New Summoner Spells
Thoughts on new summoner spells, the lore behind items, and Black Market Brawlers.
This week, it’s the future of Black Market Brawlers, new summoner spells, and stories behind items.
Oh, and for the one-year anniversary of Ask Riot, we’ll be posing your questions directly to Marc “Tryndamere” Merrill and Brandon “Ryze” Beck—the co-founders of Riot and co-creators of League. If you have questions, try to get ‘em in this week (and use their names so we can find your questions in the pile)!
Will there ever be new summoner spells?
It isn’t a goal to add new spells in the same way it is a goal to add new champions. We would rather have a smaller set of summoner spells that get a lot of play and have interesting and exciting uses than a huge stable of spells that isn’t that exciting. Spells like Flash and Teleport can be game changers. Things like Exhaust and Ignite are fairly interesting and do get used, but they aren’t the source of big plays like Flash and Teleport are. We’re okay with that space as long as they are relevant. Barrier and Clarity often do struggle to be relevant, but they can still be a good choice, in the right circumstances. And of course, we have pruned some spells over time that just weren’t that interesting (and didn’t feel like they had a lot of options to make more interesting).
So it’s possible someone will come up with a great idea for a new summoner spell, but it would have to be a really good one that could compete with the ones we have today.
Do you have any current plans to bring back Black Market Brawlers? I loved it.
Probably not. Black Market Brawlers had some unique ideas in it but suffered from a split-identity crisis. Having both the minion customisation and the new items side by side was just too much going on inside a single mode. Lessons learned.
We would more likely choose one of those two systems to double down on if we wanted to resurrect a part of that mode. One of them might come back in some other form, but it’s unlikely to be in the specific incarnation that was Black Market Brawlers.
As I observed, Riot hasn’t focused on explaining the background of items. The only item we know is relevant to lore is the Blade of the Ruined King. Will you explore more stories of items?
Short answer: Yes.
Long answer: We’re looking into exactly how to deliver lore for the items (it’d be a bad idea to put the lore into the game itself, because when your four friends are in a teamfight and you have to buy an AP pen item, the last thing you need is to see some writer’s bullshit musings on the Blessed Isles cluttering up your screen), but it’s something we definitely intend to tackle soon.
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