Patch 0.9.1 in Legends of Runeterra looks to bring a series of smaller changes to the game. This update is nowhere near as large as the previous patch from mid-February, but there are still some important points to cover in terms of quality of life improvements and changes to how players gain experience.

Developer Notes On Animations

When the game first released, the flashy animations of Champion cards was something to enjoy. Now that players have seen these animations hundreds of times, it feels like the perfect opportunity to speed things up and keep the action moving. The developers state that, “We’ve seen a lot of feedback about animations taking too long…We’re going to speed some things up over the next few patches, beginning with this one.”

For starters, players will begin to see a speeding up of basic moments that occur frequently in a match, such as when drawing, summoning, passing your turn, and starting a new round. Over the course of a match, and a week’s worth of matches as players work towards maximizing their experience gains, these small changes should add up to quite a bit of time saved.

While the decision is welcome by many, it would be great to see an option to toggle in the game settings since there are bound to be players who do not mind, or even love the great-looking animations of their favorite Champions.

Boards & Guardians

To vary the backgrounds that players stare at while awaiting their turns, a new guardian, Minion, is being added, along side two new boards belonging to Jinx and Garen.

As a minor quality of life improvement, Guardians Silverwing and Gloomtooth not be so loud when idle, and Basilisk’s tail and Gromp Jr’s legs have been fixed to avoid clipping through some boards.

Project Feel Good – Optimizing Game Pacing

Along the same lines as speeding up certain repetitive animations, the developers are looking at how they can improve the overall pacing and responsiveness of Legends of Runeterra. Currently, the developers have looked at the following and are working to both speed up animations, decrease periods of time when players are locked out of performing an action, and generally increasing responsiveness:

  • Summoning units Drawing cards Dragging units out to attack Playing Fast, Slow, and Burst spells Initiative token flip at the beginning of rounds

Another Tweak To Friend Challenge XP

In Patch 0.9.0. there were sweeping changes made to how players earned experience, and again there is a minor tweak at hand, this time to how friends earn experience when challenging each other. The change in mid-February was made to discourage the spamming of win-trading and left the losing player of a match with zero experience awarded.

Unfortunately, this change came across as unduly harsh for the many players that do enjoy playing against friends, and so there has been a slight reversion in the core concept of this change. Winning a match will now award 200 XP, up from 100, and losing will award 100 XP, up from zero. The developers are still trying to locate that sweet spot for giving players the ability to play how they want and not rewarding players who simply want to exploit the system to maximize rewards. The developers have stated that there will be a future patch dealing with XP once again, but no timeline has been given.

Deckbuilding Made Easy

One of the final major changes comes in the form of the deckbuilding UI. Each card count will now be visually represented by “pips” to indicate how many copies a player owns, does not own, used in a deck, and not used in a deck. This will make for better organization and planning, and is a minor, but useful quality of life improvement.

Apart from the changes listed above, there are several small bugfixes listed on the Legends of Runeterra website. Although patch 0.9.1 did not bring any major changes to cards and the meta, these are still great improvements to the overall quality and polish of the game.

Source: playruneterra.com

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