Riot Games has published a blog post on the League of Legends website outlining the developer's approach to the 2021 Preseason. Preseason usually begins in December, but annual adjustments to LoL are a multi-month process through observation and analysis of the previous season. Riot has shared some of their plans, primarily in the form of item reworks and what they aim to achieve for each respective champion class.

Riot Games first revealed details for the 2021 Preseason in June, featuring the current item icons of Nashor's Tooth, Ravenous Hydra, Phage, Rapid Firecannon, Sanguine Blade, Pickaxe, Rylai's Crystal Scepter, Rabadon's Deathcap, and Needlessly Large Rod darkened and desaturated to highlight the new next-season item icons for Iceborn Gauntlet, Trinity Force, Archangel's Staff, Abyssal Mask, Maw of Malmortius, Tear of the Goddess, Twin Shadows, Ionian Boots of Lucidity, and Frozen Heart.

Riot Games revealed a lot more than just visuals and overviews in its new update, however. Highlights include the adjustment of jungle items to self-upgrade the way support items have since the start of 2020, stronger first-item choices for marksmen, and more personalized choices for the niche champion classes of AD Assassins and AP Fighters.

In general, Riot aims to personalize each class with specific nuance and purpose as opposed to multiple classes building the same items. Magic resist items will feature more variety, for example, but a 'dream' item is also in progress for long-range artillery mages to accentuate their strengths. 

Items aren't the only thing being changed either. Cooldoown Reduction is receiving a full rework in being converted to Ability Haste,  a specialization of Grievous Wounds in response to the healing creep in the past few seasons, and Tenacity will now apply to knockups as it does to other forms of crowd control by reducing time airborne. 

UPDATE 10/18: RiotScruffy confirmed in a Tweet that the change to Tenacity to allow it to apply to knockups the same way it does to other forms of crowd control has been removed from the League of Legends PBE. While the development team may come back to the change in the future, it is not currently in the plans for the 2021 preseason. 

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