Mortdog Reveals Big System Changes Coming to TFT Patch 14.1
While the new Teamfight Tactics expansion, TFT: Remix Rumble has been a smash hit on players' playlists, the team at Riot Games is taking some time with their first patch of the new year to address some concerns on the system side to make TFT Set 10 even better.
The lead designer for TFT, Stephen “Mortdog” Mortimer took to social media to give TFT players a sneak peek at what they can expect in Patch 14.1 which is set to come out next week. In his post, Mortdog mentioned they are changing out ties work, nerfing streaking and tweaking a Headliner rule.
Here is an in-depth look at what these changes are and how they will affect the game.
Mortdog on social media said that in Patch 14.1, these rules will change
- "If players tie in any way, the result is both players take damage as if it were a loss, and then both players' streak is reset to 0."
- “streaking is being adjusted from 2-3/4/5 -> 3-4/5/6. requiring longer streaks to get value”
- "If YOU have more than 4 copies of a four cost, or 3 copies of a 5 cost, the headliner can't appear for you."
New changes make open forting riskier
Riot Games
The first two changes announced directly affect the infamous “open fort” strategy. In TFT, open forting refers to the strategy in which a player will not place any champions onto the board and losing rounds on purpose to generate more gold in the early game than everyone else in the lobby. Because the player doing this does not need to use gold to buy champions and combined with the loss streak gold they generate, depending on the augment selected, this usually results in the player doing this spiking extremely hard in the mid-to-late game with their gold advantage which usually results with them building unbeatable boards that normally wouldn't be able to be created.
This strategy is pretty popular the higher rank a player gets because it is a hard to pull off strategy since a player will be low on HP when they eventually spike. It’s so popular in fact, that there could be multiple players in a lobby doing the same strategy at the same time.
These two changes impact open forting in two ways. The first is the nerf to streaking, because it now takes an additional round to streak, the gold generation from open forting is now not a real selling point. But the other change makes it even more dangerous to contest an open forter. Ties very rarely happen unless one open-forter plays against another. In which case it's a literal coin flip on who wins and loses the round which was very important due to loss streak gold as one player’s streak would be broken and the other’s would stay intact.
But with the change to ties, in which both players take damage and their streaks are set back to zero, if two open forters play against each other, they both will sabotage their game. Essentially open forting is now a game of chicken.
Headliner Clarity
Players might think that in a set where players are allowed to buy a two-star champion from the shop, the amount of three-star champions would increase. But with the changes to bag size and how Headliners work, outside of reroll comps, there haven't been many big “three-star moments” when it comes to high-rolling four and five-cost champions. Additionally, the three-star four-cost champion win condition has also been really hard to hit as well.
This is because there is a hidden rule in which if there are more than half of the champions in the pool are out, the Headliner of the champion will not appear in any shop. This is being changed to if a player has four or more four-cost champions or three or more five-cost champions that headliner will not show up in their shop. This change is being made to make the game more transparent while also keeping the amount of four-cost and five-cost three-stars in check.
Mortdog in his tweet mentioned this change hopefully “takes a lot of stress of everyone needing to constantly scout or worry about what is hidden in enemies shops.”
Players can expect these changes to hit the live servers on Wednesday, January 10th.
