TL;DR guide to the Midseason update

The Midseason update is Riot’s last chance to make hefty changes to League of Legends before the preseason arrives at the end of the year. In 2016, Riot looked into League’s mages for a class update, making changes to Brand, Zyra, magic items, and much more. This year, the vanguard tank class is the focus of the update, with changes to the map and items tagging along for the ride.

Whether you’re an aspiring Sejuani main or a support player feeling underappreciated, this patch has something great for everyone. Here’s our TL;DR guide to the Midseason update.

The Rift Herald

The Herald has been somewhat of an afterthought to players since her introduction back in the 2016 preseason. As she stands now, she simply isn’t worth the risk to take down unless your team is wildly ahead. After her rework, the reward she gives her slayers will be much more significant than a one-person buff.

We already went into the specifics of her terrifying makeover—killing her grants your team with a one-time-use activatable item that summons the Rift Herald back to fight for you. She does massive damage to towers, so she can be deployed in a lane to create some serious pressure for your team.

Tank updates

Vanguard tanks are the subclass of tanks that lead the charge for their team. They disrupt the enemy with eye-popping crowd control, and they’re nigh-unkillable due to high resistance. There are three tanks in particular that needed some special attention to make them, well, less boring.

We covered Sejuani, Maokai, and Zac’s big changes already—they’re all getting new abilities to make them more challenging to play, rewarding skilled players with more damage and a higher impact on the game. Each champion is getting a new ultimate ability, but some of their regular abilities are going through transformations as well.

Related: Sejuani and Maokai’s new splash arts are badass.

Tank items

Changes to champions aren’t the only things being made to improve the tank class. Most tank items in the game are being changed around to have higher resistances (armor and MR) but lower health, to promote situational building rather than the same cookie-cutter build in every game. There are also two new tank items being added to the game, that each have their own situational uses as well, the Gargoyle Stoneplate and the Adaptive Helm.

Core support items and contribution

For most of League’s lifespan, playing as a support or a support-style jungler has always lacked substantial rewards. Well, hopefully that will be a thing of the past, because supports are going to feel much better to play. Not only are the three starting items for supports being changed with in-game quests and new effects, but there will also be end-game stats for tracking how well you did with crowd control, warding, and more, and they’ll affect your end-game rating more accurately as well.

The Midseason patch will be arriving tomorrow, according to Surrender@20, a League PBE news site. There are a ton of changes coming, but each one has the game’s fun factor in mind.