The reworks for Morgana and Kayle hit the live servers yesterday with the release of League of Legends Patch 9.5—and while the Judicator saw a nearly full rework, Morgana’s abilities remained untouched. Instead, the champion received updates to her visuals, drastically improving her character model and ability effects to better fit with the current standard for League’s visual designs.
But Morgana came close to seeing the same rework treatment as her sister. According to a Reddit Q&A by Riot Games on Thursday, the League of Legends developer had a few ideas for the Fallen Angel that wound up not making the cut.
When asked about the potential changes that had taken spots on Morgana’s drawing board, Riot’s senior champion designer August Browning described a new passive that would have granted Morgana additional movement speed toward enemies she damaged or enemies that had been locked down by her team’s crowd control.
“It gave her a pretty dynamic aggressive pattern and made W feel like a real spell,” Riot August said. “I was planning to ship it until we brought in a bunch of Morgana mains for player labs and they all hated it.”
The senior designer also pointed to a passive that lengthened the range on her auto-attacks against snared enemies, an evolved ultimate similar to Kayle, and a version of her current W that enflamed against low-health enemies and delivered critical damage to opponents.
Rioter Mark “Scruffy” Yetter responded to the same question, describing another potential passive and further explaining the reasoning why neither made it into the rework—and ultimately why Morgana’s entire kit remained as is.
“Morgana is both one of the oldest and one of the most played/lasting champions in the game so while there are many things we could imagine doing to the character we decided it would be better to respect the signals players are already giving us—‘we like this the way it is,’” Riot Scruffy said.
With both sisters’ reworks now on the live servers, Morgana fans can check out the champion’s new look for themselves and reminisce about what could have been.
