Back to basics: Riot explains why LoL’s Mythic items are being removed for 2024

After spending only a couple of years with League of Legends’ new Mythic items, Riot Games is returning back to basics by sunsetting the system for next year.

In a new developer’s blog post today, lead designer Matt “Phroxzon” Leung-Harrison spoke about the multiple reasons why the team has chosen to remove the system. Mythics, for example, were originally made to bring “kit warping effects that augmented champion fantasies for other classes.” But they also made it rather difficult to balance across the countless champions available in the game, especially with newer releases.

“When we started out with Mythic items, they were intended to be high excitement with unique outputs, similar to getting really awesome unique items in MMOs and ARPGs,” Phroxzon said. “While we are able to balance champions around having Mythic outputs, it adds a bit too much design debt when it comes to designing new champions.”

The limited number of Mythics made it very difficult to satisfy all of the unique users and champion classes since almost every champ can be played and built in a multitude of ways. As a result, Mythics were forced to bring a load of stats to be useful for multiple roles, like Stridebreaker giving attack damage, attack speed, ability haste, and health, along with a unique active and two passives.

Riot could create more Mythic items to help satisfy other roles and builds, but those different items would also bring their own layer of complexity to gameplay, whether you’re playing with or against them.

“There is a maximum number of items that League can have before it gets too complicated, and for every Mythic item that we add, an item slot is taken up and there is one less in the Legendary item pool,” Phroxzon said.

Another important reason why Riot is removing Mythics is because multiple champions and roles were forced into buying the same Mythic item, causing a lack of diversity within the game’s meta.

One item was always stronger than the others, and those items’ unique effects eventually became more important than the champion itself. Even Legendary items will be having their unique item effect reduced for next year to allow individual champion strengths to take center stage, instead of them becoming vessels for the item to shine instead.

Mythics will officially be gone from League as of the 2024 season, according to Riot.