Riot Games has been plugging away at their flagship games for a while now, and now one of their surprising hits, Teamfight Tactics, is coming out of the gate storming. The auto-battler has brought a completely redesigned UI, a revamped stable of heroes and so much more to the table in the 9.xx patch series that it’s kind of hard to cover it all.
Some UI tweaks include an easier-to-use crafting system that links the two inventory elements together, speeding up this one element of the game. And given how important properly equipping your heroes is with new items in Teamfight Tactics, it’s no surprise that this change was made. But new UI elements aren’t the only thing coming in 9.23 and beyond.
Being billed as True Damage 2019, Riot has built this newly revitalized version of the game into a real titan of fun and strategy. With this first round of playtests for Teamfight Tactics and Rise of the Elements, players should take some time to learn the reworked UI first and foremost, because a lot of things are changing.
The newly reworked hero roster has an entirely new meta-game surrounding it, and it’s built around the idea of proper and tactical usage of the map itself. The map has not only been expanded with a full new row of hexes, and has also had elemental modifiers of various types applied to each hex on said map. And depending on the hex your hero is sitting on, both the items they can use and the stats they have are altered. Placing a hero on a hex gives a buff in an item slot; if you wish to equip a champion with a third item, they must be move that unit to a new hex with a different modifier. And yes, the heroes will have a hex they are best on. Ocean works well with Summoners and Mages, Infernal with Berserker and Blademaster, things like that.
All units are classified by two traits, elements and classes. And yes, there are multi-class and multi-element champions, and each one of these will need to be supported with a wider army of focused heroes as well. Each of the combinations will have a strong and weak element, essentially in a rock-paper-scissors type of design. The use of focused hero compositions, like all units having an Infernal setup to make a horde of weaker minions, is totally viable too beyond hyper-focusing on various hero compositions.
If you want more details, check out the cheat sheet from Riot below. All of this combines as part of a complete overhaul of the combat from top to bottom.
The next patch to the game, 9.23 will bring the next phase of these changes, in addition to re-enabling the ranked play that was disabled last patch.
