It’s no secret League of Legends is an extremely competitive game that’s a source of frustration for many, largely because of what players perceive as an unfair ranking system, teammates intentionally feeding, and small LP gains. To give the League community time to rest between seasons which normally last for nine months, Riot Games introduced the preseason.
The preseason in League is the time between two seasons that’s generally used to experiment with map, item, and balancing changes. During the preseason, Riot typically introduces large-scale changes to the game, like elemental drakes and item overhauls.
Although the 2023 preseason will not introduce any drastic changes like the previous two preseasons, which overhauled drakes and items, it’s still a major change for all League players—from the return of Chemtech drake to new jungle pets. Since these changes will definitely leave a mark on the meta and take time to adjust to, there’s no doubt that the preseason will be chaotic.
If you can’t wait to test out the new adorable pets and see how broken Chemtech drake will be now, we’ll discuss all the changes coming to preseason 2023, and the exact dates when will the preseason patch hit the live servers.
All preseason 2023 changes
League’s most controversial drake, Chemtech drake, is making its return with the preseason. Since the drake—together with its soul and map changes—was universally hated, once you kill the drake now you get a small amount of tenacity and a shield, and the Chemtech soul now gives you bonus damage. The Chemtech map will feature mutated plants, meaning that they become significantly stronger. For example, Scryer’s Bloom will upgrade into Stalker’s Bloom, give you a small shield, and won’t slow you at all.
The second change coming with the preseason update is jungle pets. Bought instead of a starting item at the beginning of the game, the jungle pets will grow stronger as you kill jungle monsters. Once evolved, jungle pets will empower their owners with strong buffs. For instance, Noxian Embercat will give aggressive junglers slow and even more damage in early-game skirmishes.
Junglers are also getting leashing indicators that show how far you can kite monsters before they reset. On top of that, you will see a recommended jungle path on your mini-map that will definitely help you orient in the jungle, especially if you’re new to the role.
Since the pinging system is somewhat out of date, Riot is updating the ping wheel with loads of new pings like Push, All-In, Hold, and Bait. You can now demand from your teammates what exactly they should do with vision—clear vision, demand they place wards, or warn them enemy has vision.
Other than this, Riot is tweaking old items and introducing a couple of new items, so that champions like Singed and Katarina will finally have proper item build paths. To reduce bot lane snowballing, AD carries, and their designated supports are getting hit with XP nerfs, while the top laners can rejoice since they will have a 95 percent XP multiplier.
When is the 2023 League of Legends preseason?
The 2023 League of Legends preseason begins on Nov. 16. This means that all these previously mentioned changes are finally going live and we’ll have almost three full months to limit test, experiment, and find the most broken builds to help us climb in season 13.
Although we still don’t know the exact date of the beginning of Season 13, we can expect it at the beginning of January. If we look at the dates from previous seasons, we notice that Riot normally starts the season the second week of January. So, we can expect the preseason to end from Jan. 5 to 10, 2023.
Once the preseason comes to an end, you can start your ranked climb again and slowly work towards your goal. On top of that, you’ll start slowly working towards those ranked rewards like borders, emotes, and chromas.
With preseason ending and the regular season beginning, Riot will definitely mark the date and, similarly to last year’s celebration, use this as an excellent opportunity to share their plans for the upcoming season, including champion roadmaps, reworks, upcoming skin lines, and any further system changes they plan to make.
