League of Legends fighter item rework will “disrupt” Season 12’s duelist meta

Irelia, Fiora, Riven, Yone ⁠— duelist champions like these have dominated the League of Legends meta in Season 12. However, Riot’s planned fighter item rework for patch 12.3 will “disrupt” their power by making the bruisers less durable while still boasting high damage.

Duelists ⁠— or light fighters, as Riot likes to call them ⁠— have dominated the League of Legends Season 12 meta. With the Lethal Tempo rework enabling their offensive power, and items like Immortal Shieldbow (now nerfed) making them incredibly durable, they boast high-damage and are near impossible to kill.

Riot has made moves to try and curb the meta, but picks like Riven and Fiora are still near the top of the tier lists with win rates as high as 55% at the top ranks.

So the developers are pinching the duelist meta in League of Legends with a “disruptive change” in Season 12. The overall objective? Make duelists easier to kill, but still giving them access to high-risk high-reward moments.

“The short of the fighter changes is that we’re aiming to shift light fighters toward lower-durability itemization. We’ll be watching the fallout closely, it’s 100% a disruptive change,” developer ‘Phlox’ asserted on January 25.

11 items in the class are being changed, with most of the rework nerfing squishier duelists while buffing up underrepresented bruisers and juggernauts. The itemization changes should open up more options for the latter to bring them in line.

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Divine Sunderer, Goredrinker, Black Cleaver, and Maw of Malmortius now offer more offensive stats at the cost of health ⁠— making those duelists a bit more vulnerable.

There have also been major changes to staples Sterak’s Gage and Death’s Dance which limit how much healing and shielding the two items give. Finally, Trinity Force ⁠will give more health and less bonus attack damage to make it more appealing to bruisers.

“When a light fighter [duelist] can act as a pseudo-frontliner and kill you they can be kind of messed up. They’re low-risk high-reward, able to kill you without risking death themselves. On the flip side, Juggernauts should feel like tanky, slow meatballs of death,” Phlox added.

“These different kinds of fighters should feel pretty different to face, and shouldn’t share all of their items else they start to homogenize together to the benefit of neither class.

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“Again, we’ll be watching closely and almost surely following up over the next few patches”. The full League of Legends fighter item rework changelist can be found in our LoL patch 12.3 update hub.