Prognostication: Preseason Recap

So Season 3 hit, and it's time to examine all of my predictions to see how well I did.

Items:

So it turns out that Lord Van Damm's Pillager did not get ported to Summoner's Rift and was, in fact, removed from the game entirely. Instead, Blade of the Ruined King arrived on the Rift. Infinity Edge, meanwhile, is alive and well. Whoops.

I was half right in my third prediction, Haunting Guise did get an upgrade path. However, Spirit Visage was simply made a more powerful (and expensive) item in its own right. Not bad as far as predictions go, but not great.

My most accurate prediction was regarding Tenacity items. They were, in fact, very significantly rebalanced. However, I refuse to claim full credit because I did not anticipate the addition of new Tenacity items nor the removal of existing ones.

Jungle:

My jungle predictions were thrown out of whack by the unanticipated addition of Hunter's Machete. I could claim partial credit for identifying that a 300g item would be necessary to clear the jungle, but that's a stretch. Moreover, my prediction for the cost of new jungle items was off by a factor of two, so no credit there.

The value of the jungle didn't exactly increase by 10-20%, at least not initially. It's actually very difficult to measure this against the game as Riot primarily increased the scaling of the jungle, and only modified base values insofar as necessary to adjust for the changes to ambient gold and to take some value away from Wraiths and distribute it elsewhere. I'll take half credit for this one.

I was incontrovertibly correct on spawn timers. Score one for Montegomery.

Masteries:

My Movement Speed prediction could be interpreted in different ways. Initiator was removed entirely, but one could argue it was replaced with Nimble in the utility tree. Swiftness was replaced with Wanderer and move up a tier rather than down. While Movement Speed in general is harder to come by, I'll only claim half-credit for this.

Strength of Spirit was buffed significantly. However, I was very vague as to the nature of the buffs, so this isn't exactly a great victory. Havoc still remains, in defiance of my final prediction of this category. I shake my fist angrily.

Summoner Spells:

Unfortunately while I was correct that Flash and Ignites cooldowns would increase, I was off on magnitude. Flash increased by 35 seconds, and Ignite by 30 seconds. Failure.

Heal is most definitely not single-target. Fail.

Revive's cooldown wasn't directly decreased, but you can now decrease it using an item. The speed boost was not changed. Partial credit, but another near miss.

Clarity does not restore Energy, fail.

Champions:

As of yet Riot has not released another AP jungler. They may do so in the future, but for now I appear to have been wrong.




In the end, I was generally very successful in identifying the areas that would be changing, but when it came to accurately hitting the targets themselves I was rarely accurate, only coming close to a bull's eye on one or two predictions. I did, however, do remarkably better than my jungle prognostications.

I'll do another of these sometime in the future, but for now I'll send my crystal ball to the cleaners because obviously everything was its fault and not my own.