Riot promises Caitlyn mechanic changes after League of Legends update backflip
Caitlyn mains rejoice: Popular auto-reset mechanics are being re-added in some capacity following the Sheriff of Piltover’s League of Legends patch 11.23 update. Riot promised the Season 12 changes after widespread community criticism.
Caitlyn’s visual update went live on League of Legends patch 11.23 without one core mechanic: Her auto-resets. Skilled players could use the Sheriff of Piltover to reset her Headshot autos and dish out a ton of burst damage.
However, Riot patched them out of the game after rescripting the 11-year-old champion from the ground up.
At the time of Caitlyn’s update hitting PBE, Riot stated they had no plans to add back her auto-reset animation cancel, which was a popular mechanic among champion mains. After attempts to patch out the “machine gun” mechanic, the visual update finally gave them the tools to do so.
“The Summoner’s Rift team already tried to patch-out the machine-gun Cait mechanics a while back, and felt they had successfully done so. What they didn’t realize was that this fix was ineffective if you switched to a different target as Caitlyn,” developer Daniel ‘Rovient’ Leaver said earlier in November.
“When the ASU team fixed up how Caitlyn’s headshots code works… they removed the attack resets unintentionally. They’re gone because her headshots are now finally working as they always should have.”
However, after listening to player feedback, Riot are working on bringing back auto-cancel mechanics to add more skill expression to the Sheriff of Piltover.
“We were certainly stuck between a rock and a hard place: we cleaned up her code…yet that clean-up also ejected some of the ‘bugs’ that produced that snappy trap-headshot responsiveness that you loved,” Rovient admitted on November 17 after the changes went live.
“We all agreed internally that this was not OK, but there was simply no time to produce a set of new tweaks or replacement mechanics that we could be confident in before we launched her in 11.23.”
The developers have “changes in internal playtesting” that are expected to ship either in LoL patch 11.24 — due in early December — or early in 2022. “We had to be sure that Caitlyn’s changes would be in a solid place before talking with you all,” Rovient said.
Exactly what mechanics Riot intends on adding back remain to be seen, but Caitlyn mains will have a few more combos in their repertoire once changes ship.
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