Last pre-season saw a ground-up rebuild of masteries with the goal of making mastery choices more about individual playstyle than numerical buffs. Though we’ve had a few balance challenges over the season, the basic premise has held up over time. We’re filling in the remaining holes in each tree with an eye toward further sharpening this ‘playstyle-first’ vision, and addressing two of the ‘problem children’ remaining in the system.
Side-note: we recently shipped an article sharing most of the information in this section, so if you get deja-vu, you’re not crazy (or psychic).
Feast has become the poster child for conservative gameplay. Access to this sustain has crowded out the riskier mastery options at that level (namely Double-Edged Sword), making it hard for lane bullies to succeed at forcing weaker laners back to the fountain. Limiting Feast to one proc per wave tones down the impact it has on lane while keeping its heal amount satisfying.
COOLDOWN :[25 seconds]⇒ 30 seconds
v5.24 Feast cooldown up. Fervor of Battle slightly reworked, and Deathfire Touch’s damage effectiveness is down.
Ferocity is definitely living up to the hype for fighters and mages looking to stay in combat, but provides certain champions too much power relative to the rest of the cast. Fervor of Battle is now about stacking damage against champions specifically, and Deathfire Touch is more focused about consistent applications of damage.
Feast
COOLDOWN :[20 seconds]⇒ 25 seconds
v5.22 We're updating the mastery system to offer focused, high-impact choices rather than a slew of nuanced micro-math optimizations. Each tier of decisions now successively grows in importance, ending in your final 'keystone mastery' which fundamentally impacts how you play your champion.
Rather than just the 'Offense' tree, let's look at the types of bonuses Ferocity provides. This tree is all about getting into fights and staying there, scrapping with anyone at any time. Many of its bonuses help you against a large number of targets (attack speed and % penetration are pretty 'always good'), but bursty mages or assassins may find single target isolation somewhat lacking. Wanna deal damage, but worried about tanks and fighters getting in your face? Get ferocious and bite back.