Once you’ve lost a few thousand hours to a MOBA, it’s easy to forget how hard it was to learn. A game like League of Legends has well over a hundred playable characters, all sorts of items and jungle monsters, and even the basics can be fussy. One of the most crucial is the zen practice of “last hitting,” or swinging at a hostile creep right as it’s about to die to get credit and gold for the kill.
While it’s hard to get the hang of, Riot has been toying with a way to make last hitting easier for new players: last hit indicators. These indicators show the threshold at which a creep will be killed by one of your hero’s autoattacks, making it easier to score kills if you don’t have an intuitive sense of how much damage you’re doing. While it’s been quarantined in the game’s casual modes for the last few months, patch notes from earlier this week stated the feature would be coming to normal draft and ranked play.
Players were mixed on the feature, with some welcoming anything that would make the game easier for newcomers and others more protective of its high skill floor. “Riot keeps dumbing down core mechanics and calling it accessibility,” said Reddit user TsundereeTease. “[Last hitting] is literally the skill gap in lane, if you can’t last hit you shouldn’t be in ranked. What’s next, auto aim for skillshots?”
On the same thread, user garethh was less skeptical. “Cutting back the barrier to entry without touching the play and counterplay of League doesn’t seem like an inherently bad idea to me,” they wrote. “If everyone knows if their auto will kill or not, what changes? Lazy players, sporadic players, and/or auto-filled players are empowered a bit. The entirety of the play and counterplay of laning still exists.”
In response to the feedback, Riot announced in a post on X that it would pump the brakes on last hit assistance: “We want to get more data and feedback to decide if we should make them an option for ranked before making that call. So we’ll keep them enabled, but off by default, for swiftplay, co-op vs AI, and normal draft, to collect data and iterate.” In other words, it may still come to ranked play, but it’s no longer certain.
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