s passive, then you get an “elixir of skill”, which allows you to level up an ability early. If you consistently reach level 18 in all your games, this is probably useless, but I rarely do, so for me this is great.

More confusing are the little coins it starts dropping – I am unsure whether or not you have to go and physically pick them up or not (if so, kind of dumb because it’s more risk than it’s worth), but I do think it’s cool that in addition to gold coins it sometimes drops mana coins.

The other two item quests are completed the same way but give you a permanent shield or movement speed.

The only other change I actually noticed was that status effects on a champion are now indicated above their health bar (instead of their name), which…that’s cool. I don’t really care about it (at least for now) but that is fine.

Two exciting changes I have not yet experienced –

1) The Rift Herald, the Baron’s predecessor! I have literally never seen anyone kill the Rift Herald and it always seemed like a waste of time to me as well considering that it only appears in the first 20 minutes of the game and you would likely need multiple team members to kill it. However, now, if you kill it, you get to summon it to go kill stuff for you, so that’s a pretty good incentive right there. I also learned that if you hit its eye it does extra damage.

2) Reworks for Maokai, Sejuani, and Zac. I don’t remember if I have mentioned this before but it’s like Riot read my mind! When I played Zac, I remember thinking that I might like him more if he were stronger (same with Sejuani). And when I played Maokai, I remember thinking that he was just boring and I didn’t understand why my boyfriend liked him so much. I’m really excited for them all to appear on free rotation again so I can see!