How the Upcoming Season Four Changes to Vision in League of Legends Affect You

With Season Four of League of Legends on the horizon, the upcoming changes are ripe for discussion and analysis.  We will be seeing some changes to the jungle and to items, but there are entire discussions about the upcoming changes to map vision.

So what’s actually changing?

This is big.  Wards were changed for Season Three with the inclusion of sightstone and a time limit on oracle’s elixir, making it generally easier to keep reliable map vision active regardless of how far behind or ahead a team is.  Season Four is further altering the way vision works in several huge ways.  For one thing, wards are being changed dramatically.

Vision wards, the pink ones, are able to see stealthed champions and other wards, are no longer themselves stealthed.  They take five hits to kill instead of three, now, but actually need to be protected.  As one final limiting factor, each player can only have a single vision ward active at a time.  To balance this a bit, they are also permanent unless destroyed and cost less.

Regular wards are still stealthed and still have a time limit, but each player can only have three of these wards active at any one time.  As an extra way of making these wards more viable, given the per-character limits, oracle’s elixir is being removed entirely.

The stated reasons for these changes to wards are to improve Support quality of life by preventing support players from being treated as ward batteries.  They can only cover so much of the map, now, so it falls to the rest of the team to cover what the support cannot.

What’s changing other than wards?

To further help make map vision a team effort, each player is being given a new item slot for something called a trinket.  These trinkets do one of three things.  They either create a short-term ward (the same way Wriggle’s Lantern does), they grant toned-down clairvoyance effect, or they reveal and temporarily disable enemy stealthed objects like Shaco traps or Teemo shrooms within a radius.

The possible combinations and practical applications of these trinkets are both obvious and various, adding entire new levels to team composition and itemization.  Does everyone keep things simple and just grab the free ward?  Will the team designate a sweeper to go ward hunting or to systematically clear shrooms from the jungle?  Will bot lane take a couple of the mini-clairvoyance trinkets to peer into the nearby jungle for the enemy jungler before pushing the lane for a fight?  The possibilities become almost endless.

How does this actually alter how the game is played?

For starters, it becomes almost impossible for you to see a support 20 minutes into a game with nothing but boots because they have been buying five vision wards every time they go back to base to keep an eye on Evelynn.

The entire point of making vision wards permanent and visible is to cause them to require actual protection.  They grant unlimited visual awareness of an area, but only for so long as that area is controlled and protected.  If an enemy slips in for longer than a second or two, it has to be replaced.

At the same time, stealthed wards become harder to deal with.  A vision ward placed specifically to find one is an easy target, and lacking oracle’s means the sweeper trinket is the only reliable, inexpensive means of dealing with them, and that trinket is stated as having a long cooldown.

What all this combines to mean is map vision is simultaneously easier to maintain while actually requiring attention and care if you want to dissuade the enemy from having the same sort of vision.  Tactical placement of stealth wards can cause the enemy to waste their sweeper trinket’s usage checking places they think you placed the ward, while similarly careful placement of vision wards can allow game-long clearance of a given area.

Now a three-player investment!  Not recommended placement.

It also means teams will need to coordinate much more directly to be sure they are getting the right balance of warding capability and ward removal.  Riot has stated they will also be looking at Evelynn carefully since she is almost guaranteed to become instantly much more powerful as a direct result of vision wards being easier to destroy and fewer in number on the map.

Keep watching for more updates as the preseason becomes imminent!